Women's Bible Commentary, Third Edition: Revised and Updated [Updated] 9780664237073, 066423707X

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THoROUGHLY UPDATED EDITION OF THE BEST-SELLING CLASSIC

WOM E N ’ S B I B L E COM M E N TA RY

“With this edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary, the blessings of feminist mothers and their offspring are visited upon readers unto the third generation. Interpretive essays in reception history alongside reliable introductions to canonical and deuterocanonical texts provide varieties of voices, views, and values that can serve well lay groups and the academic community.” —Phyllis Trible, Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature, Emerita, Union Theological Seminary

Testament, Emeritus, Columbia Theological Seminary

Carol A. Newsom is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She was the 2011 President of the Society of Biblical Literature. Sharon H. Ringe is Professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary. Jacqueline E. Lapsley is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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Commentaries

ISBN-13: 978-0-664-23707-3

www.wjkbooks .com

e d i t i o n

edition

Newsom Ringe Lapsley ed i to r s

Women’s Bible Commentary Tw e n t i e t h - A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n

Revised and Updated

Tw e n t i e t h - A n n i v e r s a r y E d i t i o n

The Women’s Bible Commentary is a trusted, classic resource for biblical scholarship, written by some of the best feminist scholars in the field today. This twentieth-anniversary edition features brand-new or thoroughly revised essays to reflect newer thinking in feminist interpretation and hermeneutics. It comprises commentaries on every book of the Bible, including the apocryphal books; essays on the reception history of women in the Bible; and essays on feministcritical method. The contributors raise important questions and explore the implications of how women and other marginalized people are portrayed in biblical texts, looking specifically at gender roles, sexuality, political power, and family life, while challenging long-held assumptions.

t h i r d

Women’s Bible Commentary

“The Women’s Bible Commentary has established itself as an important reference point in the ongoing work of hermeneutics. This new, greatly expanded edition takes seriously the noticeable changes that have occurred in scholarship and interpretation.” —Walter Brueggemann, William Marcellus McPheeters Professor of Old

third

Carol A. Newsom Sharon H. Ringe Jacqueline E. Lapsley ed i to r s

Women’s Bible Commentary

An illustration from the fifteenth-century manuscript Des cleres et nobles femmes depicts Erythraea wearing a blue gown and turning the page of a manuscript on the lectern of a golden altar decorated with icons and books. A rich library with ornately clasped books is visible within the Gothic architectural frame.

Women’s Bible Commentary Revised and Updated Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley editors

© 1992, 1998, 2012 Westminster John Knox Press First edition published 1992. Second edition published 1998. Third edition Published by Westminster John Knox Press Louisville, Kentucky 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21—10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Westminster John Knox Press, 100 Witherspoon Street, Louisville, Kentucky 40202-1396. Or contact us online at www.wjkbooks.com. Scripture quotations from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible are copyright © 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and are used by permission. The editors have given authors the interpretive freedom to replace the NRSV’s rendering of the name of God as Lord with YHWH, if they wished to do so. See acknowledgments, p. 648, for additional permission information. Book design by Drew Stevens Cover design by Lisa Buckley Cover illustration: Des cleres et nobles femmes. Ca. 1450 Mss. Text. Spencer collection, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Used by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Women’s Bible commentary / Carol A. Newsom, Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, editors. — 3rd ed., twentieth anniversary ed.    p. cm.   Includes bibliographical references.   ISBN 978-0-664-23707-3 (alk. paper)   1. Bible—Commentaries.  2. Women—Middle East—History.  3. Women—Rome—History. I. Newsom, Carol A. (Carol Ann), 1950–  II. Ringe, Sharon H.  III. Lapsley, Jacqueline E., 1965–  BS491.3.W66 2012  220.7082—dc23 2012011194 printed in the united states of america The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992 Westminster John Knox Press advocates the responsible use of our natural resources. The text paper of this book is made from 30% postconsumer waste. Most Westminster John Knox Press books are available at special quantity discounts when purchased in bulk by corporations, organizations, and special-interest groups. For more information, please e-mail [email protected].

Dedicated to Jane D. Schaberg, who died during the preparation of this volume, and to the memory of Tikva Frymer-Kensky, a contributor to the original edition.

Contents

xiii Abbreviations xv Contributors xxi Introduction to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition xxv Introduction to the Expanded Edition xxvii Introduction to the First Edition 1

WHEN WOMEN INTERPRET THE BIBLE Sharon H. Ringe

11

WOMEN AS BIBLICAL INTERPRETERS BEFORE THE TWENTIETH CENTURY Carol A. Newsom

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament 27 GENESIS Susan Niditch Eve and Her Interpreters  46 Anne W. Stewart Sarah, Hagar, and Their Interpreters  51 Elaine James 56 EXODUS Nyasha Junior Miriam and Her Interpreters  67 Elaine James

viii Contents

70 LEVITICUS Hannah K. Harrington 79 NUMBERS Katharine Doob Sakenfeld 88 DEUTERONOMY Carolyn Pressler 103 JOSHUA Amy C. Cottrill Rahab and Her Interpreters  109 Amy H. C. Robertson 113 JUDGES Susanne Scholz Deborah, Jael, and Their Interpreters  128 Anne W. Stewart

Jephthah’s Daughter and Her Interpreters  133 Anne W. Stewart

Delilah and Her Interpreters  138 Josey Bridges Snyder 142 RUTH Eunny P. Lee 150

1 AND 2 SAMUEL Jo Ann Hackett

164

1 AND 2 KINGS Cameron B. R. Howard



Jezebel and Her Interpreters  180 Josey Bridges Snyder

184

1 AND 2 CHRONICLES Christine Mitchell

192 EZRA–NEHEMIAH Tamara Cohn Eskenazi 201 ESTHER Sidnie White Crawford 208 JOB Carol A. Newsom

Job’s Wife and Her Interpreters  216 Anne W. Stewart

221 PSALMS Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford

Contents

232 PROVERBS Christine Roy Yoder 243 ECCLESIASTES Jennifer L. Koosed 247 SONG OF SONGS J. Cheryl Exum 255 ISAIAH Patricia K. Tull 267 JEREMIAH Kathleen M. O’Connor 278 LAMENTATIONS Kathleen M. O’Connor 283 EZEKIEL Jacqueline E. Lapsley 293 DANIEL Carol A. Newsom 299 HOSEA Gale A. Yee 309 JOEL L. Juliana M. Claassens 312 AMOS Amy Erickson 319 OBADIAH L. Juliana M. Claassens 321 JONAH Kelly J. Murphy 326 MICAH Judy Fentress-Williams 329 NAHUM Julie Galambush 335 HABAKKUK Amy C. Merrill Willis 339 ZEPHANIAH Katie M. Heffelfinger 343 HAGGAI Julia M. O’Brien 346 ZECHARIAH Julia M. O’Brien

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x Contents

350 MALACHI Ingrid E. Lilly 354

WOMEN’S RELIGIOUS LIFE IN ANCIENT ISRAEL Carol Meyers

The Apocrypha 365 INTRODUCTION TO THE APOCRYPHA Eileen M. Schuller 367

1 ESDRAS Eileen M. Schuller

370

2 ESDRAS Karina Martin Hogan

376 TOBIT Eileen M. Schuller 383 JUDITH Denise Dombkowski Hopkins

Judith and Her Interpreters  391 Nicole Tilford

396 THE GREEK BOOK OF ESTHER Adele Reinhartz 404

WISDOM OF SOLOMON Sarah J. Tanzer

410 SIRACH Pamela Eisenbaum 418 BARUCH Patricia K. Tull 423 THE LETTER OF JEREMIAH Patricia K. Tull 426 THE GREEK BOOK OF DANIEL Nicole Tilford Susanna and Her Interpreters  432 Nicole Tilford 436 THE PRAYER OF MANASSEH Patricia K. Tull 438

1 MACCABEES Kelley Coblentz Bautch

Contents

444

2 MACCABEES Colleen M. Conway

450

3 MACCABEES Sara R. Johnson

455

4 MACCABEES Judith H. Newman

460

PSALM 151 Carol A. Newsom

New Testament 465

GOSPEL OF MATTHEW Amy-Jill Levine

478

GOSPEL OF MARK Elizabeth Struthers Malbon

493

GOSPEL OF LUKE Jane D. Schaberg and Sharon H. Ringe

Mary and Her Interpreters  512 Brittany E. Wilson 517

GOSPEL OF JOHN Gail R. O’Day

Mary Magdalene and Her Interpreters  531 Brittany E. Wilson 536 ACTS OF THE APOSTLES Margaret Aymer 547 ROMANS Beverly Roberts Gaventa 557

1 CORINTHIANS Jouette M. Bassler

566

2 CORINTHIANS Jouette M. Bassler

570 GALATIANS Carolyn Osiek 576 EPHESIANS E. Elizabeth Johnson 581 PHILIPPIANS Carla Swafford Works

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585 COLOSSIANS E. Elizabeth Johnson 588

1 THESSALONIANS Monya A. Stubbs

592

2 THESSALONIANS Mary Ann Beavis

595

1 TIMOTHY Joanna Dewey

602

2 TIMOTHY Joanna Dewey

604 TITUS Joanna Dewey 605 PHILEMON Mitzi J. Smith 608 HEBREWS Mary Rose D’Angelo 613 JAMES Gay L. Byron 616

1 PETER Cynthia Briggs Kittredge

620

2 PETER Cynthia Briggs Kittredge

622

1, 2, AND 3 JOHN Gail R. O’Day

625 JUDE Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz 627 REVELATION/APOCALYPSE OF JOHN Tina Pippin 633

BEYOND THE CANON Deirdre Good

640 THE RELIGIOUS LIVES OF WOMEN IN THE EARLY CHURCH Margaret Y. MacDonald 648 Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Eccl. Ecclesiastes Song Song of Songs Isa. Isaiah Jer. Jeremiah Lam. Lamentations Ezek. Ezekiel Dan. Daniel Hos. Hosea Joel Joel Amos Amos Obad. Obadiah Jonah Jonah Mic. Micah Nah. Nahum Hab. Habakkuk Zeph. Zephaniah Hag. Haggai Zech. Zechariah Mal. Malachi

Gen. Genesis Exod. Exodus Lev. Leviticus Num. Numbers Deut. Deuteronomy Josh. Joshua Judg. Judges Ruth Ruth 1 Sam. 1 Samuel 2 Sam. 2 Samuel 1 Kgs. 1 Kings 2 Kgs. 2 Kings 1 Chr. 1 Chronicles 2 Chr. 2 Chronicles Ezra Ezra Neh. Nehemiah Esth. Esther Job Job Ps. (Pss.) Psalms Prov. Proverbs

Apocrypha Let. Jer. Gr. Dan. Pr. Man. 1 Macc. 2 Macc. 3 Macc. 4 Macc. Ps. 151

1 Esd. 1 Esdras 2 Esd. 2 Esdras Tob. Tobit Jdt. Judith Gr. Esth. The Greek Book of Esther Wisd. Sol. The Wisdom of Solomon Sir. Sirach Bar. Baruch

xiii

The Letter of Jeremiah The Greek Book of Daniel The Prayer of Manasseh 1 Maccabees 2 Maccabees 3 Maccabees 4 Maccabees Psalm 151

xiv Abbreviations

New Testament Matt. Matthew Mark Mark Luke Luke John John Acts Acts of the Apostles Rom. Romans 1 Cor. 1 Corinthians 2 Cor. 2 Corinthians Gal. Galatians Eph. Ephesians Phil. Philippians Col. Colossians 1 Thess. 1 Thessalonians 2 Thess. 2 Thessalonians

1 Tim. 1 Timothy 2 Tim. 2 Timothy Titus Titus Phlm. Philemon Heb. Hebrews Jas. James 1 Pet. 1 Peter 2 Pet. 2 Peter 1 John 1 John 2 John 2 John 3 John 3 John Jude Jude Rev. Revelation

Other Abbreviations Aram. Aramaic BCE Before the Common Era (=B.C.) CE Common Era (=A.D.) DH Deuteronomistic History JB Jerusalem Bible LXX Septuagint NAB New American Bible NEB New English Bible

NETS New English Translation of the Septuagint NIV New International Version NJB New Jerusalem Bible NRSV New Revised Standard Version par(s). parallel(s) REB Revised English Bible RSV Revised Standard Version vol(s). volume(s)

Contributors

Margaret Aymer Associate Professor of New Testament Interdenominational Theological Center Atlanta, Georgia Acts of the Apostles

L. Juliana M. Claassens Associate Professor of Old Testament Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, South Africa Joel; Obadiah

Jouette M. Bassler Professor Emerita of New Testament Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas 1 and 2 Corinthians

Colleen M. Conway Professor of Religious Studies Seton Hall University South Orange, New Jersey 2 Maccabees Amy C. Cottrill Assistant Professor of Religion Birmingham-Southern College Birmingham, Alabama Joshua

Kelley Coblentz Bautch Associate Professor of Religious Studies St. Edward’s University Austin, Texas 1 Maccabees

Sidnie White Crawford Willa Cather Professor of Classics and Religious Studies University of Nebraska-Lincoln Lincoln, Nebraska Esther

Mary Ann Beavis Professor of Religion and Culture St. Thomas More College Saskatoon, Saskatchewan 2 Thessalonians

Mary Rose D’Angelo Associate Professor of Theology University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, Indiana Hebrews

Gay L. Byron Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins Colgate Rochester Crozer Divinity School Rochester, New York James

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xvi Contributors

Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford Professor of Old Testament and Biblical Languages Mercer University Atlanta, Georgia Psalms

Beverly Roberts Gaventa Helen H. P. Manson Professor of New Testament Literature and Exegesis Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, New Jersey Romans

Joanna Dewey Harvey H. Guthrie Jr. Professor Emerita of Biblical Studies Episcopal Divinity School Cambridge, Massachusetts 1 and 2 Timothy; Titus

Deirdre Good Professor of New Testament General Theological Seminary New York, New York Beyond the Canon

Pamela Eisenbaum Associate Professor of Biblical Studies and Christian Origins Iliff School of Theology Denver, Colorado Sirach Amy Erickson Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible Iliff School of Theology Denver, Colorado Amos Tamara Cohn Eskenazi Professor of Bible Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles, California Ezra–Nehemiah J. Cheryl Exum Professor Emerita of Biblical Studies University of Sheffield Sheffield, United Kingdom Song of Songs Judy Fentress-Williams Professor of Old Testament Virginia Theological Seminary Alexandria, Virginia Micah Julie Galambush Associate Professor of Religious Studies The College of William and Mary Williamsburg, Virginia Nahum

Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz Assistant Professor of Christian Scriptures School of Theology and Ministry Seattle University Seattle, Washington Jude Jo Ann Hackett Professor of Middle Eastern Studies University of Texas at Austin Austin, Texas 1 and 2 Samuel Hannah K. Harrington Professor of Old Testament Patten University Oakland, California Leviticus Katie M. Heffelfinger Lecturer in Biblical Studies and Hermeneutics Church of Ireland Theological Institute Dublin, Republic of Ireland Zephaniah Karina Martin Hogan Associate Professor of Theology and Women’s Studies Fordham University New York, New York 2 Esdras Denise Dombkowski Hopkins Woodrow and Mildred Miller Professor of Biblical Theology Wesley Theological Seminary Washington, DC Judith

Contributors

Cameron B. R. Howard Assistant Professor of Old Testament Luther Seminary St. Paul, Minnesota 1 and 2 Kings Elaine James Ph.D. Candidate Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, New Jersey Sarah, Hagar, and Their Interpreters; Miriam and Her Interpreters E. Elizabeth Johnson J. Davison Philips Professor of New Testament Columbia Theological Seminary Decatur, Georgia Ephesians; Colossians Sara R. Johnson Associate Professor, Department of Languages, Literatures, and Culture University of Connecticut Storrs, Connecticut 3 Maccabees Nyasha Junior Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible/ Old Testament Howard University School of Divinity Washington, DC Exodus Cynthia Briggs Kittredge Ernest J. Villavaso Jr. Professor of New Testament and Academic Dean Seminary of the Southwest Austin, Texas 1 and 2 Peter Jennifer L. Koosed Associate Professor and Chair, Department of Religious Studies Albright College Reading, Pennsylvania Ecclesiastes Jacqueline E. Lapsley Associate Professor of Old Testament Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, New Jersey Ezekiel

xvii

Eunny P. Lee Independent Scholar Princeton, New Jersey Ruth Amy-Jill Levine University Professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies; E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Professor of New Testament Studies; Professor of Jewish Studies Vanderbilt University Nashville, Tennessee Gospel of Matthew Ingrid E. Lilly Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible and Jewish Studies Western Kentucky University Bowling Green, Kentucky Malachi Margaret Y. MacDonald Professor of Religious Studies St. Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia The Religious Lives of Women in the Early Church Elizabeth Struthers Malbon Professor, Department of Religion and Culture Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University Blacksburg, Virginia Gospel of Mark Carol Meyers Mary Grace Wilson Professor of Religion Duke University Durham, North Carolina Women’s Religious Life in Ancient Israel Christine Mitchell Professor of Hebrew Scriptures St. Andrew’s College Saskatoon, Saskatchewan 1 and 2 Chronicles

xviii Contributors

Kelly J. Murphy Conrad J. Bergendoff Fellow, Religion Department Augustana College Rock Island, Illinois Jonah Judith H. Newman Associate Professor of Religion and Old Testament/Hebrew Bible Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto Toronto, Ontario 4 Maccabees Carol A. Newsom Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible Candler School of Theology Emory University Atlanta, Georgia Women as Biblical Interpreters before the 20th Century; Job; Daniel; Psalm 151 Susan Niditch Samuel Green Professor of Religion Amherst College Amherst, Massachusetts Genesis Julia M. O’Brien Paul H. and Grace L. Stern Chair in Old Testament Studies and Professor of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Lancaster Theological Seminary Lancaster, Pennsylvania Haggai; Zechariah Kathleen M. O’Connor William Marcellus McPheeters Professor Emerita of Old Testament Columbia Theological Seminary Decatur, Georgia Jeremiah; Lamentations Gail R. O’Day Dean and Professor of New Testament and Preaching Wake Forest University School of Divinity Winston-Salem, North Carolina Gospel of John; 1, 2, and 3 John

Carolyn Osiek, RSCJ Charles Fischer Professor Emerita of New Testament Brite Divinity School Texas Christian University Fort Worth, Texas Galatians Tina Pippin Wallace M. Alston Professor of Religious Studies and Chair, Department of Religious Studies Agnes Scott College Decatur, Georgia Revelation/Apocalypse of John Carolyn Pressler Harry C. Piper Jr. Professor of Biblical Interpretation United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities New Brighton, Minnesota Deuteronomy Adele Reinhartz Professor, Department of Classics and Religious Studies Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa Ottawa, Ontario Greek Book of Esther Sharon H. Ringe Professor of New Testament Wesley Theological Seminary Washington, DC, and Extraordinary Professor of Old and New Testament Stellenbosch University Stellenbosch, South Africa When Women Interpret the Bible; Gospel of Luke Amy H. C. Robertson Independent Scholar Atlanta, Georgia Rahab and Her Interpreters Katharine Doob Sakenfeld William Albright Eisenberger Professor of Old Testament Princeton Theological Seminary Princeton, New Jersey Numbers

Contributors

xix

†

Jane D. Schaberg Professor of Religious Studies and Women’s Studies University of Detroit Mercy Detroit, Michigan Gospel of Luke

Nicole Tilford Ph.D. Candidate Emory University Atlanta, Georgia Greek Book of Daniel; Judith and Her Interpreters; Susanna and Her Interpreters

Susanne Scholz Associate Professor of Old Testament Perkins School of Theology Southern Methodist University Dallas, Texas Judges

Patricia K. Tull A. B. Rhodes Professor Emerita of Old Testament Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary Louisville, Kentucky Isaiah; Baruch; Letter of Jeremiah; Prayer of Manasseh

Eileen M. Schuller Professor, Department of Religious Studies McMaster University Hamilton, Ontario Introduction to the Apocrypha; 1 Esdras; Tobit Mitzi J. Smith Associate Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity Ashland Theological Seminary, Detroit Southfield, Michigan Philemon Josey Bridges Snyder Ph.D. Candidate Emory University Atlanta, Georgia Delilah and Her Interpreters; Jezebel and Her Interpreters Anne W. Stewart Ph.D. Candidate Emory University Atlanta, Georgia Eve and Her Interpreters; Deborah, Jael, and Their Interpreters; Jephthah’s Daughter and Her Interpreters; Job’s Wife and Her Interpreters Monya A. Stubbs Assistant Professor of New Testament Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary Austin, Texas 1 Thessalonians Sarah J. Tanzer Professor of New Testament and Early Judaism McCormick Theological Seminary Chicago, Illinois Wisdom of Solomon

Amy C. Merrill Willis Assistant Professor of Religious Studies Lynchburg College Lynchburg, Virginia Habakkuk Brittany E. Wilson Visiting Assistant Professor of New Testament Duke University Divinity School Durham, North Carolina Mary and Her Interpreters; Mary Magdalene and Her Interpreters Carla Swafford Works Assistant Professor of New Testament Wesley Theological Seminary Washington, DC Philippians Gale A. Yee Nancy W. King Professor of Biblical Studies Episcopal Divinity School Cambridge, Massachusetts Hosea Christine Roy Yoder Professor of Old Testament Columbia Theological Seminary Decatur, Georgia Proverbs

Introduction to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition

In 1989, when Cynthia Thompson, an editor at Westminster John Knox, first raised the possibility of a one-volume commentary that would focus on feminist biblical interpretation, it was a provocative idea. The second wave of feminism had been underway since the late 1960s, but feminism in biblical studies had only started to gain ground in the mid- to late 1970s. Barely a decade later, it was an open question whether there were yet enough feminist biblical scholars who could write across the entire canon. Moreover, at that time most feminist biblical scholarship was focused on those texts that featured women. How one would do feminist analysis on texts that did not directly speak about women was still a question. Nevertheless, it was a tantalizing opportunity. Some of our decisions about the project were controversial. One involved the name. The Women’s Bible Commentary was an obvious and intentional nod of the head to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s publication of The Woman’s Bible in 1895–98. That project, which had inflamed public opinion when it was originally published, had largely languished in obscurity for decades before it was republished in 1974 by the Seattle-based Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion. The radical freedom to critique and to reinterpret and to re-imagine the representation of women in the Bible that Stanton and her colleagues embodied had been invigorating and empowering to early feminist biblical scholars of what is now known as the second wave of feminism. Even as we paid homage to this groundbreaking work, we differentiated ourselves from it. The change from the singular “Woman’s” to the plural “Women’s” reflected the recognition that, however important gender is as a category, it is always complexly mixed with other categories, including race, ethnicity, class, and dis/ability. That recognition, however, raised other issues. Our project could not possibly represent the variety of emergent feminist interpretation as it was beginning to appear in various geographical, institutional, and experiential contexts. In contrast to Stanton’s project, which was written by women with no “credentials” from the scholarly establishment of the emerging discipline of biblical studies, our project was one written by women who were members (or, as some felt, “quasi-members”) of the scholarly guild. Thus our project was more ambiguously placed between “insider” and “outsider” status. Similarly, although some of Stanton’s colleagues were affiliated with religious denominations, most were proponents of New Thought and Free Thought movements, roughly, the precursors of the current New Age Spirituality and New Atheism movements. While not all of our contributors were affiliated with religious communities, we were, on the whole, much more involved with such communities than was Stanton’s group. xxi

xxii Introduction to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition

More troubling from our point of view was the impossibility of fulfilling the promise of plurality represented by the term “Women’s.” There was no way, in 1989 or in 2009, adequately to represent the variety of feminist scholarship as it was being produced in different geographic and social locations. So we made another controversial decision. We decided to be “parochial” and to feature North American feminist scholarship—in as much religious and ethnic diversity as possible, but North American in focus. That was, in part, frankly a pragmatic decision. But it was not only that. On principle, we did not want to engage in the tokenism that picks a bit of this and a bit of that and parades itself as deeply inclusive when it is not. Instead, we made what was a calculated gamble of hope. We embraced “parochial” not in the negative sense of “confined, restricted, insulated” but in the positive sense of “based in the neighborhood.” We sensed that feminist scholarship “otherwise located” was quickly developing into a fascinating network of neighborhoods: African American neighborhoods; Latina neighborhoods; European neighborhoods; African neighborhoods; Asian neighborhoods; lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered neighborhoods; evangelical and post-Christian neighborhoods. Our wager was that a modest parochialism could be the basis for a much richer cosmopolitanism. And so it appears to be happening. The wealth of other projects in feminist scholarship now places this edition of the Women’s Biblical Commentary into a rich context of other feminist voices speaking from a variety of different locations. The current edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary is the third, and it is interesting to see the changes that have been made in each supplementary edition. The first edition oriented itself to the Protestant canon, though it gestured to a broader religious literature. The project was, after all, sponsored by a Presbyterian press. The enthusiastic response to the first edition—not only among Protestants, but also among Catholic, Jewish, and “non-aligned” readers—caused us to rethink the structure of the second, expanded edition. After all, some of the books of most interest to feminist readers are in what Protestants call the Apocrypha and Catholics call the deutero­ canonical writings. It was clear those should be included. But the original articles were, for the most part, not replaced or revised. As we decided to do a third edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary, we realized that a wholesale revision was needed, for several reasons. First, the field of feminist biblical criticism has developed in profound ways in the last twenty years. Issues that were just beginning to be explored in 1989—the hermeneutical significance of sexual identity, analysis of masculinity, and postcolonial positioning—were, by 2009, very much a part of feminist criticism. Second, the number and variety of feminist biblical critics have increased exponentially. Whereas we were anxious in 1989 about finding a sufficient number of authors to invite, in 2009 we anguished over how many people we would like to invite that we simply could not. We also became aware that in the present day not all of the prominent feminist interpreters are in fact female. A small but significant number of men now identify themselves as doing feminist biblical interpretation. We decided, however, that this volume would continue to feature women authors, even as we celebrate the diffusion of feminist methods into the practice of biblical studies at large. One of the most difficult decisions we had to make was which articles to replace and which to revise and retain. Our principle was to identify some of the most interesting younger women working in the field and to invite them to write for the new edition. Even if that meant replacing some of our cherished previous articles, we decided that it was appropriate for the senior women to make way for the new generation. We have been deeply gratified at the graciousness with which the authors of articles that have been replaced have not only accepted but cheered our initiative to include the work of younger scholars. Finally, in envisioning the new edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary, we realized how much the entire field of biblical studies has changed in the past twenty years.

Introduction to the Twentieth-Anniversary Edition

One of the most profound changes has been in the new appreciation of the importance of reception history, that is, how Christian, Jewish, and modern secular culture has interpreted the Bible. The meaning of the Bible is not just “what it meant” when it was composed, if ever we could fully reconstruct that. Nor is it simply “what it means” now, as our contemporary societies engage the Bible. What the Bible means and the effects it has had include the entire history of its reception and engagement. Significantly, women characters in the Bible have been the site of extraordinary interpretation and contested interpretation, as many issues, both involving the status of women and involving many other things, have been debated. In order to acknowledge this emerging aspect of biblical studies, we have commissioned thirteen articles that sketch the interpretation of significant female figures from the Bible. Since interpretation takes place not only in words but also in images, we are including a selection of artistic images that are part of this history of interpretation. While much of the interpretation of female figures from the Bible was articulated by men, readers of this commentary have a particular interest in what women interpreters have said. So we have also included an essay on women as interpreters of the Bible in the pre-twentieth-century period. On a more technical note, just as the field of feminist biblical studies has changed over the last twenty years, so have the conventions for editorial practices and citations of biblical and related literature. Were we to be starting anew, we would undoubtedly use the increasingly standard SBL Handbook of Style as our norm. Since the first two editions of the Women’s Bible Commentary were edited according to other practices, however, we have judged it better to retain those editorial conventions. Each time the editors write an introduction to an edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary we think it will be the final one. At some point, of course, this volume will no longer have a role to play. But we are deeply gratified that it has served the needs of so many women and men who are interested in feminist biblical scholarship, and we hope that it can continue to be a valued resource for many years to come. Each introduction has thanked persons whose hard, careful, and painstaking work has been important to the production of the volume. The help of others has been even more significant for this edition. The editors would first like to thank Westminster John Knox editor Marianne Blickenstaff, whose championing of this volume was vital. She carried us through times of perplexity and discouragement as we tried to envision our new edition, and she facilitated the details of our work in so many ways that it is impossible to count them. We offer her our deepest thanks. We were also supported by the extraordinary talents of several student assistants whose knowledge, efficiency, and attention to detail were indispensable. Without Robin McCall, Anne Stewart, Chris Hooker, and Amanda Davis, this volume would simply not have been possible. Jacqueline E. Lapsley Carol A. Newsom Sharon H. Ringe

xxiii

Introduction to the Expanded Edition

This edition differs from its predecessor in two ways. First, it includes individual essays on the Apocrypha, or deuterocanonical books. These discussions will enhance the usefulness of the volume to those in parts of the Christian church that include these books in the lectionaries or texts assigned for reading in public worship. Historically, the Apocryphal books were accepted by Orthodox and Roman Catholic communions and rejected by the churches of the Reformation, but as a result of recent ecumenical conversations about worship in general and about lectionaries in particular, Protestant churches also listen for God’s word in these texts. (Since we have included here books that are found in the Roman Catholic, Greek, and Slavonic Bibles in different sequences or only in appendixes, there is no commonly agreed upon order to follow. For convenience and accessibility, we have adopted the sequence used in Harper’s Bible Commentary.) In addition to enhancing the usefulness of the Women’s Bible Commentary in the churches, adding the discussions of these books serves those whose principal interest is historical. The deuterocanonical literature provides significant glimpses into both the lives and religious experiences of women and attitudes toward women in the Second Temple period, which was formative of the Jewish and Christian movements and communities that grew out of that common matrix. The second change to this edition of the Women’s Bible Commentary is the addition of a bibliography at the end of the volume to supplement the bibliographies in the articles of the original edition. Although the field of biblical interpretation by women is growing so rapidly that any such list is out of date before it is published, this brief bibliography provides a glimpse of the rich variety of interpretations of the Bible being done by women in all parts of the world at the time of this publication. The general bibliography thus begins to set our work as North American biblical scholars in its global context and to provide some starting points for readers who wish to explore issues more broadly. We have listed in the bibliography only works readily available in English, and we encourage any who translate this work to expand the bibliography to include books and articles in their languages. The essays on the books of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and the New Testament that formed the original edition of this commentary have not been revised or replaced, with one exception. The chapter “Daniel and Its Additions” has been retitled “The Greek Book of Daniel” and moved to the new section on the Apocryphal/­ deuterocanonical books. A new article on the Hebrew and Aramaic book of Daniel

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has been included to replace it in the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament section of the commentary. We look forward to the opportunity to prepare a fully revised version of the Women’s Bible Commentary at an appropriate time in the future. We wish to thank Faith Kirkham Hawkins and Jacqueline Lapsley for their assistance in compiling the bibliography. Carol A. Newsom Sharon H. Ringe

Introduction to the First Edition

Although women have read the Bible for countless generations, we have not always been self-conscious about reading as women. There are many reasons why it is important that women do so. Women have distinctive questions to raise about the Bible and distinctive insights into its texts: our experiences of self and family, our relationship to institutions, the nature of our work and daily lives, and our spirituality have been and continue to be different in important respects from those of men. But there is another reason, too. Because of its religious and cultural authority, the Bible has been one of the most important means by which woman’s place in society has been defined. Throughout the centuries, of course, the Bible has been invoked to justify women’s subordination to men. But it has also played a role, sometimes in surprising ways, in empowering women. Increasingly, it is difficult for a woman, whether she is a member of a religious community or not, to read the Bible without some sense of the role it has played in shaping the conditions of her life. During the women’s movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there emerged a clear sense of the need for women to read the Bible self-consciously as women. Just over a hundred years ago Frances Willard, president of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, made this appeal: “We need women commentators to bring out the women’s side of the book; we need the stereoscopic view of truth in general, which can only be had when woman’s eye and man’s eye together shall discern the perspective of the Bible’s full-orbed revelation” (Willard, p. 21). To that end she urged “young women of linguistic talent . . .  to make a specialty of Hebrew and New Testament Greek in the interest of their sex” (Willard, p. 31). That was a problem. The interpretation of the Bible has always tended to be reserved to the “experts.” In part this has been because of the specialized knowledge of ancient languages that is needed, but it is also a matter of institutional and cultural power. So long as women were excluded from both religious offices and educational opportunities, it was difficult for them to enter into the interpretation of the Bible in an authoritative way. Even as outsiders, however, some courageous women began to interpret the Bible and its bearing on women’s lives. In the 1890s Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a small group of collaborators produced The Woman’s Bible. They excerpted and commented on those portions of the Bible in which women appear—or are conspicuously absent. In their comments the authors attacked both the male bias that had distorted the interpretation of the Bible and the misogyny of the text itself. Sharp and outspoken in its content, witty and pungent in its style, The Woman’s Bible remains a fascinating work. Many of its observations, which seemed so daring at the time, have since come to be widely held, even treated xxvii

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as obvious. But The Woman’s Bible was not, even by the standards of its day, a work of biblical scholarship. Although some women had begun to receive training in biblical languages and in the new forms of scholarship that were starting to make such an impact in biblical studies, they were reluctant to participate in Stanton’s project. In her introduction she observes: Those who have undertaken the labor [of The Woman’s Bible] are desirous to have some Hebrew and Greek scholars, versed in Biblical criticism, to gild our pages with their learning. Several distinguished women have been urged to do so, but they are afraid that their high reputation and scholarly attainments might be compromised by taking part in an enterprise that for a time may prove very unpopular. Hence we may not be able to get help from that class. (Stanton, 1:9)

What was the case in 1895 remained the case for almost three quarters of a century. Although a small but not insignificant number of women continued to be trained in biblical studies, women in the academy did not use their skills to read the Bible from a feminist perspective. It was not until 1964 that a female professor of biblical literature, Margaret Brackenbury Crook, published a study on the status of women in Judaism and Christianity entitled Women and Religion (see Gifford). Although insisting that hers was not a “feminist” project, Crook pointedly observed: [A] masculine monopoly in religion begins when Miriam raises her indignant question: “Does the Lord speak only through Moses?” Since then, in all three of the great religious groups stemming from the land and books of Israel—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—men have formulated doctrine and established systems of worship offering only meager opportunity for expression of the religious genius of womankind. (Crook, p. 1)

The women’s movement of the 1960s and 1970s and the increasing number of women attending seminaries renewed interest in what it might mean to read the Bible self-consciously as a woman. Books such as Letty Russell’s The Liberating Word and Phyllis Trible’s God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality introduced many women and men to the new possibilities opened up by feminism for reading and understanding the Bible. With increasing self-confidence and sophistication, feminist study of the Bible has blossomed to become one of the most important new areas in contemporary biblical research. Over the last twenty-five years biblical scholarship by women has come into its maturity. Not only are women prominent in the discussions of traditional topics in biblical studies, but the new questions women have posed and the new ways of reading that women have pioneered have challenged the very way biblical studies are done. There are many different directions that feminist study of the Bible has taken. Some commentators have attempted to reach “behind the text” to recover knowledge about the actual conditions of women’s lives in the biblical period. Others have paid attention to what goes on in the telling of the stories and the singing of the songs, using literary approaches to shed new light on metaphors, images, and narratives about women. Still others have tried to discover the extent to which even the biblical writings that pertain to women are shaped by the concerns and perspectives of men and yet how it can still be possible at times to discover the presence of women and their own points of view between the lines. Many have struggled with the issues of how women in communities of faith can and should read the Bible in the light of what feminist inquiry has discovered. Contemporary feminist study of the Bible has not set out either to bring the Bible into judgment or to rescue it from its critics. But to read

Introduction to the First Edition

the Bible self-consciously as a woman is a complex experience, alternately painful and exhilarating. There is a great sense of empowerment, however, that comes from reading the Bible as a woman in the company of other women. That is an experience that this volume is intended to assist. Although there has been a rapidly increasing number of books and articles on the Bible by women, The Women’s Bible Commentary is the first comprehensive attempt to gather some of the fruits of feminist biblical scholarship on each book of the Bible in order to share it with the larger community of women who read the Bible. The title of this volume pays tribute to Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s pioneering work almost a century ago. But whereas she entitled her work the “Woman’s Bible,” we have chosen the plural, “Women’s Bible.” The reason for this is our recognition of the diversity among women who read the Bible and study it. There is no single “woman’s perspective” but a rich variety of insight that comes from the different ways in which women’s experience is shaped by culture, class, ethnicity, religious community, and other aspects of social identity. Indeed, one of the insights of feminism has been the recognition of the extent to which knowledge is perspectival. People see things or are oblivious to them in part because of how they have been formed through their experiences. They ask certain kinds of questions and not others for the same reasons. In choosing contributors for this volume we have tried to represent some of that diversity of perspectives shaped by different ways of being female in our pluralistic culture. Included in this volume are Jewish women, Roman Catholic women, Protestant women. Many are laywomen, but some are members of religious orders or ordained clergy. Our relationship to religious community differs, too. Many of us are actively involved with worshiping communities; some are in an uneasy relationship or can no longer make our spiritual homes within traditional religion; and a few have come to the study of the Bible from secular backgrounds. As work on the volume was coming to an end, we invited the contributors to reflect on some of the factors that had both helped to form their interest in the Bible and shaped their way of interpreting it. For some, a sense of ethnic identity—as African American, Native American, Asian American—has been crucial. For others, too, an experience of crossing cultural boundaries was formative: growing up white in an urban black community in the South, being a European in America or an American in Europe. One contributor who grew up Jewish in a largely Christian neighborhood remarked on the way in which her experience of the sins of anti-Semitism and sexism not only formed her as a child but continues to inform her research. Several contributors indicated the strong connections between their feminist reading of the Bible and their involvement in issues of social justice. Jane Schaberg said eloquently of her work on Luke: This commentary is based on the conviction that feminism and social justice are inextricably linked, and that it is an urgent task to analyze this Gospel’s thinking about women and the poor. The commentary is written in Detroit, which has been called the United States’ first Third World city, where the inadequacies of capitalism and the evils of racism and anti-Semitism are daily experienced. It is also written from a position of anguished, stubborn membership in the Catholic church, whose official leaders currently uphold patriarchal values and resist egalitarian, democratic trends in contemporary society. Reading Luke in this context sharpens perceptions of its weaknesses and strengths.

Yet for all the variety of perspectives reflected in this volume, many voices are not represented or are underrepresented, even from among North American women. Readers might also pause and think how different a commentary on the Bible would be that was written by the women of Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, or the Levant.

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One of the things that all the contributors to this volume have in common is a rather similar type of education. We are, in Frances Willard’s words, “women of linguistic talent” who have decided “to make a specialty of Hebrew and New Testament Greek in the interest of their sex.” To that end we have all spent many years in graduate study in American and European universities. Our commitment to feminism has taught us not only to value expertise but also to be wary of the elitism that often goes with it. For our learning truly to be in the service of the larger community of women, it is vital that our work be shaped in dialogue with the laywomen, clergywomen, and students for whom this volume is intended. Many contributors have long been active in Bible study with women’s groups, and all were encouraged to share their work in progress and receive comments from women in their communities. Claudia Camp, in particular, has stressed how important the women’s Bible study group at South Hills Christian Church in Fort Worth, Texas, was in shaping the article she wrote on 1 and 2 Kings. Such an experience, Claudia says, helps to dispel the illusion of individual achievement and points toward new models of what authorship really means. If the women of South Hills had a direct role in shaping this volume, there are others whose influence was less direct but no less real. A number of the contributors named their mothers, grandmothers, and other women in their religious communities as the ones who in so many ways taught them how to read the Bible. It may be helpful to say a few words about the contents and organization of the material that follows. One of the realities of the differences among religious communities is that when Jews, Catholics, and Protestants talk about the “Bible,” we all refer to something different. The canon of scripture differs for each community, not only in the number and identity of books included but also in the order in which they appear. In some instances, even the chapter and verse references differ slightly between Jewish and Christian Bibles. As a project sponsored by a Protestant publisher, The Women’s Bible Commentary follows the number and order of the biblical books in the Protestant canon, with one small exception: the deuterocanonical additions to Esther and Daniel, including the story of Susanna, have been grouped with the canonical books. The rest of the Apocrypha, included in the Old Testament by Catholics, is treated here in a separate article. We have designated the first section of the book with the dual title Hebrew Bible/Old Testament, in recognition of the fact that these scriptures have a different identity and role in Judaism and in Christianity. Similarly, we have identified dates with the designation b.c.e. (before the common era) and c.e. (common era). Unless otherwise noted, quotations and chapter and verse references are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. There is one exception. The divine name, YHWH, is traditionally rendered by the title “Lord” in most translations. We have preferred to use either “YHWH” or “Yahweh.” The Women’s Bible Commentary does not intend to be a general or complete commentary on the Bible. Each article on a biblical book does begin with an introduction that orients the reader to the contents of the book and provides an overview of the major issues raised by the book. Rather than asking the contributors to comment on each and every section of the biblical book, we have followed the model of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible and asked contributors to select for comment those passages that they judged to be of particular relevance to women. What contributors have selected includes not only portions of the Bible that deal explicitly with female characters and symbols but also sections that bear on the condition of women more generally. Aspects of social life, marriage and family, the legal status of women, religious and economic institutions, the ways in which community boundaries were defined and maintained, and other such topics are all treated. In addition, there are discussions of certain symbolic ways of thinking, such as the notion of holiness or dualistic conceptions of the world, that are important for understanding the representation of women in the Bible and in the cultures from which it came. Finally, we have included several articles that go beyond the boundaries of the canon. Two articles consider the

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daily lives of women in the biblical period, drawing both on biblical and nonbiblical sources. One article explores the appearance of women in early Christian literature outside the canon. A final essay is devoted to feminist hermeneutics, that is, to the ways in which women in the modern world are engaged in interpreting and assessing the meaning of biblical texts from a self-consciously feminist perspective. The reading of the Bible is a never-ending task, renewed and refreshed by each new community of readers who bring questions and perspectives nurtured by their own experiences. What we offer on the following pages is not intended as a definitive or final word but more as a model of some of the ways in which women reading as women can engage the biblical text. ***** In addition to the persons whose contributions appear explicitly in the book, there are several whose assistance in the development and preparation of this volume should be acknowledged. Above all, recognition should go to Cynthia Thompson of Westminster/John Knox Press, who first conceived of the project and persuaded us to undertake it. Cynthia’s wise counsel and sense of perspective made the task of editing a much easier one than we could have imagined. Rex Matthews generously took the cacophony of divergent word-processing programs used by forty-one authors and translated the files into forms we could use. Colleen Grant and Dorcas Ford-Doward checked the manuscripts and prepared the final copy. To each of them we offer our thanks. Carol A. Newsom Sharon H. Ringe Bibliography

Crook, Margaret Brackenbury. Women and Religion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964. Gifford, Carolyn De Swarte. “American Women and the Bible: The Nature of Woman as a Hermeneutical Issue.” In Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, edited by Adela Yarbro Collins, pp. 11–33. Biblical Scholarship in North America 10. Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985. Russell, Letty M., ed. The Liberating Word: A Guide to Nonsexist Interpretation of the Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, ed. The Woman’s Bible. 2 vols. New York: European Publishing Co., 1895–1898. Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. Willard, Frances E. Woman in the Pulpit. Chicago: Woman’s Temperance Publishing Association, 1889.

When Women Interpret the Bible Sharon H. Ringe

What on earth does the Bible mean? How can modern readers ever understand the assumptions and language taken for granted by ancient authors and their communities? When the reader is a woman, how is the process of reading the Bible, or the result of that process, different? How has the Bible influenced the lives of women and men through history and in the present? How ought it to shape the lives of women and men who look to it as the norm for faith and practice? What does it mean to call the Bible “the word of God”? What might compel one to say, “On this point, the Bible is wrong”? At the heart of such questions is the process of interpretation.

Interpretation as Active Reading Interpretation of the Bible begins with careful and active reading. Such reading attempts to understand the time, place, and purpose for which a particular biblical book was written, the principal concerns of the author and of the communities that shaped the book, and the meanings of particular terms found in the text. This part of the process is similar to the effort to get to know a conversation partner in order better to understand how she uses words, what life story has shaped him, what prompts the conversation—in short, where he or she is coming from—so as not to impose one’s own agenda on the other and thus mute his or her unique voice. A conversation, however, requires two active partners, and even a person carefully sensitive to where the other is coming from still filters what is heard through his or her own experience. What is perceived is thus not always exactly what was intended, and knowing who is reporting a conversation can be as important as knowing who is speaking! The situation for a reader of an ancient text like the Bible is similar. Although the careful reader attempts to distinguish between the voice of the ancient author and his or her own concerns as a modern interpreter, this distinction is never absolute. The place in history, culture, and society occupied by the reader inevitably influences what she or he can perceive in any text and what questions seem important to ask about the text and its context. Therefore, while commentaries, Bible dictionaries, and other scholarly tools can help in this reading process, each of them represents the work of particular readers. Like the biblical materials they seek to interpret, all such resources too reflect their authors’ contexts. What sets the Women’s Bible Commentary apart from others is its authors’ acknowledged commitment to read the biblical texts through the varied lenses of women’s 1

2 When Women Interpret the Bible

experiences in ancient and modern religious and cultural contexts. The result is an attempt to understand and even to ask questions of the biblical authors, through the legacy of their work, concerning the situation of women in the communities from which they came or which they envisioned as desirable.

Biblical Authority and Interpretation Clearly, women’s perspectives or the consequences for women’s lives were not the primary concern of the biblical authors. In fact, it seems evident that those authors rarely if ever raised such questions. But women reading the Bible do want to know such things: they relate to our foremothers’ histories and to our own lives. An important question faced by interpreters raising such questions is whether they are legitimate. If they are not the agenda of the authors or even of their principal audiences, should—or even can—they be pursued? The question must be approached carefully. On the one hand, the Bible does not address every issue of concern to women of this or any other time, any more than it provides specific answers to modern questions in biomedical ethics. To read such answers or to pursue such explicit agenda within the biblical text would not honor its—or the reader’s—historical context. On the other hand, the literary legacy of the biblical authors does include female characters and introduce issues of special concern to women’s lives. To ask about those is to open up the text itself and to make visible the invisible (and often unconscious) values and assumptions of its author. Such a reading is part of the process of “unmasking” the dominant culture and is the particular talent of persons who live on its margins. Women’s questions about women of biblical times and about the implications of the Bible for women’s lives reflect the fact that, for good or ill, the Bible is a book that has shaped and continues to shape human lives, communities, and cultures in the West, as well as in those other parts of the world under the hegemony or influence of Europe and North America. The Bible is a collection of “classic” texts often referred to in other literature, and the values of these texts (usually as they have been interpreted by dominant or powerful individuals and groups) have shaped both philosophies and legal systems. The Bible has become part of the air we breathe without our even being aware of its presence or power. In addition to that common cultural or even “atmospheric” role, in both Christianity and Judaism the Bible as “scripture” or “canon” bears a variety of kinds of religious authority: guide for conduct, rule of faith, inerrant source of truth (factual and/or moral), and revelation of God. Within these communities, the authority of the Bible is explicit as well as implicit, but often ambiguous and finally ambivalent, especially for women.

The Ambivalent Power of the Bible The Bible is a powerful book. Because of that power, the question of interpretation goes beyond merely understanding the Bible, to ask, “Having understood it as best we can, what is its force in our lives, and what are we to do with or about it?” The question is not an easy one, especially for women. In the first place, the power of the Bible in women’s lives has been at best ambivalent. It has functioned as a force for life, for hope, and for liberation. Women’s lives have been enriched, sustained, and empowered in communities that affirm that within the Bible one encounters not only the divine will for human life and behavior, but the very presence of God. Women have found their own lives mirrored in the stories of quiet, valiant women who experience God’s blessing on them. Poor women long accustomed to feeding their families with a

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handful of flour and a little oil (1 Kgs. 17) find confidence to carry on. For centuries, women have affirmed with Paul that “neither death, nor life . . . nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God” (Rom. 8:38–39). At the same time, women reading the Bible have found themselves on alien and even hostile turf. Rarely if ever do women in the Bible get to speak for themselves. Rather, they are portrayed from the perspective of male authors and in the context of religious communities where authority finally came to be vested in men and where men’s experience was the norm. Women are thus absent from the Bible as persons working out their own religious journeys. It is clear that women have always undertaken such journeys, but within the Bible itself their legacy is not to be found. Rather, women appear—to use a metaphor from grammar—as direct and indirect “objects” and not as “subjects” of the verbs of religious experience and practice. Where aspects of their lives are described in stories or narratives, or where their behavior is prescribed (such as in the legal and moral codes of both testaments), or where women’s lives function as metaphors of religious realities (such as in Hosea or the book of Revelation), women are often “flat” characters, perfectly good or villainously evil, or objects at someone’s disposal. Both the silence of women and their silencing—the contempt in which they are held and the violence with which they are treated—in the Bible mirror the realities of many women’s lives. For them, the Bible is experienced as giving a divine stamp of approval to their suffering. Far from bringing healing of the hurt or empowerment toward freedom from oppression, the Bible seems to bless the harm and abuse with which women live and sometimes die.

Approaches to the Task of Interpretation The different ways women have experienced the power of the Bible individually and as members of different religious, social, and ethnic communities have led to a variety of approaches to the task of interpretation. Those approaches range along a continuum from affirmation that the entire Bible, as the word of God, positively informs faith and practice to, at the other extreme, outright rejection of the entire Bible as hopelessly and irredeemably misogynistic. Many women find themselves working in different ways with different parts of the Bible or in different contexts or occasions of interpretation. There is no single “correct” or “acceptable” way to work, but what should be kept in mind is that the various approaches yield different results or conclusions. Being aware of an interpreter’s approach or stance toward the text is important to one’s understanding or assessment of her work. Women who affirm the authoritative, even binding, role of the Bible as a positive force for women often distinguish sharply between the intent of the biblical authors and the results of interpretation and “application” of biblical teachings. Thus the biblical views of women are seen as affirming and supportive of women’s dignity and worth, and where the Bible has been read as demeaning or even as warranting the abuse of women, the error is seen to lie in the interpretation. Others—many African American and Latin American women, for example— recognize the important role played in past and present liberation struggles of their people by such parts of the Bible as the exodus narrative, the teachings of the prophets, and the teachings of Jesus found in the Synoptic Gospels. Those interpreters read these parts of the Bible as the heart of Scripture, a “canon within the canon,” which provides the key to interpreting all the rest. Under such a reading, any portion of Scripture that might be detrimental to women is read through the lens of the liberating intent of its heart. In a variation of that interpretive option, which focuses not on a generally “liberating” message but on texts specifically related to women, passages affirming women’s role and value are posited as a countervoice to those “against” women. The former

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are then affirmed as representative of the heart of the biblical message, in their stance against the patriarchal assumptions of the surrounding society. Still other women, recognizing the patriarchal values embedded in all of the biblical writings (despite the wide range of historical contexts out of which they arose and the varied purposes for which they were written), find in the negative views of women in the Bible a mirror of women’s experience in any androcentric or male-centered and male-normed society. They read such texts in memory of the women whose lives are depicted in them and those who have suffered because of them. Such texts also become the raw material for critical reflection on the history, doctrine, and theology that have shaped contemporary communities of faith and practice. The power of such texts to reveal anything about God, or about a community in faithful covenant with God, is denied. Finally, some readers experience the patriarchal values embedded in Scripture as so overwhelming that they no longer read the Bible at all. According to this view, the authority of human experience, and especially of women’s experience, to identify norms of justice and dignity stands in judgment over the human words of the biblical text: what is wrong in the treatment of women today always was wrong, and to continue to find any value in literature that perpetuates such wrong can only extend the harm done. For these readers, the interpretive task relative to the Bible is set aside, and the foundations of women’s spirituality and women’s religious experience are sought elsewhere.

A Chorus of Voices: Contextual Readings The variety of stances taken by women toward the biblical text and its authority is multiplied by other dimensions of difference as well. In each of these dimensions it is important to be aware of the specific factors shaping a particular reading and to incorporate a variety of voices into the project of interpretation.

Variety within the Text The first dimension of diversity of which the interpreter must be aware is that of the biblical materials themselves. Written over more than a millennium and collected over even more years than that, and originating among people living in every size and shape of human society from small tribal communities to cosmopolitan cities, the biblical materials reflect widely different assumptions about social forms and values, theology, and religious practice. It is important to recognize the particular context and, as far as possible, the assumptions that this context would convey, in order not to misconstrue the particular voice of a text. In addition to the variety of historical and social contexts of materials in the Bible, there is also a variety of forms of literature—narratives, poetry, laws, letters, songs, and proverbs, just to name some general categories. These different forms reflect different purposes: one does not write a poem for the same reason that one organizes a code of laws! The different types of material not only reflect different purposes but also have different effects on a reader. The beginning “Once upon a time . . .” invites one to relax, settle back, and listen to a story, whereas the opening phrase “Thou shalt not . . .” evokes both tension and attention—or else! And different types of literature are read in different ways, questioned for different purposes, and assessed by different criteria. In a poem or psalm, for example, one might ask about meter or metaphor, while characterization or plot development would be the concern in a narrative. Even the meaning of “truth” is different in poetry from the meaning in a text that purports to be a historical chronicle.

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The “Context” of a Lectionary The diversity within the Bible and the variety of contexts and purposes that gave rise to it are compounded when modern interpretation takes place in the context of public worship, as part of a “lectionary” or set of readings appointed to be read together. In the Christian church, those readings usually (but not always) include a psalm or other canticle, another reading from the First (or Old) Testament (Hebrew Bible or Apocrypha), a reading from an epistle, and one from a Gospel. Traditionally those readings have been grouped according to the season of the church year or according to the theme of the Gospel reading. Such a grouping provides a new context for interpretation, suggesting that the various readings be read not only for themselves but also as interpreting one another. The danger is that the specificity of each voice and its context will be muted. If one of the readings is focused on a female character or on a teaching or other text of special concern to women, an added danger is that this focus will be lost in a more general thematic study.

A History of Interpretation It is important also to recognize that no modern interpreter comes to the Bible directly. Rather, she or he is influenced (often without being aware of it) by centuries of interpretation whose results become nearly indistinguishable from the text itself. If women are to be able to arrive at a fresh hearing of the biblical traditions as they relate to women, an important part of the task is to be aware of that history of interpretation. Two aspects of that history of interpretation require special mention. One relates to passages such as the household codes of the New Testament (Eph. 5:21–6:9; Col. 3:18–4:1; 1 Pet. 2:18–3:7), which have been read as mandating the submission— and often subsequent abuse—of women, children, and other marginalized people. Regardless of the original intent of such passages, the history of their interpretation has included very hurtful readings, and even a short time listening to the stories of victims and survivors of domestic violence will make this clear. That history of (mis) interpretation and the damage it has caused must be taken into account. A second area where the history of interpretation is particularly relevant to women’s reading relates to the picture that is presented of Judaism. In particular, the representation of that history has often contrasted the worst from among the varied teachings concerned with women in later rabbinic writings with the best of the values and practices related to women attributed to Jesus. In fact, Jewish life in Jesus’ day probably mirrored the ambivalent picture of women’s roles in the teachings stemming from the Jesus movement. In both cases, women’s roles were, by modern standards, circumscribed—but not to the degree that the popular caricature of the silent, veiled Jewish woman shut away in her kitchen would suggest. While it seems that women were active among the followers of Jesus, their roles in that context were probably similar to those of their other Jewish sisters in the life of their families and local congregations.

Interpretation in a Global Context In addition to being attentive to the consequences of the history of interpretation, women from the dominant culture, class, and ethnic group—especially in the United States—need to be careful not to generalize our experience as that of all women. Again, the role of the social, historical, and economic context is crucial in shaping the questions one poses to the biblical material and in affecting what one can—and cannot—see in a text. Interpretation is therefore best done as a community project, where the voices of many different women—poor women and rich women; white women and women of color; single women, married women, divorced women, and widows;

6 When Women Interpret the Bible

women from one’s own country and from other parts of the world; lesbians, and bisexual, transgendered, and heterosexual women—can all be heard, if not in person, at least in their writings. With the involvement of many voices, the chorus of interpretation can begin to convey the rich texture of the biblical traditions themselves.

Gender, Language, and Interpretation A particular concern in women’s interpretation is the problem of language and gender. The so-called generic use of words like “man,” “brother,” and “mankind” and of masculine pronouns in traditional translations of the Bible obscures or even negates the participation of women in the communities whose stories are conveyed in the Bible. The translators of the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) worked strenuously and systematically to address these problems. Their translation, on which this commentary is principally based, uses words like “person,” “human being,” and “brothers and sisters” where the gender of a person is unspecified or where women as well as men are clearly being addressed. A theological issue of great importance in feminist interpretation that was not addressed by the translators of the NRSV is the problem of language about God. All pronouns referring to God in that translation are masculine singular. The explanation given is that these pronouns (or verb endings, as pronouns are often conveyed in Hebrew) are found in the original languages and that therefore the translation is accurate. In both Greek and Hebrew, however, all nouns have grammatical gender, which governs the gender of pronouns used to refer to the nouns. In that sense, those languages are like such modern languages as Spanish, where, for example, “table” (la mesa) is a feminine noun, requiring a feminine pronoun (ella, “she”). If one were translating from Spanish to English, however, where pronouns convey biological and not merely grammatical gender, the pronoun that refers to “table” would be translated with the neuter “it.” The same freedom prevails in rendering pronouns from Greek or Hebrew. Thus, the decision about which pronouns to use for God is one that cannot be made on grammatical grounds alone. It is a theological decision, and one whose resolution affects the way one views God. An interpretive decision that many women make is not to use any pronouns to refer to God (simply to repeat the word “God” or to use the unvocalized “G-d”), thus conveying the theological affirmation that God is beyond human categories of gender. A related but more complex problem is the use of pronouns and titles (such as “Lord”) to refer to Christ. In the Christian confession that Jesus of Nazareth is the Christ, clearly the reference is to a human male. That fact itself presents problems for many feminist interpreters, for whom the idea that women are ultimately dependent on a male for their relationship to God is unacceptable. Whether or not one views Jesus’ being a man as problematic for women, and whatever one might conclude about whether the Christ’s being a male was a historical necessity in the religious tradition into which he came, theologically the accent is on the humanity, not the maleness, of the Christ—according to the creeds, fully human and fully divine. Again, the problem for the interpreter is how to convey that affirmation within the limits of the English language, or how to identify the problem when the structure of the language does not allow it to be resolved.

Conclusion One point that is clear, given the complexity of the task of interpretation, is that one cannot simply read a text and “apply” it to one’s own context. For women in particular,

When Women Interpret the Bible 7

the passage from ancient text to contemporary context is much more dynamic and multidimensional. It comes into focus finally in a decision by the interpreter concerning what to do about a particular text one has struggled to understand. Interpretation itself is thus an active project, undertaken in a particular context, in dialogue with many partners both ancient and modern, and with the pastoral and theological purpose of hearing and sustaining a word of healing and liberation in a hurting world. Bibliography

Achtemeier, Paul J., ed. The Bible, Theology, and Feminist Approaches. Interpretation 42 (1988). Bach, Alice, ed. The Pleasure of Her Text: Feminist Readings of Biblical and Historical Texts. Philadelphia: Trinity Press Int., 1990. ———. Women in the Hebrew Bible: A Reader. New York: Routledge, 1998. Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Bellis, Alice Ogden. Helpmates, Harlots, and Heroes: Women’s Stories in the Hebrew Bible. 2nd ed. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Bird, Phyllis. Missing Persons and Mistaken Identities: Women and Gender in Ancient Israel. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Minneapolis: Fortress Press,1991. Brenner, Athalya, and Carole Fontaine, eds. Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies. New York: Routledge, 2001. Calvert-Koyzis, Nancy, and Heather Weir. Breaking Boundaries: Female Biblical Interpreters Who Challenged the Status Quo. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2010. ———. Strangely Familiar: Protofeminist Interpretations of Patriarchal Biblical Texts. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2009. Caron, Gerald, Aldina Da Silva, Olivette Genest, et al. Women Also Journeyed with Him: Feminist Perspectives on the Bible. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. Cheney, Emily. She Can Read: Feminist Reading Strategies for Biblical Narrative. Philadelphia: Trinity Press Int., 1996. Choi, Hee An, and Katheryn Pfisterer Darr, eds. Engaging the Bible: Critical Readings from Contemporary Women. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2006. Collins, Adela Yarbro, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship. Biblical Scholarship in North America 10. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985. Davies, Eryl W. The Dissenting Reader: Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003. Day, Linda, and Carolyn Pressler, eds. Engaging the Bible in a Gendered World: An Introduction to Feminist Biblical Interpretation, in Honor of Katharine Doob Sakenfeld. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. De Groot, Christiana, and Marion Ann Taylor, eds. Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Dube, Musa W. Other Ways of Reading: African Women and the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2001. ———. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000. Exum, J. Cheryl. Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Trinity Press Int., 1993. Fabella, Virginia, and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds. With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. ———, ed. Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary. New York: Crossroad, 1993.

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———, ed. Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Introduction. New York: Crossroad, 1993. ———. Wisdom Ways: Introducing Feminist Biblical Interpretation. New York: Orbis Books, 2001. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. Reading the Women of the Bible. New York: Schocken Books, 2004. ———. Studies in Bible and Feminist Criticism. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2006. Gench, Frances Taylor. Back to the Well: Women’s Encounters with Jesus in the Gospels. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004. Graham, Susan Lochrie, and Pamela Thimmes, eds. Escaping Eden: New Feminist Perspectives on the Bible. New York: New York University Press, 1999. Guest, Deryn. When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Feminist Hermeneutics. London: SCM, 2011. Jobling, J’Annine. Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Theological Context: Restless Readings. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Klein, Lillian R. From Deborah to Esther: Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000. Kraemer, Ross Shepard, and Mary Rose D’Angelo. Women and Christian Origins. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Laffey, Alice. An Introduction to the Old Testament: A Feminist Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1988. Lancaster, Sarah Heaner. Women and the Authority of Scripture: A Narrative Approach. Philadelphia: Trinity Press Int., 2002. Lapsley, Jacqueline. Whispering the Word: Hearing Women’s Stories in the Old Testament. Annotated edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2011. Levine, Amy-Jill. “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Meyers, Carol, Toni Craven, and Ross Shepard Kraemer, eds. Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. Feminist Revision and the Bible: The Unwritten Volume. Oxford: Blackwell, 1993. Pardes, Ilana. Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach. Boston: Harvard University Press, 1993. Pobee, John S., and Bärbel von Wartenberg-Potter, eds. New Eyes for Reading: Biblical and Theological Reflections by Women from the Third World. Bloomington, IN: Meyer-Stone Books, 1987. Polaski, Sandra Hack. A Feminist Introduction to Paul. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2005. Reid, Barbara A. Taking Up the Cross: New Testament Interpretation through Latina and Feminist Eyes. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Russell, Letty M., ed. Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985. Rutledge, David. Reading Marginally: Feminism, Deconstruction, and the Bible. Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers, 1992. Sakenfeld, Katharine Doob. Just Wives: Stories of Power and Survival in the Old Testament and Today. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003. Scholz, Susanne. Introducing the Women’s Hebrew Bible. London: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Schottroff, Luise. Let the Oppressed Go Free: Feminist Perspectives on the New Testament. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. Schottroff, Luise, Silvia Schroer, and Marie Theres Wacker. Feminist Interpretation: The Bible in Women’s Perspective. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. Schroer, Silvia, and Sophia Bietenhard. Feminist Interpretation of the Bible and the Hermeneutics of Liberation. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003.

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Selvidge, Marla J. Notorious Voices: Feminist Biblical Interpretation, 1500–1920. New York: Continuum, 1996. Spiegel, Celina, and Christina Buchmann, eds. Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1994. St. Clair, Raquel A. Call and Consequences: A Womanist Reading of Mark. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman’s Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective. Original publication: New York: European Publishing Co., 1895–98. Several modern editions available. Streete, Gail Corrington. The Strange Woman: Power and Sex in the Bible. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. Taylor, Marion Ann, and Agnes Choi, eds. Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters: A Historical and Biographical Guide. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Thurston, Bonnie B. Women in the New Testament: Questions and Commentary. New York: Crossroad, 1988. Tolbert, Mary Ann, ed. The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics. Semeia 28 (1983). Torjesen, Karen J. When Women Were Priests: Women’s Leadership in the Early Church and the Scandal of Their Subordination in the Rise of Christianity. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1993. Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978. ———. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. Vander Stichele, Caroline, and Todd Penner. Her Master’s Tools? Feminist and Postcolonial Engagements of Historical-critical Discourse. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2005. Weems, Renita. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women’s Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988. Wegner, Judith Romney. Chattel or Person? The Status of Women in the Mishnah. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Williams, Delores. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1995. Yee, Gale A. Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century Carol A. Newsom

In her groundbreaking book, published in 1993, The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, historian Gerda Lerner provocatively entitled chapter 7 “One Thousand Years of Feminist Biblical Criticism.” Can that be true? Can it be possible that feminist biblical criticism, which has seemed to be such a new phenomenon, actually has a history that is a thousand years old? The answer, of course, is both yes and no. It depends in part on how one chooses to define “feminist” and “biblical criticism.” But what is undeniable is that Lerner was able to identify repeated efforts by women from the medieval period onward to counter interpretations of the Bible that were used to diminish and limit their spheres of activity and authority and to find within the Bible bases for their own empowerment and authorization for leadership. This is a story that is still largely unknown, even to many feminist biblical critics of the twenty-first century. Indeed, one of the things that Lerner points out is that, although a number of interpretive strategies for dealing with problematic texts recur frequently within the works of feminist biblical interpreters, the interpreters are for the most part completely ignorant of the earlier work of women who had worked out these solutions, sometimes centuries previously. Women have been reinventing the wheel for age after age. Lerner interprets this fact negatively, as something that has held women back. Where men “stood on the shoulders of giants” who preceded them, women started from scratch every time. But perhaps there is another way of assessing this data. Perhaps we should rather use the analogy of science, where a single experimental result is worthless unless it can be replicated. What Lerner’s and others’ histories of women’s biblical interpretation have shown is that women who read the Bible critically and in light of their own experience repeatedly come to the same conclusions. It seems to matter little whether one is European or American, sixteenth century or nineteenth century, educated or self-taught. What is wrong with misogynistic texts and the misogynistic interpretation of texts reveals itself again and again to women. Lerner’s “thousand years” is, even as she acknowledges, probably not the entire time during which women have been active in interpreting biblical texts that have been used either to restrict or empower them. For as long as the Bible has been authoritative and employed in local contexts to organize religious activity, women have been engaging or resisting interpretations that affect their roles. Unfortunately, our sources for reconstructing these negotiations are very limited in every period, but they are particularly lacking for late antiquity and the early medieval period. We begin to get some sense of women as biblical interpreters only in the high Middle Ages, particularly in the writings of nuns, especially those who were highly placed as abbesses or other leaders within female monastic communities. 11

12 Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century

Marginalized from the religious hierarchy of the priesthood and from the emerging universities, these women often self-authorized their voices through mystical experiences. Of these women, the most significant for the history of feminist biblical interpretation is Hildegard of Bingen. As one would expect, she worked from within the normative interpretations of her time; but she found space for resistance and reinterpretation within those boundaries. Hildegard acknowledged that women were physically weaker because they were created from Adam’s flesh, whereas he was created out of the dust of the earth; but she turned that fact into a claim that, having been made from finer stuff, women were therefore suited to more skilled work, presumably spinning, weaving, and sewing. The image of the “garment” was not only used literally but in Hildegard’s work was a potent symbol for the incarnation, a role in which the woman Mary played an essential role. The hermeneutical strategy of noting the different raw materials of males and females becomes a staple of later feminist biblical interpretation. It is sometimes used in complementarian ways, as Hildegard primarily uses it, and sometimes as an argument for female superiority. Daringly, Hildegard draws a parallel between the woman Eve and Christ, noting that both are engendered not from semen but from human flesh—Adam’s and Mary’s. As for the fall, in contrast to most male theologians of the time, Hildegard places most of the blame upon Satan. But why did Satan approach Eve rather than Adam? Hildegard does describe Eve as “weaker” and “softer” than Adam, though she does not mean this in a moral sense but rather in a physical and dispositional sense. Thus it was fortunate that Satan targeted Eve, for “if Adam had sinned before Eve, that transgression would have been so grave and incorrigible, and man would have fallen into such great, unredeemable stubbornness, that he neither would nor could have been saved. Hence, because Eve transgressed first, the sin could more easily be undone, since she was weaker than the male” (cited in Newman, 114–15). Hildegard did defend women as fully made in the image of God, an issue of some dispute in the medieval period. Moreover, she found in the images of Eve, Mary, the Woman Clothed with the Sun in Revelation, and, above all, Wisdom, a symbol of the feminine aspect of the Divine. Indeed, a surprising number of interpretive insights that will be repeated throughout the centuries of women’s biblical interpretation are already presaged in the work of Hildegard of Bingen. Somewhat less is known about the biblical interpretive activity of Jewish women in the medieval period. The women most likely to be educated and trained as interpreters of the Bible and halakah (religious law) were the daughters of learned rabbis who had no sons. Such was the case with the most famous of the medieval rabbis, Rashi. His three daughters, Johabed, Miriam, and Rachel, were educated by their father. When he was too ill to write himself, they served as his secretaries. A tradition even exists that they were themselves the authors of the commentary on the Talmudic tractate Nedarim, but it appears impossible to verify or refute that tradition. Given the limited information about Rashi’s daughters, it is impossible to know if any of their interpretive work addressed the specific concerns of women. Renaissance Italy was also a context within which a small number of highly educated Jewish women were renowned for their scholarship, including Pomona da Modena of Ferrera (late fifteenth c.) and Fioretta (Bathsheba) da Modena (sixteenth c.), though they had no public roles. In a few cases, Jewish women have been identified as public teachers of Jewish law, the best known of whom is Mariam Shapira Luria, who was known by the honorific title Rabbanit Miriam. Although she is said to have taught in Padua, Italy, even the dates of her life are a matter of dispute (thirteenth to fifteenth c.), and there is no information about the content of her teaching. Better attested is Asenath, the wife of Rabbi Jacob Mizrahi (sixteenth and seventeenth c.). With her husband she lectured and maintained a yeshiva in northern Iraq. After his death, she continued to teach and lead the yeshiva, despite serious financial difficulties. A different model of the

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public role of a learned Jewish woman is that of the seventeenth-century Venetian Sara Copia Sullam, who, though fluent in Hebrew, was also educated in the classical traditions. A poet and patron of both Jewish and Christian intellectuals, she was attacked in a published pamphlet by the priest Baldassar Bonifaccio for allegedly denying the immortality of the soul. Her reply, written just two days later, is a brilliant display of immense learning, sharp wit, and relentless logic. That a Jewish woman should engage in public disputation about theological topics with a Catholic priest was a feat of considerable daring at a time when the Inquisition was still powerful. Sources for women’s interpretive activity also become more plentiful for the Christian women of the Renaissance and early modern periods. Even though the number of highly educated women was extremely small, what is remarkable is the sharpness of their focus on issues that we would identify as feminist. Perhaps the most remarkable of these women is Christine de Pizan (1365–ca. 1429). Superbly educated by her father in Paris, she was widowed early and supported her family by copying and illustrating books (in an all-female workshop) and by publishing her own writings. Her most famous book, The Book of the City of Ladies (1405), was a response to a genre of highly misogynistic literature (“the quarrel about women”) that emerged in the late medieval period attacking women’s minds, bodies, behaviors, and will. Christine de Pizan imagines a vision in which the ladies Reason, Rectitude, and Justice appear to her to tell the truth about women. As a woman trained in the classical sources that were so important in Renaissance France, much of her work focuses on exemplary pagan women. But she also lifts up as exemplary biblical women such as Miriam, Esther, Susanna, and Ruth, and the female martyrs of the early church, thus refuting the calumnies that had been leveled against women. Moreover, she engages certain classic theological “blame the woman” arguments in an artful way. In an innovative twist on the felix culpa argument (if no sin, then no salvation), she says this: “And if anyone would say that man was banished because of lady Eve, I tell you that he gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve when humanity was conjoined to the Godhead, which would never have taken place if Eve’s misdeed had not occurred” (de Pizan, 24; I.9.3). Thus the key moments of human history, being, and meaningfulness are mediated through women. Much of the attention of the learned women of the Renaissance was occupied by the “Eve question.” One of the most remarkable pieces of literature was produced by the superb humanist from Verona, Isotta Nogarola (1418–66). Apparently deriving from an actual correspondence carried out between her and the Venetian humanist Ludovica Foscarini, the “Dialogue on the Equal or Unequal Sin of Adam and Eve” (1451) is a literary disputation in which they debate whether Adam or Eve was the greater sinner. Throughout the debate Isotta refutes the notion that Eve was more to blame. To be sure, some of her arguments are based on Eve’s greater weakness and inconstancy. But for that very reason, she is the less culpable. Eve’s relative insignificance is turned to tactical advantage. Isotta works closely with the biblical text. Citing Genesis 3:17–19, she notes that God says to Adam, “You ate of the tree about which I commanded you [singular].” Thus, it was only Adam, and not Eve, who had been directly commanded not to eat from the tree. And if her action was wrongful, it was simply because she desired pleasure (Gen. 3:6), not because she wanted to “be like God.” Thus her sin was minor. Similarly, Isotta invokes 1 Corinthians 15:22, which says that it was on account of Adam (not Eve) that all die, and she concludes that if only Eve had eaten from the tree, then there would have been no lasting consequence (Lerner, 146–47). No one, I suspect, ever won an argument with Isotta Nogarola, no matter the fact that the conventions of the literary dialogue required a kind of even distribution of the argument as a means of conclusion. Whereas Isotta wrote from a position of privilege, a more traumatic situation was responsible for the writings of Arcangela Tarabotti (1604–52). Forced against her will to become a nun, because her father considered her to be the least marriageable of his

14 Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century

six daughters, she wrote a book entitled Paternal Tyranny. Hers was a fate shared by many young women whose families could not pay the high dowries required to marry their daughters. In her book she rereads the narratives of biblical women victimized by men in light of her own experience. Naturally, the story of Jephthah’s daughter has a critical place in her argument, although she represents Jephthah in a surprisingly favorable light; she treats him as an anguished victim of his unbreakable vow, in contrast to the voluntary violence inflicted upon Venetian daughters by their fathers, who forced them into monastic lives that they had not chosen. She also defended Eve as a victim of the devil’s deception, Dinah (Gen. 34) as a rape victim, not a seductress, and Bathsheba as also defenseless against the more powerful David. In another text that, unfortunately, has not been translated (Che de donne siano della specie degli uomini, 1651), she refuted a misogynist publication that argued that women were not human beings, citing biblical examples to counter the author’s contentions. Although France and Italy were centers of Renaissance humanism, early modern England also became a context for significant early feminist writing. Aemilia Lanyer (1569–1645) was herself Italian by background, the daughter of an Italian musician in the Tudor court. After her father’s death, she was fostered in the household of the Countess of Cumberland, who provided her with a good education. In 1611 she published a volume of poetry, the centerpiece of which was a long poem entitled Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, a meditation on the passion of Christ. While many of its ideas reflect common views of the time (including blaming the Jews for the death of Christ), the most radical aspect of her work is a section entitled “Eve’s Apology in Defense of Women.” Lanyer takes up the reference in Matthew 27:19, in which Pilate’s wife urges him not to execute Jesus on account of a troubling dream that she had, though Matthew does not indicate the content of that dream. Lanyer envisions the dream as one in which Pilate’s wife comes to understand the true nature of events in the garden of Eden and the relative culpability of Eve and Adam. The gist of Lanyer’s argument is that not only was Adam more at fault than Eve, but that whatever her role in the fall, it paled in significance in comparison to males’ guilt in the death of Christ. Eve’s motive in giving the fruit to Adam “was simply good, and [she] had no powre to see, / the after-coming harme did not appeare” (lines 763–65). She was simply deceived by the serpent. In contrast to Eve, “surely Adam can not be excusde / Her fault though great, yet hee was most too blame” (lines 777–78). After all, Adam, not Eve, had been the one God had directly commanded (lines 787–88). Moreover, if he was made as a superior being, why did he not tell Eve what he had heard from God? (lines 804–5). Her conclusion is that men are far more at fault, for they—and not women—were the ones who betrayed and crucified Jesus. “Her weakenesse did the Serpents words obay; / But you in malice Gods deare Sonne betray./ Whom, if unjustly you condemne to die, / Her sinne was small, to what you doe commit” (lines 815–18). The conclusion she draws from this analysis of women’s and men’s culpability has implications for the present order of things. “Then let us have our Libertie againe, / and challendge to your selves no Sov’raigntie; / You came not in the world without our paine, / Make that a barre against your crueltie; / Your fault beeing greater, why should you disdaine / Our beeing your equals, free from tyranny?” (lines 825–30). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Protestant Reformation had complex consequences for women as interpreters of the Bible. The core belief that every person has access to God and has the ability and obligation to interpret Scripture created pressures for the increased education of women as well as men, inasmuch as laity as well as clergy were to be engaged with the reading and interpretation of Scripture. But anxiety at the possibly unsettling effects of such changing roles for women also provoked reactions that attempted to curb women’s roles in teaching and preaching in most Protestant traditions. Although the same conflicting pressures were not present in Catholicism, this period also saw the development of teaching orders of educated nuns, such as the Ursulines, who were instrumental in establishing schools and

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colleges for girls, particularly in the period of the early settlement of North America by Europeans. Although little is known about feminist elements in the writings of Catholic women during this period, the history of Protestant women’s defense of their right to education and to interpret the Bible is better documented. One of the most extraordinary of these women is Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–78), a Dutch scholar who was exceptionally well educated in biblical languages, including Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Samaritan Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Ethiopic. She even prepared one of the earliest Ethiopic grammars, though it has unfortunately been lost. Her passion for languages was fueled by the sense that knowledge of the ancient languages was essential for proper biblical criticism. She defended her work in a composition entitled “Whether the Study of Letters Is Fitting to a Christian Woman.” Her answer, of course, was yes, though she restricted that role to unmarried women, so that such work did not interfere with domestic duties. But she defended the appropriateness of such learning on the basis of the equality of all before God. Despite her extraordinary renown as a woman of learning (the philosopher Descartes made a trip to Utrecht in 1640 to visit and converse with her), she later abandoned her work as a scholar and intellectual to devote herself to the religious life of a pietist sect. Increasingly, in Protestant circles women had to contend with traditional and entrenched patriarchal assumptions about women’s roles in relation to religious leadership, especially as these appeared to be enshrined in biblical texts, such as 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:11–12. The “left wing” of the Protestant Reformation (Anabaptists, Quakers) was generally more accepting of women’s leadership than the Calvinists and the Lutherans, but even here the case had to be made for women’s roles as preachers and teachers. Perhaps the most remarkable manifesto was that written by Margaret Askew Fell (1614–1702). Oftentimes referred to as the “Mother of Quakerism,” Margaret Fell was an early follower of George Fox, and after the death of her first husband, she married Fox. The early movement was often persecuted, and Margaret Fell was actually in prison when she wrote Womens Speaking Justified (1666). Fell’s arguments justifying women’s preaching refute the apparent Pauline opposition, contending that Paul’s comments to the Corinthian church applied only to that particular circumstance and were not a universal rule. Moreover, Fell notes Paul’s phrase “as also saith the law” as a further indication that such restrictions do not apply to the present community of grace. Not surprisingly, Fell privileges the creation account of Genesis 1:27 over that of Genesis 2–3, arguing that the subordination of women is itself a product of human misunderstanding, since “God the Father made no such difference in the first Creation, nor ever since between the Male and the Female” (Fell, 116). Men who oppose women’s full participation are attempting to “limit the Power and Spirit of the Lord Jesus, whose Spirit is poured upon all flesh, both Sons and Daughters, now in his Resurrection” (Fell, 121). Fell invokes the long sequence of prophetic female figures from the Hebrew Bible and the special role that women play in relation to Jesus’ teaching and as the first proclaimers of his resurrection. One expects, in a sense, to find feminist biblical interpretation in radical Protestant movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is perhaps more surprising to find it in a female English philosopher who even rates her own entry in the prestigious Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Mary Astell (1666–1731). Although philosophers know her for her work on metaphysics and epistemology, she also engaged in feminist biblical criticism in A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. She secures for women the right to interpret, because “Sense is a Portion that GOD Himself has been pleas’d to distribute to both Sexes with an Impartial Hand” (Astell, 78). Although she acknowledges the authority of Scripture, she mistrusts the history of male interpretation, for “Scripture is not always on their side who make parade of it, and thro’ their skill in Languages and the Tricks of the Schools, wrest it from its genuine sense to their own Inventions” (Astell, 74). Moreover, like Fell, she argues that historical

16 Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century

context is the proper horizon for interpreting Paul’s strictures on women’s participation. In her reflections on the social implications of her interpretation, however, Astell is less radical than Fell, justifying hierarchy in society, in the church, and in marriage: “We pretend not that Women shou’d teach in the Church, or usurp Authority where it is not allow’d them; permit us only to understand our own duty, and not be forc’d to take it upon trust from others” (Astell, 154). Though less bold than Fell, Astell’s work was nevertheless quite subversive of the structures of interpretive authority as they existed in the early eighteenth century. In Judaism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the tradition of learned women from rabbinical families appears to have continued, although for the most part these women are known only from secondhand reports rather than from their own writings, women such as Krendel Steinhardt and Gittele Eger of Germany as well as Dina Segal of Amsterdam and Sara Oser of Poland, both renowned as Hebrew poets. Some of these women combined talmudic learning with the learning of the Jewish enlightenment, as was the case of Tcharna Rosenthal, who corresponded extensively with the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. In the Hasidic movement, which was characterized by a strong charismatic element, women also seem to have made room for themselves as religious teachers. Given the nature of the sources, however, it has proven frustratingly difficult to distinguish between legend and historically verifiable information about many of these women. A case in point is that of Hannah Rachel Verbermacher (ca. 1806–88). The traditional sources concerning her life indicate that she functioned as a rebbe or religious teacher both in her native Ludmir (in modern Ukraine) and later in Palestine. Although she authorized her unconventional role on the basis of a quasi-mystical experience that left her with a “new and lofty” soul, she led a house of study where she taught both men and women. After her relocation to Jerusalem she appears to have had primarily female followers and led pilgrimages to the traditional site of the tomb of Rachel. While one may surmise that her teachings had some concern with the role and status of women, unfortunately, nothing is preserved about the content of what she taught. Perhaps more significant than the unique case of Hannah Verbermacher, however, was the practice of composing women’s prayers (Kthines) among seventeenth- to nineteenth-century European Jews. Although many of these prayers were composed by men for women, a number of important collections are clearly the work of women. Two of the most important authors of Kthines were Leah Horowitz (1680–1755) and Sarah bas Tovim (eighteenth c.). Although much of the piety reflected in these prayers was of a conventional nature, they tend to invoke the matriarchs and other women of the Bible in ways that are not represented in the synagogue liturgy and in men’s prayers. Moreover, they sometimes have implicitly feminist concerns to authorize women’s religious practices and to oppose misogynistic biblical interpretation. Horowitz argued for the distinctive importance and efficacy of women’s prayers in bringing redemption by citing a medieval commentary on Exodus 38:8 concerning the “ministering women at the door of the tent of meeting,” and contesting the understanding that women obtain merit only vicariously through their husbands and sons. Sarah bas Tovim’s Kthine for the women’s ritual of making candles for the living and the dead before the Day of Atonement contrasts instructively with a similar, contemporary one composed by a man for women. In Sarah’s composition, the sin that brings death into the world belongs to both Adam and Eve. In Simeon Frankfurt’s prayer, the sin is Eve’s alone. In Simeon’s composition the women merely pray for Eve’s atonement, whereas in Sarah’s the women’s prayer and candle making has the effect of awakening the souls of the dead and invoking Eve and Adam to plead before God for the well-being of the living. Thus Adam and Eve may “rectify the sin by which they brought death into the world” and so end death itself (Weissler, 144). Whereas Simeon Frankfurt’s prayer gives women a very passive role, Sarah bas

Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century 17

Tovim’s envisions women’s prayer as having actual effect in soliciting the agency of the souls of both male and female ancestors in effecting eschatological change. During the nineteenth century the spread of education and the growth of reform movements in Europe, Britain, and America engaged more women with the importance of biblical interpretation and gave them increasing resources with which to do it. Although most of the women who did biblical interpretation were working from within their faith traditions, the latter part of the nineteenth century saw the development of a critique of the Bible by women who dissociated themselves from religion. Much if not most of the religious women’s interpretation was not specifically feminist, but the recent publication and study of examples of a wide range of biblical interpretation by women gives us a better sense of larger context of women’s interpretation (see Taylor and Weir and selected essays in de Groot and Taylor). The focus of this article, however, is on the more explicitly feminist interpretation among women in Britain and the United States. For various reasons feminist biblical interpretation developed somewhat later in European countries and has not been as thoroughly studied (but see Wacker). Although most of the nineteenth-century feminist biblical interpreters who have been documented were Christians, the Jewish British novelist, poet, and religious writer Grace Aguilar (1816–47) used her considerable popularity as a writer to argue both for better religious education for Jewish women and for full civil rights for Jews within British society. In some respects her feminism seems of a rather timid sort, as she accepts the notion of women as both physically and mentally weaker than men and the idea that women’s special sphere is the domestic life. Her two-volume work The Women of Israel, however, recounts and interprets the lives of biblical women, as well as selected women from Jewish history, in ways that make a claim for their significance and full dignity. Writing as a Jew in a Christian culture that often denigrated the “Old Testament” for its supposed legalism in general and its denigration of women in particular, Aguilar explicitly challenged this view as a misinterpretation of the narratives and laws of the Hebrew Bible. In this manner she is an important forerunner of many women today whose interpretation of the Bible is self-consciously shaped not only by gender but also by ethnicity. The perspectives of social class also play a role in some of the nineteenthcentury feminist biblical interpreters. Josephine Butler (1828–1906) came from a high-­ranking and well-to-do British family that was deeply involved in social reform. Butler herself became a social activist, abolitionist, and advocate for political equality for women. Her work with female prostitutes and sexually exploited children in particular made her into a sharp critic of the cruelties and hypocrisies of Victorian society. In 1894 she published a collection of essays on various biblical texts, entitled The Lady of Shunem. In chapter 4 she recounts the story of Hagar and interprets it through the hermeneutical lens of the victimized prostitutes whose lives she had come to understand. In passionate language she excoriates the behavior of Abraham and Sarah toward Hagar, directly comparing them to the self-righteous “respectable” society of her own day, which refused to see its role in abusing and despising the outcast “fallen” woman. Butler also took to task the commentators who refused to exercise ordinary moral judgment in interpreting the narrative and instead defended the actions of Abraham and Sarah. In the United States, also, involvement in social reform was often connected with feminist consciousness. Many women who became engaged in the abolitionist movement discovered that the fight against slavery led to the struggle for the full freedom of women in society. Just as the Bible was a key text for those who argued for and against the institution of slavery, it became a key text in the struggle for women’s rights. Sarah Moore Grimké (1792–1873) is the most prominent and influential example. After her sister was abusively criticized for her antislavery speeches in 1837, Sarah composed a series of “Letters on the Province of Women” for the New England Spectator, later

18 Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century

republished as Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women. A significant aspect of the book was its biblical interpretation. Though not acquainted with the emerging discipline of critical biblical studies, Grimké nevertheless intuitively employed many of its approaches. As Selvidge observes, she uses “what might be considered proto-historical, literary, textual, and canonical criticisms” (Selvidge, 48). Not surprisingly, she bases her claim for the equality of the sexes in the creation account of Genesis 1. The “fall” is a fall from an original ideal state of affairs but not a fall from equality, and the woman’s subjection to her husband in Genesis 3:16 is not to be translated as a divine command (“you shall . . .”) but is merely a prophecy (“you will . . .”). Similarly, she argues from biblical examples from both testaments for equality in marriage. Where she did encounter texts that appeared to state the opposite (Eph. 5:22; Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1), she did not hesitate to argue either that the texts were culturally conditioned or simply that “they directly contravene the laws of God, as given in various parts of the Bible” (Grimké, 96). Educated white women like Grimké had greater opportunity to have their words preserved in published documents than did women of color, who were forbidden to be educated if they were slaves or, even if they were free persons, had little access to education. There were exceptions, however, such as the highly educated Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964), who, like Grimké, interpreted the Bible in terms of its ideals rather than its isolated dicta, ideals that, she argued, grew and ripened over time. Among these biblical ideals was “a rule and guide for the estimation of woman, as an equal, as a helper, as a friend, and as a sacred charge to be sheltered and cared for” (Cooper, 18), rather than exploited. If anything, a critical hermeneutic based on race and gender was even more explicit among the often illiterate or informally educated female itinerant preachers of the nineteenth century who were active in the African American community. Sojourner Truth (1797?–1883), for example, preferred to have the Bible read to her by a child rather than an adult, since adults tended to interpret the text to her, and she wanted to hear the text without commentary. “In that way she was enabled to see what her own mind could make out of the record, and that, she said, was what she wanted, and not what others thought it to mean. She wished to compare the teachings of the Bible with the witness within her” (Gilbert, 88). Moreover, in her remarkable speech at the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in 1854, “Ain’t I a Woman?” she issued the bold challenge, “I have heard the bible and have learned that Eve caused man to sin. Well, if woman upset the world, do give her a chance to set it right side up again” (Gilbert, 118). During the nineteenth century a number of the women in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) tradition asserted their right to preach, often to be met with deep hostility from the established male clergy, both because they were women and also because they espoused a Holiness theology at a time when the AME Church was distancing itself from the more charismatic and perfectionist aspects of the Holiness movement. Several of these women composed autobiographies detailing their experiences (Elizabeth [last name not known], Jarena Lee, Rebecca Cox Jackson, Julia A. J. Foote, and Amanda Berry Smith). Often having little formal education, their claims of authority to preach were generally based on visionary and mystical experiences rather than educational credentials. While the autobiographies do not often indicate how they interpreted the Bible, one anecdote from Amanda Smith illustrates the role Scripture played in empowering them. Somehow, I always had a fear of white people . . . a kind of fear because they were white, and were there, and I was black and was here! But that morning on Green Street, as I stood on my feet trembling, I heard these words distinctly . . . ‘There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female, for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.’ . . . And as I looked at white people that

Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century 19

I had always been afraid of, now they looked so small. The great mountain had become a mole-hill. (cited in Humez, “My Spirit Eye,” 134)

Phoebe Palmer (1807–74), the highly influential white Holiness movement preacher, author, and social reformer, distanced herself from the more radical women’s equality movements such as Grimké was associated with. Nevertheless, she argued forcefully for the right of women to preach and exert leadership in religious institutions. Given her Methodist and Holiness context, and not relying on charismatic experience as a warrant in the way that the AME women did, she understood that a case for the biblical authorization for women’s preaching was essential. According to Palmer, “the Scriptural way of arriving at right Bible conclusions is by comparing Scripture with Scripture” (Palmer, 50). Thus, armed with an exhaustive set of examples of women who exercised prophetic and evangelistic roles in both Old and New Testaments, Palmer was able to neutralize many of the passages often cited against women. Like Grimké, she also invoked the influence of ancient custom rather than divine intent to account for some of the restrictions placed on women in the New Testament epistles. Although not formally educated, as many of the other nineteenth-century feminists were, Catherine Booth (1829–90), who together with William Booth founded the Salvation Army, also published a defense of women’s preaching and ministry entitled Female Teaching. Her approach to the problematic passages in the Bible was similar to that of Grimké and Palmer, though there are some distinctive interpretive elements. Booth acknowledged the “subjection” of the woman in Genesis 3 as a punishment but argued that it was subjection only to her husband, not to men in general, and even that was mitigated by Christ. Moreover, the subjection did not apply to unmarried women and widows who had no husbands. Regarding the passages in 1 Corinthians 14:34–35 and 1 Timothy 2:12–13 that seem to forbid women to speak in church, she argued that the word translated “to speak” actually means “to chatter” or “to prattle” and so was only restricting disruptive, unseemly speech. Moreover, she observed that the words are directed only to the women in Corinth. With this interpretation and with a parade of biblical examples of women who in fact exercised authority, Booth made the case for women’s public ministries. “You will never be allowed to do this. You will never be allowed to stand in a pulpit nor to preach in a church, and certainly you can never be ordained” (Selvidge, 105). One might think those were the words of a man, denying the right to preach to a woman. They were, rather, the words of Lucy Stone, suffragist and feminist, to her friend and later sister-in law Antoinette Louise Brown Blackwell (1825–1921). Such was the incredulity that met the ambition of Antoinette Brown Blackwell. Today, even for women whose denominations do not ordain women, it is difficult to understand the unimaginableness of women’s ordination in nineteenth-century America. But Antoinette Brown Blackwell did indeed become the first woman in America to receive ordination. Her career was difficult, however. Even at the highly progressive Oberlin College, where she studied, she was encouraged to pursue the theological studies program but was denied her degree and ordination because she was female. Oberlin did, however, publish her scholarly article analyzing the passages that seemed to prohibit ordination of women (1 Cor. 14:34–35 and 1 Tim. 2:12–13) in the Oberlin Quarterly Review 4 (1849): 358–73. Here, for the first time in history, one finds a woman engaging in biblical exegesis for feminist purposes in a scholarly journal. Her particular arguments are actually similar to those that had been anticipated by her nonscholarly predecessors, though she was apparently unaware of them. In her careful study she raises the question of whether the injunctions were intended for women of this particular church and so were not universally intended. She analyzes the vocabulary and compares it to how the critical words are used elsewhere in Pauline letters; she

20 Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century

considers the literary context of the passages and the cultural contexts of the ancient church. Through very careful analysis she concludes that the only speech by women that is being prohibited is speech “which was not profitable to the church.” Thus there is no biblical bar to women’s speaking and teaching within the church. Modern feminists may not fully agree with Antoinette Brown Blackwell’s analysis, arguing rather that these texts represent a genuinely misogynistic cultural backlash against the new scope for women’s participation that early Christian communities enabled. But what is extraordinary about Blackwell’s article is that she used the tools of the then-current biblical scholarship to make a very credible case for women’s preaching and teaching authority, within the hermeneutical frameworks that were normative at that time. Despite Oberlin’s ambivalent treatment of her, she was called to a church in South Butler, New York, and ordained in 1853, though she served only for a short time. She continued to be a significant lecturer, writer, and activist. She lived long enough to ordain two other women and to cast her vote in a public election in 1920, after the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Frances Willard (1839–98), college professor, dean, and president and national leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, was also a spirited critic of the arbitrary ways in which male ecclesial hierarchies had interpreted and employed passages in the Bible to deny women equality and to restrict their roles in religious leadership. In Woman in the Pulpit she mocked the absurd selectiveness of such interpretations, while other scriptural statements less congenial to the male interpreters were ignored or interpreted more generously, concluding that “the plain wayfaring woman cannot help concluding that exegesis, thus conducted, is one of the most timeserving and man-made of all sciences, and one of the most misleading of all arts” (Willard, 23). She argued instead for exegesis that acknowledges the changing cultural norms between antiquity and the present, relegating those passages restricting and subjugating women to the same status as those that took polygamy and slavery as accepted practices. She included a chart in which the few passages from the Pauline epistles restricting women’s activities and roles are refuted by other verses in both Old and New Testaments and even by other passages in the Pauline literature itself (Willard, 27–28). As radical as women like Catherine Booth, Phoebe Palmer, Antoinette Brown Blackwell, and Frances Willard seemed to much of the public, their positions and arguments were endorsed by a progressive wing of Christianity. Frances Willard even prefaced her book with letters of endorsement from prominent male clergy. But in the latter part of the nineteenth century a wing of the feminist movement developed that no longer wished to be identified with orthodox religious institutions and that found these feminists to be far too conservative. There were two branches of this development. On the one hand were those feminists who were engaged by what was known as “New Thought,” an alternative religious orientation that was engaged by Eastern religions (especially Hinduism and Buddhism), Jewish Kabbalah, theosophy, and spiritualism. On the other hand were those feminists who identified with the “Free Thought” movement, a more rationalistic approach to religion, and who, though often not dissociating themselves entirely from religious identification, became fierce critics of the deleterious effects of organized religion in general and of Christianity in particular. If one sees in these movements the precursors of “New Age” religions and of the “New Atheism” respectively, one would not be entirely wrong, though there are many twists and turns to the story of religious and antireligious radicalism. Although New Age religions and the New Atheism tend to be fairly separate phenomena in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, in the late nineteenth century the lines between New Thought and Free Thought were not entirely clear. The confluence and conflict between these two radical strands of feminism can be seen, however, in the book that figures as the controversial capstone to feminist biblical interpretation in the nineteenth century: Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible.

Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century 21

Although Stanton (1815–1902) had invoked the Bible for progressive purposes in her early antislavery writings, in her later years she became convinced that Christianity and its biblical basis were the cornerstone of women’s unjust subordination. She found common cause with English secularist feminist critics such as Annie Besant (1847–1933), a British feminist who wrote in her essay “Woman’s Position According to the Bible” that “Happily for women, the influence of the bible is becoming feebler and feebler as education and heresy make their beneficent way among men. The chains bound round her by the Bible are being broken by Freethought, and soon she shall walk upright and unfettered in the sunshine, the friend, the helper, the lover, but nevermore the slave of man” (Besant, 8). Some of the same sharp critique of Christian tradition that Stanton was embracing was later articulated by Matilda Joslyn Gage (1826–93) in her book Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate, published in 1893. It was a scathing history of the mistreatment of women and the violent and corrupt practices of the “patriarchate,” her term for male dominance. Although Gage never entirely severed her connection with the church, she was blunt about the extent of the Bible’s devaluing of women. As a New Thought as well as a Free Thought feminist, one of her strategies was to treat the Bible as only one among many sources of religious knowledge, such as postbiblical gnostic writings, Kabbalah, Eastern religious texts, spiritualism, and scientific inquiry. Already in the 1880s Stanton was frustrated by the increasingly religious opposition to women’s emancipation. A visit by the English feminist Frances Lord prompted Stanton to share with her, “the subject so near my heart . . . the Woman’s Bible” (Stanton, Eighty Years, 390; Kern, 99). In 1886 Stanton and Lord advertised a joint committee of British and American women who would undertake both a new translation of the Scriptures and a new commentary “for the benefit of women anxious to face their Biblical foe” (cited in Kern, 100). In the end, what Stanton and her collaborators produced was not that ambitious. It was, rather, a selective commentary on those passages of the Bible that dealt with women. But for all that, it was a bombshell. Their ambitious project met with decided disinclination to participate from feminists across the political spectrum. Their stated reasons were various. Some, such as Antoinette Brown Blackwell, said that they had not sufficiently kept up their scholarship. Others demurred on grounds that they thought that the biblical teachings, rightly understood, could still support women’s claims to equal treatment. Yet others were simply concerned that publishing such an incendiary volume could have a negative impact on the politics of the push for women’s suffrage (a prediction that turned out to be quite correct). So Stanton could persuade only a small number of fellow feminists to join her in the enterprise of producing The Woman’s Bible. The “committee” never actually met together, and more than half of the two volumes was produced by Stanton herself. Even so, the divergent perspectives between the New Thought feminists and the Free Thought feminists who contributed to the project produced a lively disagreement as to whether the Bible was to be simply exposed and condemned for its negative impact on the lives of women, or whether it could be redeemed through an esoteric interpretation of its spiritual meaning. The Woman’s Bible was a product from the far left end of the feminist spectrum in late-nineteenth-century culture. Not surprisingly, the two volumes of The Woman’s Bible (1895, 1898) touched off a firestorm of reaction. Conservative fury was certainly anticipated. More surprising was the rejection it elicited from supporters of women’s rights across the political spectrum. It was denounced by the National American Woman Suffrage Association and even dismissed by Stanton’s longtime friend Susan B. Anthony as “flippant and superficial” (Kern, 180). It was a document simply too radical and too incendiary for its time, when more feminists identified themselves with a position that has been called “progressive orthodoxy” (Kern, 191).

22 Women as Biblical Interpreters before the Twentieth Century

The violent reaction against The Woman’s Bible led to a significant eclipse of Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s reputation in the fight for women’s equality. For nearly a century her leading role in the early feminist movement was displaced, and her more culturally acceptable friend Susan B. Anthony was cast instead as the dominant figure. After the initial controversy and the renewed infamy it received during the fight over the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, granting women’s right to vote, The Woman’s Bible was simply forgotten. It was only decades later, in what is known as the second wave of feminism, that attention was drawn back to this volume. In 1974, Jane T. Walker of Tacoma, Washington, made available to the Seattle-based Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion the text of The Woman’s Bible that she had inherited from her great-aunt, Mary Elizabeth Meech, inscribed by Stanton herself. The reprint of Stanton’s work, sponsored by the Coalition, coincided with the emergence of a new movement for feminist interpretation of the Bible. This time, it touched a chord. Even women who would not agree with Stanton’s scathing critiques of the Bible or her colleagues’ esoteric reinterpretations of biblical texts found the freedom with which these women challenged received interpretations of the Bible to be intoxicating. The radicalness of Stanton and her colleagues was seen as highly congenial to the new ways in which women were defining themselves in relation to religious traditions in the last quarter of the twentieth century. This is not to say, of course, that feminist biblical interpretation found a common voice. If anything is the case, it is the opposite. The contests between the “left” and “right” wings of the feminist movement have reemerged in feminist biblical interpretation, as evangelicals, mainstream, progressive, and postreligious feminists have articulated different positions. More significantly, issues that nineteenth-century feminists were unaware of have emerged as critical issues. All too often, Christian feminist biblical interpretation of the nineteenth century was marked by an uncritical racism and anti-Judaism. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, feminists have attempted to confront these issues. These have not been easy discussions. The earlier assumption that “gender” is a comprehensive category that can encompass all women has become more problematic. It has become more evident that gender, while central, is one of many critical elements in identity and in interpretive stance; other elements include ethnicity, class, culture, nationality, and many other things that resist classification. Nevertheless, the future of biblical interpretation, however it may develop, in whatever contexts, can no longer proceed without making gender a central category of its hermeneutical work. Bibliography

de Groot, Christiana, and Marion Ann Taylor. Recovering Nineteenth-Century Women Interpreters of the Bible. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2007. Deutsch, Nathaniel. The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schüssler. Searching the Scriptures, vol. 1, A Feminist Introduction. New York: Crossroad, 1993. Humez, Jean M. “‘My Spirit Eye’: Some Functions of Spiritual and Visionary Experience in the Lives of Five Black Women Preachers, 1810–1880.” In Women and the Structure of Society, edited by B. J. Harris and J. K. McNamara, 129–43. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1984. Kern, Kathi. Mrs. Stanton’s Bible. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001. Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages to Eighteen-seventy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

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Selvidge, Marla J. Notorious Voices: Feminist Biblical Interpretation, 1500–1920. New York: Continuum, 1996. Taylor, Marion Ann, ed. Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2012. Taylor, Marion Ann, and Heather Weir, eds. Let Her Speak for Herself: NineteenthCentury Women Writing on the Women of Genesis. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006. Thickstun, Margaret Olofson. “‘This was a Woman that taught’: Feminist Scriptural Exegesis in the Seventeenth Century.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 21 (1992): 149–58. Wacker, Marie-Theres. “The German-Speaking Countries until World War II.” In Feminist Interpretation: The Bible in Women’s Perspective, edited by Luise Schottroff, Silvia Schroer, and Marie-Theres Wacker, 16–28. Translated by M. and B. Rumscheidt. Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 1998. Weissler, Chava. Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1998. Zolty, Shoshana. And All Your Children Shall Be Learned: Women and the Study of the Torah in Jewish Law and History. New York: Aronson, 1993. Primary Sources

Note: Many of these works are now available online through various digital initiatives. Aguilar, Grace. The Women of Israel. 2 vols. New York: Appleton, 1851. Astell, Mary. A Serious Proposal to the Ladies. New York: Source Book Press, 1970. ———. The First English Feminist: Reflections upon Marriage and Other Writings. Edited by B. Hill. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986. Besant, Annie. Woman’s Position according to the Bible. London: Printed by A. Besant and C. Bradlaugh, 1885. Booth, Catherine Mumford. Female Teaching. London: G. J. Stevenson, 1861. Brown, Antoinette L. “Exegesis of 1 Corinthians XIV., 34, 35; and 1 Timothy II., 11, 12.” Oberlin Quarterly Review 4 (1849): 358–73. Butler, Josephine Elizabeth Grey. The Lady of Shunem: Papers on Religious Subjects. London: H. Marshall, 1894. Cooper, Anna Julia. A Voice from the South. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Originally published Xenia, OH: Aldine Printing House, 1892. de Pizan, Christine. The Book of the City of Ladies. Translated by E. J. Richards. Rev. ed. New York: Persea Books, 1998. Fell, Margaret. “Womens Speaking Justified.” In First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578–1799, edited by M. Ferguson. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985. Gage, Matilda Joslyn. Woman, Church and State: A Historical Account of the Status of Woman through the Christian Ages: With Reminiscences of the Matriarchate. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2002. Originally published Chicago: C. H. Kerr, 1893. Gilbert, Olive. Narrative of Sojourner Truth. Edited by M. Washington. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. Grimké, Sarah Moore. Letters on the Equality of the Sexes, and Other Essays. Edited by E. A. Bartlett. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988. Lanyer, Aemilia. The Poems of Aemilia Lanyer: Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum. Edited by S. Woods. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Palmer, Phoebe. Promise of the Father. Boston: Degen, 1859. Tarabotti, Arcangela. Paternal Tyranny. Edited and translated by L. Panizza. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

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Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815–1897. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993. Reprint of 1898 edition. ———. The Woman’s Bible. Seattle, WA: Coalition Task Force on Women and Religion, 1974. Reprint of 1895–98 edition. Sullam, Sara Copia. “Letter to Baldassar Bonifaccio.” In Four Centuries of Jewish Women’s Spirituality: A Sourcebook, edited by Ellen M. Umansky and Dianne Ashton. Lebanon, NH: Brandeis University Press, 2009. van Schurman, Anna Maria. Choosing the Better Part: Anna Maria van Schurman (1607–1678). Edited by M. De Baar et al.; translated by L. Richards. Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996. Willard, Frances. Woman in the Pulpit. Boston: F. Lothrop, 1888.

Hebrew Bible/Old Testament

GENESIS Susan Niditch

Introduction of Genesis; but in approaching this material with special interest in passages pertaining to women and gender, one must ask, Whose stories are these?

Contents, Composition, and Context The group of narrative and genealogical traditions called the book of Genesis describes the origin of the cosmos and its first inhabitants and unfolds the life stories of the earliest ancestors of ancient Israel. In this way the creation of the people Israel is set within the context of the very creation of the universe itself. To read Genesis is to immerse oneself in the worldview and values of a distant and foreign culture, of a people who believed in a deity, YHWH God, imagined as parent, river spirit, traveling man, and warrior, communicating with the ancestors through dream visions and waking revelations. To read Genesis is to encounter a people who considered the land of Canaan an eternally promised possession, a people who regularly petitioned and appeased their God with the blood sacrifice of animals and who could imagine this God demanding as sacrificial offering a mother’s only son (Gen. 22) and the father’s submitting to the demand. Genesis portrays a people whose women do not appear to exercise power in the public realm but who hold considerable power in the private realm of household and children. Theirs is a different world and a different way of imagining and ordering reality from our own; yet they too love spouses and children, resent siblings, mourn the loss of kin, fear and face deprivation in the form of famine and infertility, attempt to take stock of the comprehensible and make sense of the incomprehensible features of their existence. All of these very human concerns and emotions emerge in the Israelite literature

Questions of History and Historicity The culture of Israel was never monolithic. The history of Israel spans thousands of years and can be divided into three periods: the time before the monarchy (pre-1000 BCE); the time when kings ruled (1000 BCE–586 BCE); and postmonarchic times (586 BCE on). Given the major changes that took place in social structure over this long expanse of time, one must be careful not to generalize about “Israelite culture” or “the life of the Israelite woman” or “Israelite attitudes to women.” Biblical texts reveal considerable variation in the ways Israelites lived and expressed their beliefs. Nevertheless, it is not easy to track changing Israelite attitudes via apparent differences in the texts of the Bible. The Bible’s own story provides a chronology that seems to match the historical periods sketched broadly above. In premonarchic times are the matriarchs (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah) and patriarchs (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph), the exodus (the time of Moses, Aaron, and Miriam), and the age of the judges (including the warrior heroines Deborah and Jael). In monarchic times are Saul, David and Bathsheba, Solomon, the building of the great temple in Jerusalem, the eventual establishment of the northern and southern kingdoms, the socalled Josianic reform of the seventh century, and the age of classical prophecy. This period 27

28 GENESIS

ends with the Babylonian conquest and the destruction of the temple. The postmonarchic period includes the rebuilding of the temple, the last of the biblical prophets, and the work of Ezra and Nehemiah. Within the Bible’s own chronology Genesis is clearly set in premonarchic times, but “real” history and biblical narration are not as neatly matched as they may seem at first reading. The stories now found in Genesis do not necessarily stem from premonarchic authors, nor do they necessarily contain information about the way of life of Israelites who lived before 1000 BCE. Questions about the Genesis of Genesis Many of the stories in Genesis are very old, perhaps as old as storytelling itself. The essential pattern of world creation in Genesis 6–9, for example, is represented in the lore of many cultures and times: from a watery flood emerge or reemerge a world and its inhabitants. Long before the existence of the people Israel, ancient Near Eastern narrators preserved several versions of a tale about the great flood with its favored human survivor(s), very much like the biblical tale of Noah. The story of Noah was no doubt a popular tale in ancient Israel, told by various tellers with their own nuances and variations long before it was first set down in writing. Nor did this writer have the last word, for the biblical tale has been transmitted, elaborated, and edited by subsequent writers until it reached the form in which we now read it. In exploring the text of Genesis one must be aware that the ancient stories were once told in a variety of ways, oral and written. Theories about the Sources behind Genesis Over the last hundred years, biblical scholarship has spoken of separable “sources” or “documents” out of which the whole cloth of Genesis has been woven. The sources are called J (the Yahwist, or Jahwist, source), E (the Elohist source), and P (the Priestly source). J is characterized by the use of the name YHWH for God, by a downto-earth style, and by a theology that allows God a certain closeness to the human realm; for example, God walks in the garden (Gen. 3:8). The Elohist source calls God the more generic Elohim (Hebrew for “god”), supposedly reserving the special name YHWH until the revelation to Moses in Exodus 3; in E, God communicates more indirectly, through mediating dreams and angels. The P source employs the divine epithet

El Shaddai (often translated “God Almighty”) in Genesis; God emerges in this source as an even more transcendent being. The interests of P are genealogy, ritual matters, and laws of purity. J, E, and P sources are said to be layered throughout the first four books of the Bible. J is dated by scholars to the tenth or ninth century BCE of the southern or Judahite monarchy, E to the ninth or eighth century BCE of the northern or Israelite monarchy, and P to the sixth century BCE, the exilic period. Thus Yahwist (J) tales in Genesis should be expected to reflect the worldview of a Davidic courtly writer, and so on. This theory has been modified over the years and recently has been strongly criticized, though in some form it still reigns supreme among theories about the composition of Genesis. The often too neat, line-by-line assignments of verses and larger literary units of Genesis to J, E, and P are not convincing, though variations in style, content, literary form, and message do confirm that various authors, worldviews, and life settings lie behind Genesis. Some of these differences may point to sources of different date, while others may point to authors from different sectors of Israelite society: aristocratic versus popular authors, urban versus rural ones, men versus women. To distinguish the various authors and origins of biblical texts is a complex matter, but one especially important for a feminist enterprise asking whether the Hebrew Bible reveals something about attitudes toward women in ancient Israel and/or about their actual lives. The Patriarchal Age Do the stories of the matriarchs and patriarchs actually tell us about life in pre-1000-BCE Israel, even if the final form of the tales is from a later date? The tales of Genesis portray specific marriage practices; customs of inheritance and the rights of the firstborn; work roles of men and women; and attitudes toward male and female children, toward family and sexual ethics, and toward widows, barren wives, and other marginal females such as prostitutes. Can one connect such information with the considerable extrabiblical information about life in the non-Israelite ancient Near East of the second millennium BCE (e.g., from the ancient Mesopotamian cities of Mari or Nuzi), as some scholars have done, in order to reconstruct a world of early Israelite women? Can one connect the view of the workaday roles of men and women implied in God’s punishing words to man and

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woman in Genesis 3 with archaeological and ethnographic reconstructions of life in the pioneer highland culture of premonarchic Israel, as Carol Meyers attempts to do? Or should one assume that if the texts were written down and shaped during the tenth to sixth centuries BCE, they do not contain reliable information about the lives of women from an earlier, premonarchic period? Some scholars think that the evidence to reconstruct any history of Israel before 1250 BCE is lacking and refuse to speak of this so-called patriarchal age. Others remain confident that even though Genesis was written down in the first millennium BCE, it nevertheless does reflect the lives and attitudes of the second millennium BCE, of a people who lived by farming and herding, without kings or elaborate forms of government, whose lives and work centered on family and flocks. Given these debates and difficulties, how should one read and understand the tales of the lives of the women of Genesis? Rather than beginning with assumptions about the historical reliability of a text and the date when it was written down, one should ask: What sort of literature is this in terms of its style, structure, content, and messages? What sort of audience is this meaningful to? What are its authors’ apparent worldview and concerns, especially those pertaining to women’s issues broadly defined? A range of authors and worldviews should emerge, providing a reflection of the richness and complexity of the tradition in its relationship to women.

Traditional Literature, Genesis, and Women’s Tales Much of biblical literature is traditional literature. Recurring patterns in language, imagery, plot, and theme resonate in the ancient Israelite literary tradition. In the Hebrew Scriptures there are certain ways to describe God’s victories,

recurring reasons for a patriarch’s initial lack of children, ways in which the long-awaited conceptions are announced, favorite plots about the success of the underdog or the escape from seemingly powerful enemies. There are ways to frame a genealogy, to compose a lament, to describe a receiving of divine revelation. When Israelite authors set about presenting a piece of the tradition, they were at home in these conventions and creatively adapted them in accordance with their own perception of aesthetics and their understanding of political and theological verity. Through time, from author to author and editor to editor, various sorts of traditional patterns recur, giving the biblical tradition a certain unity even within its great variety. In exploring the women of Genesis and issues of gender, one must pay attention to the book’s traditional style. Recurrences in language and literary form also imply recurrences in essential messages and meanings; changes in form may mark varying messages. Out of these patterns emerge symbolic maps in which woman is a key feature. Paying attention to these similarities and differences gives rise to questions: Why does the creation myth of Genesis 1, which echoes the basic plot of creation found in the Mesopotamian myth Enuma Elish, not depict the watery chaos as female, even though Isaiah 51:9–11 does preserve this motif? Why are so many tales of women in Genesis tales about tricksters who employ deception to improve their marginal status? Why are wives regularly found by wells? Why are the important mothers barren? Many of the tales in Genesis deal with matters of home, family, and children. These are issues typical of tales from other cultures considered by ethnographers to be women’s stories. Is it possible that many of the Genesis tales were popularly told among women? Can we speak of qualities of male voice and female voice in biblical portrayals? Finally, in what ways are men and women gendered by biblical authors?

Comment Creating and Ordering the World (Gen. 1–11) Creation is not merely the initial coming into being of the universe and its life forms; it includes also the ordering and continuous

unfolding of the world. All of Genesis 1–11 is about the creation of the cosmos, including the more obvious creation accounts in Genesis 1 and 2, the Eden narrative in chapter 3, the tale of fratricide in chapter 4, the flood story of chapters 6–9, the story of the tower of Babel in

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chapter 11, and the genealogies in chapters 5, 10, and 11, which help to weave together Genesis 1–11 and form the transition to the stories of the mothers and fathers of Israel in Genesis 12–50. The Creation of Woman in Genesis 1 Woman first appears in the elegant creation account of Genesis 1. Repeating frame language neatly reveals the origins and ordering of the universe with its topography, its solar system, and its rich variety of plant and animal life. God creates by the word—“God said, ‘Let there be’ . . . and it was so”—building day by day—“there was evening and there was morning, the xth day”—until the sixth and final day, on which God makes humankind, a mirror of the divine image itself. And of this creation “in the image of God,” it is said “male and female he created them.” Without establishing relative rank or worth of the genders, the spinner of this creation tale indicates that humankind is found in two varieties, the male and the female, and this humanity in its complementarity is a reflection of the Deity. For feminist readers of Scriptures, no more interesting and telegraphic comment exists on the nature of being human and on the nature of God. The male aspect and the female aspect implicitly are part of the first human and a reflection of the Creator. Scholars often attribute Genesis 1 to a Priestly writer (P) because of its image of a transcendent, all-powerful deity, its almost genealogical style, and its explanation of the origin of the Sabbath. If so, this Priestly writer’s views of men and women differ from the much more male-centered Priestly writers of Leviticus, for whom a woman’s menstruation and childbearing are sources of pollution, separating her from the sacred realm. She regularly lacks the pure status necessary to participate fully in Israelite ritual life. In reading the Hebrew Scriptures as a narrative whole, including both Genesis 1:27 and Leviticus, one may receive the message that the genders were meant to be equal at the beginning. In Genesis 1 the Hebrew term for “deep waters” (tehom) is related to the name of the mother goddess Tiamat in the Mesopotamian creation myth Enuma Elish. Tiamat, the salt waters of chaos, is killed and split like a mussel by the young god Marduk, who builds the world out of her carcass. The Israelite author who has provided the opening chapter of the Bible wants

none of the uncertainty of this battle motif. His account of creation by God’s word is as solid and inevitable as his style. If his account lacks a matriarchal goddess, it also does not present the creation of the world as dependent on her death. The Becoming of Woman in Genesis 2–3 Written in an earthier style than Genesis 1, the tale of Genesis 2–3, with its less-than-­ complete outline of God’s creations (2:4b–25), its homespun reflections on marriage (2:23– 24), and its God who walks in the garden (3:8) and fears humans’ potential divinity (3:22), has been more influential than Genesis 1:27 in shaping and justifying attitudes toward and the treatment of women in Western tradition. This tale of creation has two parts: the emergence of the cosmos out of the mist of chaos and the emergence of “real life” from the ideal of paradise. Man is the first of God’s creations in Genesis 2 (2:7). His formation is from the dust of the earth (’adamah). He is thus Adam/ Earthling. The creation of other living beings (2:18) is motivated by God’s concern that “it is not good that the man should be alone.” But none of the birds or beasts is deemed a suitable counterpart for the man (2:20). So, out of man’s own rib, God forms woman. The sayings in 2:23 and 2:24 comment positively on the closeness of the conjugal bond. Man and woman are parts of a whole, anticipating the genealogical patterning of Genesis. Men and women will unite and have children, the male children leaving to join wives and form new families. The conjugal couple is the foundation of social and cultural relationships for the writers of Genesis. Even when the world is temporarily subsumed by the renewed chaos of the flood in the tale of Noah (Gen. 6–9), social order remains afloat on the ark in the form of Noah and his wife, his sons and their wives (6:18). This generative, cultureaffirming process, however, does not actually begin until Genesis 4:1, for 2:25 declares that man and woman are naked and not ashamed. That is, they are not aware of their sexual differences; their sexuality is yet to be discovered and expressed. Jewish and Christian traditions postdating the Hebrew Bible and a long history of Western scholarship have viewed woman’s creation in Genesis 2 as secondary and derivative—evidence of her lower status. The tale explaining the departure from Eden into a real world of

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work, birth, and death in Genesis 3 is taken to be an even stronger indictment of woman as the gullible, unworthy partner who let loose sin and death. Her biological function as conceiver and bearer of children is perceived as confirmation of her fall, a punishment shared by all women who come after her. In fact, Genesis 3 has been misunderstood. Certainly, like Pandora in the comparable Greek cosmogonic tradition, the curious woman is a linchpin in the ongoing process of world ordering. She, like Lot’s wife, dares to disobey a command not to use all her sensory capacities in a particular situation—to taste or to look—and this curiosity about forbidden fruit is often in Mediterranean tradition associated with the female. On the other hand, in the lore of all cultures interdictions such as Genesis 2:17 (“But of the tree . . .”) exist to be disobeyed by the tales’ protagonists. That is what makes the story. Eve, as she is named in 3:20, is the protagonist, not her husband. This is an important point, as is the realization that to be the curious one, the seeker of knowledge, the tester of limits, is to be quintessentially human—to evidence traits of many of the culture-bringing heroes and heroines of Genesis (see Trible 1978). Reading Genesis 3 Like Genesis 1 and Genesis 2, Genesis 3 is about a movement from a fixed and unchanging world to a new, nonstatic order. Genesis 1 and 2 describe the way in which a sterile world is replaced by one teeming with life. In Genesis 3 the change is from a well-provisioned, closely controlled world lacking discernment, social roles, and sexual status to a world in which man and woman relate to each other sexually and according to social roles, a world in which they work hard and know the difference between good and evil. The world after Eden is clearly one of birth and death, whereas the garden had been an in-between world, in which no human had eaten from the tree of life but in which no one had yet given birth. In a wonderful tale about a trickster snake, a woman who believes it, and a rather passive, even comical man, biblical writers comment on the inevitability of reality as they perceived it, wistfully presenting an image of an easier, smoother life. Woman, the one who will house life within her, helps to generate this new, active, challenging life beyond Eden. All too often readers come to Genesis weighed down by Augustine’s or Milton’s inter-

pretation of the story. What if one notices that the snake does not lie to the woman but speaks the truth when it says that the consequence of eating from the forbidden tree is gaining the capacity to distinguish good from evil, a godlike power that the divinity jealously guards (compare the snake’s words at 3:5 with God’s words at 3:22)? The snake, like the Greek giant Prometheus, who was said to have given fire to humankind, is a trickster, a character having the capacity to transform situations and overturn the status quo. The trickster has less power than the great gods but enough mischief and nerve to shake up the cosmos and alter it forever. The woman believes the snake and, in an important pun on a root meaning “to see” and “to comprehend,” the narrator says that she sees the tree is good to look at/good for making one wise (3:6). She is no easy prey for a seducing demon, as later tradition represents her, but a conscious actor choosing knowledge. Together with the snake, she is a bringer of culture. The man, on the other hand, is utterly passive. The woman gives him the fruit, and he eats as if he were a baby (3:6). With the eating come the marks of social life and culture: knowledge of good and evil, clothing that defines and conceals, and gender roles. The woman is to be the bearer of children, the Mother of all life. The husband is to work the ground, which will now only grudgingly yield its fruits. A clear hierarchy is established: woman and her offspring over the clever snake, who is now reduced to a mere dust-eating reptile, and man over woman. The status-establishing punishments meted out to man and woman and the social roles they are assigned do reflect the author’s male-oriented worldview, but no weighty accusation of “original sin” brought about by woman is found in the text. That is a later interpretation from authors with different theologies and worldviews. What the author of Genesis does reveal is that man and woman share responsibility for the alteration of their status. The man’s self-defense, like his passive act of disobedience, portrays him in a childlike manner. When accused by God of defying his order, the man says comically, “The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate” (3:12). Whose fault is it? The woman’s? God’s? And yet the woman initiates the act. It is she who first dares to eat of God’s tree, to consume the fruit of the Divine, thereby becoming, as the rabbis say of human beings, like the angels

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in having the capacity to discriminate and like the animals who eat, fornicate, defecate, and die. The woman herself comes to have the most earthy and the most divine of roles, conceiving, containing, and nurturing new life. She is an especially appropriate link between life in God’s garden and life in the thornier world to which all of us are consigned. “The Daughters of Men” (Gen. 6:1–4) Women—“the daughters of men”—are also involved in another, briefer creation tale in Genesis 6:1–4 that marks the passage from ideal to reality. Here the women themselves are the fruit attracting the divine “sons of God,” members of God’s entourage in ancient Israelite tradition. In this story, sexual intercourse rather than eating is the way that the border between God’s realm and the realm of human beings is breached. Surely the two actions are symbolic equivalents in a pattern that leads to limits on the quality of human existence, in this case to the length of life allowed mortals (Gen. 6:3). In this brief mythological snippet, as in the fuller tale of Genesis 3, the female is integral to the passage to reality, to the onset of historical time and human culture, the days of the “heroes that were of old, warriors of renown” (6:4). Women in the Genealogies One of the markers of time in the creation account of Genesis 1–11 is the genealogy. Women are absent from the lists of begetters and begotten in Genesis 4:17–26; 5:1–32; and 10:1–32, with one interesting exception. In 4:19, a descendant of Cain named Lamech takes two wives, Adah and Zillah. The women are each given credit for birthing sons who found groups responsible for some aspect of human civilization (e.g., dwelling in tents, raising cattle, playing music, forging instruments of bronze and iron). By giving birth, the women further the march of human culture. One daughter is also mentioned by name: Naamah (4:22). In 4:23 Lamech addresses to his wives what appears to be a war boast about his defeat of an enemy. Why does he address this enigmatic, taunting victory cry to his wives? Does he want to impress them with his prowess? Does he wish to encourage them to compose a woman’s victory song of their own for him (see Judg. 5; Exod. 15:20–21)? Unnamed daughters are mentioned along with sons in the list of Genesis 11:10–32. Two women who are important in the genealogy

of Israel’s ancestors are mentioned by name. Sarai (Sarah; see 17:15), the wife of Abram (Abraham; see 17:5), is introduced in 11:29, along with the comment that she was barren. The genealogist of chapter 11 also mentions the name of Abram’s brother’s wife, Milcah. Her children, and notably her granddaughter Rebekah who will be Isaac’s wife, are listed in Genesis 22:20–23.

The Mothers and Fathers of Israel (Gen. 12–50) Commentaries on Genesis 12–50 generally focus on Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and Joseph, ancestral heroes of Israel. Their life stories are built from traditional elements such as the hero’s unusual birth, his stormy relationship with his brothers, youthful adventures often including marriage, the constant presence of a divine helper, and the hero’s aging and finally his death. Theologically, Genesis 12–50 is treated as the foundation story of the patriarchal religion of Israel. It includes important scenes of covenant making with God, altar building, divine promises of land and descendants, and tests of the patriarchs’ faith. Genesis 12–36 and 38 differ significantly from the Joseph tale in chapters 37, 39–50 in style, setting, and orientation. The former’s popular, down-to-earth style contrasts with the latter’s more elaborate style. The context of the former is family, flocks, and sojourning in flight from famine. The characters are socially marginal and often confront authorities via trickery and deception. Joseph, on the other hand, sold into slavery by his jealous, scheming brothers, leaves this pastoral world, eventually rising to become the leading bureaucrat of Egypt, a member of the establishment itself. He and his brothers, all sons of Israel, are later reunited in Egypt, setting the stage for the next book in the Bible, Exodus. Often ignored, the patterns of women’s lives in Genesis are every bit as interesting and important as those of the men, for the women both reflect and help to create Israel. Tales in Genesis 12–15, moreover, reveal attitudes to masculinities and femininities and raise questions about gendered voices behind the narratives. The Matriarchs (Gen. 12–36; 38) Like the tales of Genesis 1–11, with their recurring patterns of world ordering, the tales

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of the matriarchs have recurring narrative patterns typical of traditional literature. In Genesis 12–36 and 38, certain motifs mark the life history of the women at the turning points of youth, marriage, and parenthood. The women often appear by wells or springs and are often soon to become wives (Rebekah, Rachel) or mothers (Hagar); they are often barren women soon to become mothers (Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel). If not barren, the women have other problems associated with sexuality (Dinah, Leah) or fertility (Tamar) that render them marginal unless or until the problem is solved. For those who are to have children, predictions about the birth and lives of their children are received in divinely sent annunciations. Finally, many of the women engage in acts of trickery or deception in order to further the careers of their sons or husbands (Sarah: 12:10–20; Rebekah: chap. 27; Rachel: 31:19, 33–35; Tamar: chap. 38). These recurring motifs or combinations of them tend to emphasize certain themes: (1) the role of the woman as wife and mother in the private rather than the public realm; (2) the frequent position of women intermediaries who link groups of men through marriage alliances; (3) the marginal status of women who are prevented from fulfilling the roles defined for women in Genesis 3 (e.g., the barren women, the raped Dinah, the abandoned Hagar, the childless widow Tamar, and the unloved Leah). On one level, much of this defining appears to be done from men’s perspectives. The tales of marriage, for example, really have to do with relationships between the men, be it Abraham and his kinfolk in Mesopotamia, or Jacob and Rebekah’s brother Laban, or Abraham and Pharaoh. So in Genesis 34, a tale of would-be marital relations gone awry, the central issue is less the victimization of Dinah, who had been the potential link between the sons of Hamor and the sons of Jacob, than the relationships between the men. These relationships have to do with face-saving, feuding, and vengeance, all causes of warfare in prestate, decentralized societies. It is also a male point of view that regards woman with her potent sources of “uncleanness” (see Gen. 31:34–35) as a danger, and a male point of view that places her under man’s control after eating from the tree in Genesis 3. It is logical to assume that men—male priests and a lengthy scribal tradition—are responsible for incorporating into law and custom notions of what the “proper” place of women is, namely,

to be a young virgin in the father’s home or a child-producing, sexually faithful wife in her husband’s. Thus, all women who do not—or who do not appear to—fulfill these roles fall between the cracks of the social structure. They are either rehabilitated by other laws preserved by men or by the male God’s intervention, or they fade away. On the other hand, the God of Genesis, with whom the important value judgment lies, is partial to marginal people of both genders. On some level that God is the god of the tricksters who use deception to deal with the power establishment, whether the establishment is the elders of one’s family or non-Israelites. Although their positions are circumscribed by the men around them, Sarah, Rebekah, Tamar, Rachel, and Leah exercise great power over husbands, father-in-law, and father in situations involving the family, children, and sexuality. It is, moreover, the women who are the critical ancestors for the proper continuation of the Israelites. Isaac must come from Sarah and no other woman. Abraham’s seed is not enough to guarantee his status. Similarly, Joseph must be Rachel’s son. The blessing and the inheritance go to Jacob, Rebekah’s favorite son, not Esau, her husband’s favorite. The women’s wishes and God’s wishes are one in this respect. Finally, a number of the women are portrayed as active tricksters who, like Eve, alter the rules, men’s rules. Would not women authors and audiences take special pleasure in Rebekah’s fooling her dotty old husband or in Rachel’s using men’s attitudes to menstruation to deceive her father Laban, or in Tamar’s more directly and daringly using her sexuality to obtain sons through Judah? Like Adam, the men in many of the women’s stories of Genesis are bumbling, passive, and ineffectual. By the same token, the very effective and smooth founding hero Jacob might well be described as womanish (see Gen. 27 below), hinting at another of the ways in which femininity or a kind of female voice finds status and empowerment.

Wives at Wells and Water (Gen. 16; 24; 29). The associations in literature between fertility and water are ancient intuitive acknowledgments of our watery origins on earth and in our mothers’ wombs, and of the source of life upon which we continue to depend. Four scenes involving water, women, and marriage or childbirth are found in Genesis: 16:7–14;

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21:8–21 (Hagar); 24:10–27 (Rebekah); and 29:1–12 (Rachel). In the latter two scenes, men from Abraham’s kin come to Mesopotamia to seek a wife from among his kin. In Genesis 24, Abraham’s senior servant is sent to seek a wife for Abraham’s son Isaac. In Genesis 29:1–12, Jacob seeks a wife for himself from his mother’s family (see 24:15) after fleeing from the brother whose birthright he has stolen (see below on Rebekah and Gen. 27). The man meets the wifeto-be at the watering hole, is welcomed by her family, and negotiates terms for the marriage. In each case wives are found by wells, but there are important differences. The appearance of Rebekah and her hospitable words are a sign requested of God by the emissary so that he might recognize the right wife for Abraham’s son. God’s control is certain and appears in the repetitious language of traditional literature. Rebekah herself is described as a beautiful, untouched young woman quick to serve and nurture and quick to agree to fulfilling her role in the divine plan (24:58). In a thematic echo of Genesis 2:24, Isaac loves her as soon as he sees her, for she is said to be an emotional replacement for his mother, Sarah, who had died (24:67). In Genesis 29:1–12, Jacob meets the woman, his cousin Rachel, at the well and shows his physical strength by rolling the heavy stone from the well and watering his uncle Laban’s flock (cf. Exod. 2:15–17). Jacob weeps when he greets Rachel, in ritualized behavior typical of kinship reunions in tribal cultures. The woman is acquired in exchange for seven years’ work, but her elder and less attractive sister Leah is substituted on the wedding night by their father, Laban, himself a trickster. Jacob ends up with two wives, indentured to his father-inlaw for seven more years. Jacob’s tale of acquiring a wife is the more humorous of the two, as trickster confronts trickster. In both accounts, however, the emphasis on marriage within the kinship group is very strong. The central issue is relationships between male kin, mediated by the women, who are in effect items of exchange, extremely valuable commodities, as precious as the water with which they are associated, but commodities nevertheless. From a literary perspective, the themes of marriage within the group and of woman as mediator are emphasized, issues that were important to the stories’ authors and audiences. Can more be learned, however, from these scenes about real-life social behavior in ancient Israel?

It has been suggested that Rebekah’s interaction with her family in 24:57–58 indicates that the Israelite woman was asked her permission before marriage agreements were concluded. The story indicates, however, that Rebekah is merely agreeing to leave quickly rather than spend ten days with her family (24:55). No formal law involving the woman’s permission appears to be involved here. The mention of a ten-day good-bye period is a reminder that the young woman’s family and she might never see one another again. Provision of bride-price certainly seems customary in 24:53 and in 29:18, as it is in countless cultures. Was it customary, as Laban claims in his defense of the substitution of Leah for Rachel, to marry off the elder daughter before the younger, or is he, as a trickster, good at finding excuses for acts of deception? It has also been suggested that the tale of Jacob gives evidence of matrilocal customs among Israel’s ancestors, that is, living with the wife’s family. Jacob’s living in Laban’s household is, however, considered irregular by the tradition as we now have it. Things are put right only when he returns to Israel. What does seem clear from the accounts about Rebekah and Rachel is that marriage within the group is an important means of safeguarding group identity and that cross-cousin marriage, a means of maintaining in-group marriage relations in many traditional cultures, may well have been an actual custom in some period in ancient Israel.

Hagar: Mothering a Hero (Gen. 16; 21). The story of Hagar leads to a wider discussion of the major themes of this study: the barrenness of the patriarch’s wives, the annunciation scenes, and the wives’ positions as mother of the patriarch of the next generation. Hagar’s status is contingent on that of her mistress, Sarah, the wife of Abraham. Sarah bears no children and gives Hagar, her Egyptian maid, to Abraham as a wife (16:3), hoping she will become a surrogate mother for Sarah (16:2). The custom of having children through another woman (note the expression “that she may bear upon my knees,” 30:3) is found also in the tale of barren Rachel. It is probably safe to assume that surrogate motherhood was an actual custom in the ancient Near East and would have been eminently possible in a world in which slavery was practiced and persons’ sexual services could be donated by their masters or mistresses. Surrogate motherhood allowed a barren woman

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to regularize her status in a world in which children were a woman’s status and in which childlessness was regarded as a virtual sign of divine disfavor (see 16:2; 30:1–2; and below also on Gen. 38). Childless wives were humiliated and taunted by co-wives (Gen. 16:4). The tension in the scene between Jacob and Rachel in 30:1–2 is fraught with desperate realism, as she cries, “Give me children, or I shall die!” And he responds bitterly, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” It is always the woman in this culture who is perceived as the cause of infertility—so Sarah, so Rebekah, so Rachel. By the same token, virtually no hero worth his salt in Genesis is born under circumstances that are ordinary for his mother. It is the unusual and often initially infertile women who have special births. It is their sons who count in the ongoing tradition. These women mother nations and receive special communications about the child to be born. They often engineer the births, thereby showing considerable power in matters related to fertility and sexuality. Hagar is not a barren woman, but a victim sensing a new power on conceiving Abraham’s child. She now finds her mistress “to be of less worth [literally, “lighter-weight”] in her eyes” (16:4). Sarah knows she has lost status and complains to her husband, who tells her that the maid is hers to do with as she wishes, for this is a woman’s world of competition concerning children. It is in this light that we understand the scene involving Jacob and Leah in 30:14–16. One of the sons of Leah, the fertile wife of trickery whom Jacob had never loved, finds some mandrakes, plants that were believed to have the capacity to produce fertility. Rachel, desperate for children, begs Leah for the plants, and she grudgingly agrees, in exchange for a night with their husband Jacob. Upon returning from the fields, Jacob is told by Leah that he is with her that night, having been “hired” with her son’s mandrakes. Without a comment he goes to her. He obeys in this world of women, as Abraham defers to Sarah in the matter of Hagar. Sarah afflicts Hagar, who flees to the wilderness. There by a spring of water God appears to her in the first of the annunciation scenes in Genesis. She is told about the son to be born and, like Abraham, is promised a multitude of descendants and declares that she has seen God. After the son Ishmael (“God will hear”) is born, Abraham and Sarah are visited by three

men, manifestations of God, who announce that a son will be born to them. Sarah has the nerve to laugh at the unlikely news (18:12), for she and her husband are old and past childbearing. In these scenes the women see God and confront God; they demand and receive some answers. Similarly, when Rebekah, who finally becomes pregnant after her husband petitions God, feels the children moving around violently (literally, “crushing one another”) within her, she inquires of God and is told about the feuding twins, Jacob and Esau. She is made the keeper of the information that the elder, Esau, will serve Jacob, the younger, and she actively sets out to fulfill God’s prediction (25:21–23). Hagar receives a second prediction from God about her son Ishmael in a setting of wilderness and water. Sarah sees Ishmael playing with Isaac (21:9) and demands that Abraham banish Hagar and her son. “The son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (21:10). Her words shiver with contempt for the upstarts, the upstarts that she herself had created. Abraham greatly disapproves, for his son Ishmael’s sake, but again the voice of Sarah, the matriarch, and the voice of God are one. Abraham’s wishes in the matter of inheritance are unimportant and misguided, as Isaac’s wishes will be once he has sons. This passage is a difficult one in biblical ethics. Abraham cares not at all about the maid he has bedded, and Sarah is contemptuous of mother and child and would expose them to death. The author works hard to rationalize and justify the emotions and actions of Abraham and Sarah (21:12–13). Yet while reading this story, one has the distinct feeling it is being told from Hagar and Ishmael’s point of view. One is moved by the portrait of the mother who places the child apart because she cannot bear to watch him die; the weeping mother (21:16) and the divinely protected boy ultimately rescued by God and promised a great future; the blessed child and mother, for whom God opens a well of water in the wilderness so that they might drink and live. The motif of the exposed, endangered, and delivered child is as common in the stories of great heroes as that of their mothers’ unusual, difficult conceptions. Compare Moses’ origins (Exod. 2:1–10) and the tale of the binding of Isaac (Gen. 22), anticipated and paralleled by the child Ishmael’s experience. The motif occurs also in Greek narratives about Oedipus and about the Persian king Cyrus. Embedded

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in the Israelite tale of origins is thus another related people’s story of its hero’s youth, and on some level Abraham and Sarah are its necessary villains. God is the god of those deserted in the wilderness, of those on the fringes, who are usually in the Hebrew Scriptures not Ishmaelites but Israelites, whose tales are those of the tricksters to follow.

Tricksters, Israelites, and Women and Gender One of the biblical authors’ favorite narrative patterns is that of the trickster. Israelites tend to portray their ancestors, and thereby to imagine themselves, as underdogs, as people outside the establishment who achieve success in roundabout, irregular ways. One of the ways marginals confront those in power and achieve their goals is through deception or trickery. The improvement in their status may be only temporary, for to be a trickster is to be of unstable status, to be involved in transformation and change. In Genesis, tricksters are found among Israelites sojourning in foreign lands, among younger sons who would inherit, and among women. The Wife/Sister Tales (Gen. 12:10–20; 20:1– 18; 26:1–17). Three times in Genesis, when the patriarch and his wife are “sojourning”— traveling as resident aliens—in a foreign land, the ruler of that country is told that the wife is a sister of the patriarch. In two versions he takes her to be his own woman, and each time the couple is eventually found out. Despite their similarities, the three stories possess quite different nuances and voices. It is assumed in all three versions that a brother has more power to exchange his sister than a husband his wife. The patriarchs are portrayed as assuming that the foreigners would not hesitate to kill a husband in order to get a woman, but that they would engage in normal marital exchanges with a brother. The story that makes the most sense in a crass, male-centered way is the version in 12:10–20, where it is clear that Abram has more to gain as the brother of an unattached, protected woman than as the husband of a “used” one. In Genesis 12:10–20, Sarai and Abram are cotricksters. Abram asks Sarai to participate with him in the deception that she is his sister, praising her beauty and using coaxing language (12:13 begins “Please say you are . . .”; my trans.). She is actually taken as wife by the

dupe, Pharaoh, who showers wealth on the supposed brother-in-law. God, who has other plans, interrupts the trickery with a plague, and Pharaoh, now alerted, dismisses the con artists, who nevertheless leave with their newfound goods intact. This is no woman-affirming tale. Sarai is an exchange item to be traded for wealth. She is shown as accepting this role, as are all the women in Genesis. She and Abram play out their roles in a particular social structure, but do so as marginals. Facing famine in their own land, they flee to Egypt, where they have insecure status. There they use deception to improve their situation at the expense of those who have authority over them. In Genesis 20 and 26 the gender roles are as clearly marked. These tales are again about underdogs but not necessarily about tricksters. In the version in chapter 20 the author apparently worries about the ethics of the situation. He reveals that Sarah is Abraham’s half sister. As in some ancient Near Eastern dynasties, marriage between half siblings is not taboo. The deception is not really a deception after all. Authority is not duped but respected, for the ruler, Abimelech, never actually has relations with Sarah and is portrayed as morally outraged at the thought of taking another man’s wife. Sarah’s role is more sedate in this version, as perhaps befits a more aristocratic but still male-oriented tale. In Genesis 26, the role of the wife Rebekah is even more circumscribed. Isaac, out of fear that the ruler will take Rebekah and kill him, says without consulting her that Rebekah is his sister. But before anything happens, Abimelech observes them “sporting” as man and wife and forgoes any interest in the woman. The three stories differ in their concern for piety and propriety. In Genesis 26, God tightly controls the action and protects the patriarch and his wife so that a good story never develops. Neither Isaac nor Rebekah plays an interesting role. In Genesis 20, a morally upright patriarch and equally blameless ruler relate on a somewhat more equal footing, the woman being a passive character. Only Genesis 12 reveals earthy tricksters who use the woman’s sexuality as a resource to dupe a monarch. It belongs, in this way, to a fund of comparable male-centered folk literature.

Rebekah the Trickster (Gen. 27). In Genesis 27, the woman herself is the trickster who formulates the plan and succeeds, moving the men around her like chess pieces. Lest the

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reader think that here one finally encounters a more liberated woman, beware that again success is gained through the symbolic counterpart of sex—food. Moreover, the status in question is not that of the woman but of her son. Nevertheless, within the confines and assumptions of her male-dominated world, Rebekah is very good at what she does. Indeed, she determines and directs the course of the clan and in doing so is the one who knows and fulfills what God wants. Genesis 27 begins with a father’s intimate words to his elder and favorite son. Isaac, now blind and elderly, tells Esau that he may die at any time. He asks Esau, the hunter, to catch game and make him the food he loves that he may bless him before his death. Someone has overheard the father’s request and his promise. Rebekah, the wife and mother, who has received special information from God that her younger son Jacob, and not Esau, is meant to receive the eldest’s rights and blessing, prepares to actualize that revelation. The theological message gains power from the inevitable pattern of the traditional tale. God’s choice, like love itself, is often serendipitous and inscrutable. The youngest son in folktales inherits even though the patterns of custom and social structure would have it otherwise. Why, as in the case of Sarah and Isaac, is it the woman who knows he is the chosen one? And why are the husbands and fathers left out of the inner circle in the matter of their children? Why are they passive or blind—literally as well as figuratively? One explanation is that children have to do with the private realm of home and hearth, woman’s world. Rebekah’s role as Jacob’s mother is strongly emphasized by repetitions in language in 27:6, 8, 11, 13, 14. It is equally true, as in the creation literature, that women are sources of culture. Here they become the means by which a particular Israelite tradition is established and continued, not merely by giving birth but, in the case of Rebekah, by furthering the career of one of her sons, who does indeed become Israel. From a feminist perspective, one might take pleasure in the fact that Rebekah is so important and in the realization that God’s preference for underdogs here extends to women and to the man who is more his mother’s son than his father’s. Rebekah thoroughly controls the action in Genesis 27. After overhearing her husband’s words to Esau, she repeats them to Jacob and instructs him very much like the wisdom figure

of Proverbs, “Now therefore, my son, obey my word as I command you” (27:8; cf. Prov. 8:32). She tells Jacob to bring her kids from the flock so she can prepare delicacies for Isaac. Jacob is to bring them to Isaac so he can eat and bless his son. The repetitious language of bringing, eating food, and blessing is economical in the traditional literary style. The repeated words or phrases are used to emphasize key themes. Through deception and disguise, Rebekah and Jacob will be Isaac’s providers, so that Jacob obtains from Isaac the reciprocal blessing of fullness, fertility, and security (27:27–29). Jacob hesitates, but not out of ethical compunction, for he is as good a trickster as his mother. Had he not earlier tricked Esau to sell his birthright for a bowl of red food (25:29–34)? He hesitates out of fear that he might be found out and receive a curse at Isaac’s hands rather than a blessing. If the old man should touch him, Jacob’s smoothness would give him away (27:11). Rebekah boldly offers to take the curse upon herself should things go awry, for curses are real, as are blessings. They can be stolen or transferred. His mother prepares a disguise for Jacob, using Esau’s clothes, which smell of the fields, and the woolly skin of the kids to cover his smooth hands and neck (27:15–16). The trickery works and Jacob receives his father’s blessing. Finally Rebekah, again alert to the plans of all the men in her household, engineers Jacob’s safe passage away from the vengeance of Esau (27:41–28:5). Rebekah’s wisdom is a wisdom of women that involves listening closely (recall Sarah in 18:10) and working behind the scenes to accomplish goals. It is a vicarious power that achieves success for oneself through the success of male children, a power symbolically grounded in the preparation and serving of food. It involves as well a willingness to sacrifice oneself (“Let your curse be on me,” 27:13) if necessary for the sake of the son. Such is woman’s power in a man’s world, and it is not the sort of empowerment to which most modern women aspire. It is the power of those not in authority. The woman in ancient Israelite literature who would succeed almost must be a trickster, must follow the path typical of the marginalized. Yet so clever is this trickster, so strong and sure, so completely superior in wisdom to the men around her, that she seems to be the creation of a woman storyteller, one who is part of a male-centered world and is not in open rebellion against it, but

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who nevertheless subverts its rules indirectly by making Rebekah a trickster heroine, for this is also a woman’s power in a man’s world, a power of mockery, humor, and deception. One might even go further and suggest that the biblical writer grapples with masculinities and femininities and reveals in the tales of Rebecca, Isaac, Jacob and Esau a distinct preference for the archetypally feminine.

“My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man and I Am a Smooth Man.” The ancestor hero of Israel, Jacob, father of the Israelites, is smooth, whereas the founding father of the neighboring, related, Semitic-speaking people, the Edomites, is hairy. Particular cultural messages are encoded in such images. Esau emerges first from the womb, and his hair is an immediate issue: And “emerge did the first red/all of him like a garment of hair” (Gen. 25:25, my trans.). The concept of Esau’s chronological primacy is critical as are images of “redness” and “hair.” To be the firstborn within the social structure of a patrilineal society implies inheriting the father’s status, lands, and clan leadership. This implicit leadership is accompanied by an appearance of ruddiness. The term for “red” is related to the term for the earth, a ruddy substance. Redness thus suggests earthiness, fecundity, and humanity. It is positive for a young man to be called ruddy, as is the young hero David. When we add to these considerations the generally positive views of having lots of hair in the tales of the Hebrew Bible—for example, Absalom’s pride in his hair and others’ initial impression of him, and especially the heroic, manly dimensions implied by tales of Samson and other hairy men such as Elijah—we must conclude that at the outset Esau looks like a promising patriarch. This view is reinforced by the description of Jacob’s birth and the way the boys are as they grow up. Jacob emerges grasping the heel of his younger brother; he is second born. The older brother grows to be “a man knowledgeable in the hunt, a man of the open spaces” (25:27, my trans.). Imagery of nature, skill, and manly endeavors dominate. Jacob grows up to be what the Hebrew calls ’ish tam, one who dwells in tents. The term tam comes from a root meaning “perfect” or “complete” and has been translated with a range of adjectives including “well-behaved,” “quiet,” and “upright/honest.” We might suggest “acculturated” or “domesticated.” Instead of hunting,

Jacob is pictured at the homestead making stew. The he-man Esau returns from the wilds hungry. Bigger than life, speaking in the language of heroic exaggeration, he declares he will die without food, and the younger brother sells him stew in exchange for the elder’s birthright, a deal that the elder certainly does not take seriously. The serious, grasping younger brother does. Esau is Isaac’s son. The storyteller declares that the father loves him because he provides him with game to eat (25:28). Like son, like father. He likes his food, his wild caught food, and thinks in terms of immediate bodily rewards. He is a man of appetites, even when old and blind. Jacob, however, is his mother’s favorite (25:28). Jacob is “her son” (27:6, 17), whereas Esau is Isaac’s son (27:5). “Isaac loved Esau because he was food in his mouth, but Rebekah loved Jacob” (25:28, my trans.). It is the mother who loves her favorite boy, she who masterminds the plan whereby the younger takes Esau’s blessing, a significant act of trickery in a world in which blessings and curses have the power to bring about what they predict. Mother and son are tricksters and underdogs, the woman and the second-born, dare we say effeminate, son, who use deception and roundabout means to further their goals. The son is ambitious; both he and his mother think of the future rather than of near-term gain; they are wily. And Jacob, the trickster, the younger, his mother’s son, the domesticated man, is “a smooth man” who needs to be disguised in animal skins to pass as his brother. It is all about hair. Hair is identity or assumed identity, animal-like, thick, smelling of the fields. Strong contrasts in gender and gender bending are created by the imagery of hair, and all kinds of interesting stereotypes are at play. The manly son is hairy, of the wild, makes food from the hunt, and is loved by his father. The second son is smooth, soft, lives in tents, cooks, and is beloved of his mother. He and she plan clever tricks together in secret, while the father and son interact in a direct, up-front way. And yet, it is not the manly, firstborn who succeeds his father in this patrilineal and patriarchal world. In the tradition, the smooth son, Jacob/Israel, is father of the people Israel; the Edomites, sons of Esau, the manly elder son, are relegated to lower status. The biblical writer is rooting for Jacob, not Esau, for he describes a verbal theophany in which the Deity reveals to Rebekah that Jacob is his choice (25:23).

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The tales of Jacob and Esau partake of a particular biblical symbol system that associates manliness with hair. That the smooth, more effeminate hero is the one who obtains the status and the power implies the influence of a female voice, whether produced by a woman or assumed by a man. The empowerment of smooth Jacob is an empowerment of women, albeit within the contours of an androcentric world. No woman warrior breaks free, no amazon overthrows the patriarchal system. Within that system, however, women and their surrogates succeed in behind-the-scenes ways through deception and trickery. Such stories portraying a loss of power to those who really hold the power in actual everyday life would certainly amuse women, as all such stories amuse and psychologically liberate those without the power. In its own way, Genesis 25–27 uses the equation between hair and identity quite subversively. Even if such stories and such a use of symbols may be rooted in women’s stories and have to do with gender, something bigger is going on, for these stories are now part of the history of the people Israel, and generations of male copyists, preservers, and composers saw them as fundamental expressions of Israelite origins and self-definition. The writers of the Hebrew Bible, in various ways, portray the success of the disempowered, who are aided by their ever present divine ally, the all-powerful YHWH. God loves the weak because their success is testimony to the realization that all power comes from him. Who is weaker than women in the views of androcentric writers? So Israel becomes the female in a relationship with her protector God. The disempowered use deception to improve their lot throughout Genesis.

Rachel: Stealing Laban’s Teraphim (Gen. 31:19, 30–35). In an interesting scene leading up to the departure of Jacob and his household from Laban’s land (31:4–16), Jacob speaks to the feuding wives/sisters. He reviews all that has happened to them, tells of a vision he had promising him much of Laban’s flocks, and of God’s message that the time had come to return to his own land. The women, Rachel and Leah, answer as one, making clear that their allegiance is to their husband and not to their father. They say they are thought of as “stranger women” by their father, who has “sold” them and proceeded to “eat up” all their money.

The language of 31:15 is very strong. Though men are said to acquire wives with the verb that often means “to buy,” nowhere else in the Hebrew Scriptures is a proper marriage described as a father’s selling (makar) his daughters. In the closely related languages of Aramaic and Syriac, mekar means “to buy” and is used for “to marry.” In rabbinic texts moker is a bride-price, but in the Hebrew Scriptures one only sells humans into slavery (e.g., Gen. 37:27, 28, 36; 45:4, 5, about the selling of Joseph; Exod. 21:7–8, laws about selling one’s daughter into slavery). Thus, bitterly and poignantly, the daughters of Laban describe themselves in their relationship to their father as exploited and dispossessed slaves, treated as foreign women unrelated to him. The author of this text assumes that women are economic objects, but implies that at least a man’s own daughters should be treated as more than property. The sisters’ complaint is a remarkably critical statement by women about their treatment and status. Although they do not directly condemn the whole system of which Laban is a part, they state that their rights have not been upheld, even within the requirements of that exploitative system. Indirectly they call attention to a world in which people are bought and sold. Playing the role of mother-wife whose voice is synonymous with the voice of God, the women encourage Jacob to go. It is only at this point that the wives have been fully exchanged from father to husband and that the sisters themselves set aside their own feud to unify with their husband and children as one family. At this point they depart for the husband’s homeland, and at this point of transition Rachel plays the trickster. She steals her father’s teraphim while he is off shearing his sheep. Scholars have long debated what these objects were. NRSV translates “household gods,” implying that they are minor, personal deities represented in statuettes that Rachel might easily carry and conceal. Some have suggested that the teraphim are representations of ancestors, testifying to some sort of ancestor worship among the Israelites. In any event, the role of these objects in the story provides some insight, however murky, into aspects of Israelite popular religion. Laban chases after Jacob and his household, seeming more upset about the teraphim than anything else (31:30). The story receives added tension from Jacob’s declaration that anyone with whom the gods are found shall not live

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(31:32). Jacob emerges as a full-fledged patriarch having the power of life and death over members of his household. Laban searches in Jacob’s tent, in Leah’s, and in the two maidservants’ but finds nothing. Finally he comes to Rachel’s tent. Rachel has hidden the teraphim in the camel saddle and sits on them. She says to Laban, “Let not my lord be angry that I cannot rise before you, for the way of women is upon me,” that is, “I am in a menstruous condition” (31:35). Laban does not throw her off the saddle. Is this in gentlemanly deference? This interpretation seems inconsistent with the larger portrayal of Laban. He does not discover the teraphim. Is this because in such stories those being tricked have to be tricked— at least for a while? He does not pursue the matter more carefully. Is this because he fears the potent and visceral power issuing forth from the unclean woman, whose capacity to house life links her with the sacred, whose monthly bleeding sets her apart from what is ordinary and normal in a male world, that is, from what is physiologically male? (See Lev. 15:19–24.) If uncleanness is the reason why Laban avoids examining the area close to Rachel, rather than respect for her feigned discomfort, then it provides an instance of a female trickster’s employing woman’s physical source of femininity, the dangerous and polluting power of menstruation, to deter her father from discovering her theft. Laban’s paternal and therefore male authority—an authority related to his ownership of his own household gods—is undermined by his female offspring’s clever exploitation of that which makes her most markedly female. Covert woman’s power in this one brief scene dominates man’s overt authority.

Manning Up Jacob: The Scene at Jabbok (Gen. 32:25–32). In contrast to the trickster tales explored above, the scene at the River Jabbok is dominated by a male voice. Much has been written about this scene in which Jacob wrestles with “a man” who turns out to be a mysterious and unnamed manifestation of the Divine. Scholars have explored its psychoanalytical dimensions and the ways in which it provides a transformation of the hero Jacob, a rite of passage whereby he becomes Israel, returns to the land, and reconciles with his brother Esau. Some have interpreted this scene of painful transformation as recompense or necessary penance for Jacob’s having cheated his brother.

It is above all a manly and heroic scene. Jacob fights with beings, divine and human, and has prevailed (32:28). Could this manly passage, in fact, compensate for the all-too-smooth and effeminate trickster, the son of his mother? Victory is described in the male voice as a matter of physical combat, wounding, and respect between the two male combatants who recognize one another’s power in direct physical terms. Comparisons might be drawn with the way in which relationships are established between heroes such as Gilgamesh and Enkidu, who emerge from their one-on-one combat as beloved brothers and constant companions.

Trickery as Vengeance in Men’s Literature (Gen. 34). Genesis 34 is a tale of trickery involving female sexuality. Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, is raped by Shechem, the son of Hamor. The question of status that is addressed through trickery is not her status, however, but that of her brothers, whose rightful territory— that is, one of their women—has been breached by an outsider. The narrative not only is about women’s status and rape but also deals with the relation between generations and with questions of marriage outside the kinship group. The rape occurs when Dinah goes out to visit the women of the land. A strong impression is conveyed of insider versus outsider, us versus them. Within one’s family is safety; among the people of the land lies danger. The Hebrew word for rape is from a root meaning “to be bowed down, afflicted.” So the Israelites’ oppression in Egypt is described. Yet the assumption in 34:3 is that such affliction is not incompatible with love. Verse 3 says that Shechem’s soul is drawn to Dinah, that he loves her and speaks tenderly to her. He asks his father, Hamor, to obtain her for him as a wife. One of the most striking aspects of the narrative is the degree to which Dinah is absent and present. She is, on the one hand, central to the action, the focus of Shechem’s desire, the object of negotiations between Jacob and Hamor, the reason for her brothers’ trickery, and the cause of tension between Jacob and his sons. On the other hand, she has no dialogue, no voice. How does she react to Shechem’s speaking “tenderly,” or to Jacob and Hamor’s arrangements for her marriage to the rapist? What, for that matter, happens to her at the end of the story? She seems to fade out after her brothers retrieve her (34:26).

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Does a thread in this tale, as in the story of the Benjaminites in Judges 21, condone wife stealing as one way in which new peoples are created? Jacob does not condemn the whole affair but “keeps silent” (34:5) and prepares to do business with Hamor. Two of Dinah’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, however, consider Shechem’s rape of Dinah a shocking outrage. How dare he take the daughter of Jacob without permission! And what of their feelings for Dinah, or the narrator’s? She is described as having been made unclean (34:5, 27). Like a prostitute, she has become a person of outsider status, unfit to be a bride. The brothers describe Shechem as having treated their sister like a harlot and condemn him and his kin to death. Once raped, however, Dinah is so consigned to the background of the story that the issue that emerges is less her status as a sufferer than the status of the men who control her sexuality. Shechem has raped Dinah, but in the point of view of the narrator, by doing so he shows lack of respect for the persons of Jacob and the brothers, lack of respect for the proper way of establishing kinship relations. Hamor attempts to mend matters after the fact with promises of trade (34:21) and proper marriage relations. Simeon and Levi reject his offer but not directly. They are, after all, sojourners in what is still the land of the Canaanites, God’s promises for the future notwithstanding. Their position is a precarious one, as Jacob himself indicates (34:30), and so they take their vengeance through trickery. In contrast to Genesis 31:30–35 and Genesis 38, the trickster is not the wronged woman. In contrast to Genesis 27, the point of view is clearly male. Genesis 34, not unlike the tale of Samson and the Timnites in Judges 14–15, is about a feud between two groups of men over ownership of one group’s woman. Whereas Jacob is willing to make accommodation with the Canaanites for the sake of peace and to gain, in exchange for Dinah, permission to stay in the land and trade there, the brothers, more hotheaded and concerned about matters of face than the old man, prepare a deception using Dinah’s sexuality as bait. They lie to Hamor, stating that if he and all males among his people will circumcise themselves, then they will let Shechem have Dinah and engage in further exchanges with them. Hamor agrees, and while his warriors are incapacitated, uncomfortable from the surgery, Jacob’s sons attack. They kill all the men, “slaying them with the sword,”

taking all the enemies’ possessions, their children, and their wives as booty. It is an act that evens the score but also serves as a reminder that wife stealing and rape were regularly associated with war in ancient Israel, even when the reason for war had nothing to do with ownership of the women. Genesis 34 shares with the other trickster tales about women the pattern of a problem in status, deception to improve status, and success of the plan. The rape lowers Dinah’s status but also that of her father and brothers, and it is their status that most occupies the author. Dinah herself does not engineer a deception that will restore her status; rather, she becomes a motif in the artful deception by her brothers. Their status is raised in turn by the success of their plan and the theft of other women, while Dinah’s lowered status remains. Genesis 34 confirms that tales in which women are important to the action are most often about relations between men, at least in narratives as strongly marked by the male voice as this one. Men are the protagonists of the trickster pattern; the woman Dinah serves as an occasion for their contest, as the wives and daughters of Hamor mark its closure. The women are thus on the turning points and borders of narrative action in this tale, echoing the patterns of actual women’s economic and socio-structural roles in all traditional cultures, as those who go between the men of marrying groups and between generations of men within their own families.

Tamar: Trickster Would-be Mother (Gen. 38). Genesis 38 begins as a story of Judah, who is left in the land of Canaan during Joseph’s ordeal in Egypt. In the Joseph narrative, Judah is one of the villain brothers. He does not actually want to kill the boy Joseph but suggests he be sold to a passing band of Ishmaelites (37:26– 27). Of course, being sold into slavery is not unlike a death sentence. At the very least, Judah is subjecting Joseph to social death, separating him from kin and culture and from his place as favorite of Jacob, son of the beloved Rachel, who would surely inherit. Judah wishes to keep his own hands free from blood, but is portrayed as guilty by proxy. Some scholars have suggested that the tale in Genesis 38 balances the misdeed to Joseph. As Joseph was taken in ambush, so Judah is taken by deception and forced to do his duty by Tamar. The larger stories of Jacob and Joseph are structured along such patterns

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of trickery and countertrickery, misdeed, and vengeance. The opening section of Genesis 38 tells of Judah’s marriage to Shua’s daughter and of the birth of his three sons (Er, Onan, and Shelah) in the genealogical orientation typical of family foundation narratives. Then, as in tales of Abraham’s sons and Isaac’s, we are told of marriage arrangements made for the eldest son Er. In one verse (38:6) this brief account introduces Er’s wife Tamar, the heroine of the story. The genealogical orientation continues in 38:7 but with a twist. Er is a wicked man and is slain by God, leaving no offspring. Judah tells his middle son Onan to go in to Tamar (“go in” being a biblical euphemism for sexual intercourse) to “perform the duty of a brother-inlaw.” As discussed in Deuteronomy 25:5–10, the brother of a deceased man who has died without leaving children is to marry the widow. The children born from such a union are to be considered the dead brother’s children and thereby “perpetuate his brother’s name in Israel.” On the one hand, this law might be interpreted as a male-preserving, male-protecting law, and Tamar’s actions in 38:13–19 would be a wife’s act of devotion to her dead spouse. The man’s reproductive powers extend in this way even beyond the grave. In a symbol system like that of ancient Israel, without belief in bodily resurrection, offspring are one’s afterlife. In a world in which the souls of the dead are confined to a dismal place much like Hades, called Sheol, it is especially important to have one’s name preserved among the living. Within the confines of this male-centered world, however, the law of the levirate (brother-in-law) is also important to the widow herself. Under her father’s protection and control as a virgin, she is, like Rebekah, transferred to the care and keeping of her husband and his family. Once married into her husband’s family, she is to be a faithful and fruitful wife, providing children, especially sons. The barren wife is an anomaly, for she is no longer a virgin in her father’s home, but she does not produce children in her husband’s. Even more anomalous is the young childless widow who has no hope of becoming a fruitful member of her husband’s clan once the husband is dead. Indeed, she has altogether lost her tie with that clan. Yet she, like the barren wife, no longer belongs in her father’s household. The law of the levirate suits a male-centered symbol system in that it neatens up that which has

become anomalous according to the categories of that system. But the law must have also saved young childless widows from economic deprivation and from a sort of social wilderness, no longer under father, but having no husband or son to secure their place in the patriarchal clan. Onan takes Tamar as his wife, but instead of helping her to conceive Er’s children, he practices a primitive form of birth control and spills his semen on the ground. Onan’s refusal to help create another man’s children, to become a surrogate father for the dead brother, can be explained in economic terms. Onan might prefer to divide his inheritance with the one remaining brother than to divide it among Er’s descendants, his own, and Shelah’s. God, whose voice and opinion are also the author’s, condemns this selfishness and kills Onan. God’s displeasure with Onan is not to be interpreted as an author’s condemnation of birth control, but as a condemnation of Onan’s refusal to raise up children in his brother’s name and in the process to regularize Tamar’s place in the social structure. Judah’s next step should be to wed Tamar to his youngest son Shelah, but he hesitates, fearing that Shelah will die also (38:11). Perhaps Judah fears Tamar as a witch of sorts who kills her lovers or as the lover of a demon who will not share her with any human man (cf. the book of Tobit). He puts Tamar off, telling her to return to her father’s home until Shelah grows up, but as 38:11 indicates, Judah has no intention of giving the woman to his only remaining son. Tamar returns to her father’s house, neither a virgin nor a wife nor a mother. She is on the fringes of the Israelite social structure, for nowhere does she properly belong. Tamar, the person of uncertain status, is thus the perfect candidate to become a trickster. Through deception she is able to confront those with the power to improve her status and to gain what she desires. Tamar hears that Judah, whose wife has recently died, has gone to Timnah to shear his sheep (38:12–13). Tamar takes off her widow’s clothing and assumes the disguise of a prostitute. Veiled, she waits for Judah at the entrance to Enaim. This trickster’s disguise is an excellent symbolization of her status. As she is at a geographic border, so she is at a transition point in the course of her life. She is dressed as a prostitute, a woman whose sexual role is neither virgin nor wife. So is the real Tamar, though in a different way. Deception through sexual allure

GENESIS 43

is a favorite motif in traditional trickster tales. As in Genesis 12, the attractive woman is not who she appears to be. Judah sees her, thinks she is a prostitute, and asks her for sex (38:15–16). She demands to know what he will pay her, playing her role beautifully (38:16), and finally takes as a pledge his signet seal, the cord from which the seal hung, and his staff, which was probably marked with his seal. He promises to exchange a kid for them later as payment. As in the case of Laban’s gods, Judah’s possessions are a sign of his identity, his authority, and his self. Like a signet ring, the seal bore in relief the man’s sign and would be used to make impressions on objects or documents to indicate ownership or origin. Only a man would carry a staff, whether for support or defense. Tamar thus takes symbols of the very personhood of Judah. He has intercourse with her and she conceives (38:18). She resumes her widow’s garb, and when Judah sends his friend to exchange the kid for his things, the prostitute has disappeared. He tells his sidekick to let the matter drop “lest we become objects of contempt,” having been fooled by the prostitute. Little does he realize how much the fool he has been. When it is discovered that Tamar is pregnant, it is Judah, patriarch of the family into which she had married, not her own father, who is in charge of her fate. Again one sees law and custom enforced by the patriarch and not by some external group of elders or priests. The family headed by the patriarch is a self-­contained microcosm of the larger community and its customs. Judah’s decision is swift, unconsidered, and cruel. Tension in the story is heightened. “Bring her out and let her be burned” (38:24). Is he happy finally to be rid of the woman he holds responsible for the death of his wicked sons? But Tamar, the trickster, sends to him the tokens of signet, cord, and staff with the message, “It was the owner of these who made me pregnant” (38:25). Judah recognizes his possessions. How could he deny his own seal? He acknowledges them and accepts responsibility, saying that Tamar is more righteous than he, because he had not given her to Shelah. Genesis 38:26 ends on an interesting note: Not again did he know her (sexually). Is this a later editorial comment by a writer anxious to minimize Judah’s having sex with his daughterin-law, in light of the prohibition against incest in Leviticus 18:15? The comment might also be

read as a more integral part of the story. Judah, now more fearful than ever of the woman who survived two husbands and boldly bettered him, keeps his distance from her. Tamar, like Rebekah, gives birth to twin heroes, the mark of a special matriarch. From the younger, Perez, will be descended Boaz, the husband of Ruth, whose tale is very much like that of Tamar. Both women contribute to the genealogical line leading to Israel’s greatest hero, David. Tamar’s rise in status is to be understood within a particular symbol system. She is now under the protection of the patriarch and has produced sons for the line. The tale does not criticize the rules of the social structure overtly, but like the scene in Genesis 31:14–16 insists on a man’s maintaining the status and rights allowed the woman within the system. Like the prelude to the story of the stolen teraphim (31:15–16), Genesis 38 provides an implicit critique, for one sees how easily even these rights can be abrogated. Women in the Joseph Tales (Gen. 37; 39–50)

The Comparative Absence of Women in the Joseph Tales. The Joseph narrative has no heroes who are tricksters, and its women are only two: Asenath, daughter of Potiphera, priest of On, mentioned in one line (41:45) as part of the reward given to Joseph for successfully interpreting Pharaoh’s dream, and Potiphar’s wife, a stock character portrayed as one of the challenges in life faced by the wise hero. Whereas women find many places in the stories about marginals who enjoy temporary success but remain at odds with the establishment, they are virtually absent from the Joseph tales of Genesis, which are more confirming of authority and the status quo. Potiphar’s Wife (Gen. 39). The story of Potiphar’s wife’s attempted seduction of Joseph is often compared to the ancient Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers.” In each, the upright and trustworthy person who works for a superior (Potiphar in the case of Joseph and the elder brother in the Egyptian tale) is propositioned by the superior’s wife. The younger man rejects her and remains loyal to his superior, whereupon the scorned woman accuses the young man of attempted rape. This plot is found in a wide range of traditional tales and in many popular works of modern fiction.

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The tale of Potiphar’s wife emphasizes themes found throughout the biography of Joseph. Recurring language indicates that everything touched by Joseph prospers because God is with him (see 39:2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9). Seeming misfortunes in Joseph’s life inevitably turn to Joseph’s benefit and to that of Israel (45:7, 8). Thus the serious charge that Joseph attempted to cuckold his master does not lead to his death but to the royal prison. There Joseph interprets the dreams of fellow prisoners, one of whom later recommends Joseph to the Pharaoh as one who can interpret his troubling dreams of cows and sheaves. The incident of Potiphar’s wife is one more link in a chain leading inevitably to Joseph’s becoming vizier of all Egypt. Finally, the tale contributes to the portrayal of Joseph’s character. This is the same almost-too-honest Joseph who reports to his parents the dreams that predict that he will come to dominate them, the same Joseph who reports to his father about his brothers’ indiscretions. The characterization of the almost-too-good-to-be-true Joseph is consistent throughout the narrative. He is a wisdom hero, a type represented in the biblical court narratives of Daniel and the book of Esther and in ancient Near Eastern works such as the story of Ahikar. As has been noted, the wisdom hero lives by the sort of advice offered in wisdom collections such as the biblical book of Proverbs. One of the dominant themes in Proverbs is to keep one’s distance from the loose woman, the adulteress (Prov. 2:16–19; 5:1–23; 7:6–27). Joseph exemplifies the wise man: hardworking, sober, God-­ fearing, and able to resist forbidden fruit. Potiphar’s wife exemplifies the female personification of antiwisdom: disloyal to her husband, quick to seek satisfaction in forbidden places, strongly sexual, and duplicitous. In vengeance she uses the garment she has ripped from Joseph to accuse him of her own misdeed. Her accusation to the servants (39:14–15), repeated to her husband (39:17), echoes the accurate description of what had happened in 39:12–13, but now recasts the information in a lie. Wisdom and antiwisdom, truth and lies, are thus reverse images. What sort of view of women is found in this tale and what sort of narrator’s voice? The image of the vengeful and conniving woman scorned is an archetype more meaningful to men than to women, a means of asserting the male’s desirability and innocence, projecting all sexual desire onto the woman, who is a manifestation of the

feminine frightening to men. She is aggressive, independent, and sexually demanding. Such women never prosper in the Hebrew Scriptures. In this scene Joseph is the marginal character, a foreign exile and a slave, while Potiphar’s wife is his superior; and yet Joseph is no trickster. He is a different sort of hero, and his is a different sort of literature from that found in the tales of the matriarchs and patriarchs. Whereas the latter repeatedly describe the trickster’s challenge to authority and include many women tricksters who make their way as marginals within a maleoriented system, the stories of Joseph suggest that if a man has God’s favor and lives wisely, he can succeed in becoming a part of the ruling establishment itself.

Conclusions The women of Genesis are markers and creators of transition and transformation. In some sense their narrative roles parallel social positions of and attitudes toward women in male-­ dominated cultures in which women are marginal in terms of economic or political authority. Yet paradoxically their roles as the people “in between” can be powerful and critical for the development of the stories and for the progress of human civilization and Israelite culture as perceived by biblical writers. Without Eve, the present world would not exist. Without Rebekah, Jacob would not have fathered the people of Israel. The women succeed in behind-the-scenes ways, through the medium of trickery, and their power is in the private rather than the public realm. They evoke sympathy as those whose rights are unstable and always at risk, for the line between successful tricksters such as Rebekah, Rachel, and Tamar and victims such as Dinah and Hagar is easily crossed. The tale of Potiphar’s wife implies a culture in which powerful women are regarded with suspicion, as unnatural and evil. The voice that lies behind the tales of the matriarchs and patriarchs is markedly different from the voice underlying the tales of Joseph. Only the former are imbued with attitudes of those outside the establishment and in some instances speak with the voice of the feminine. The voices behind tales of Genesis might also be explored from the perspective of masculinities and femininities, as seen, for example, in the tales of Rebekah, Tamar, Jacob, and Dinah.

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Bibliography

Brenner, Athalya, ed. Genesis. The Feminist Companion to the Bible. 2nd series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Gossai, Hemchand. Power and Marginality in the Abraham Narrative. 2nd ed. Princeton Theological Monograph Series. Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2010. Jeansonne, Sharon Pace. The Women of Genesis: From Sarah to Potiphar’s Wife. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. Meyers, Carol L. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Niditch, Susan. ‘My Brother Esau Is a Hairy Man’: Hair and Identity in Ancient Israel. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Phipps, William E. Genesis and Gender: Biblical Myths of Sexuality and Their Cultural Impact. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1989. Schneider, Tammi J. Mothers of Promise: Women in the Book of Genesis. Grand Rapids: Baker Books, 2008. Trible, Phyllis. “A Love Story Gone Awry.” In Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 72–143. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Eve and Her Interpreters Anne W. Stewart

the mind, which was symbolized by Adam (On the Creation of the World, 165). Other Jews and Christians, on the other hand, did not find that Eve’s secondary creation necessarily implied her inferiority. Christian theologian John Chrysostom insisted that because Eve was created from Adam’s rib, she was equal to him in every respect: “So, from man’s rib God creates this rational being, and in his inventive wisdom he makes it complete and perfect, like man in every detail” (Kvam, 143). The Talmud even argues that God gave greater mental powers to Eve than to Adam. It explains that the phrase “God built (from Heb. banah) her from his side” (2:22) means that God gave more understanding (Heb. binah) to Eve (b. Niddah 45b). Other Jewish traditions tried to reconcile the two different creation accounts. Some medieval interpretations suggest that Eve, the woman created in the second account, was actually Adam’s second wife. The first creation account then refers to Adam’s first wife, who left Adam, prompting God to create another wife for him. The medieval text Alphabet of Ben Sira explains that Lilith, the first woman, and Adam began fighting when Adam told her to lie down below him. She refused, insisting that the two were equal because they were both created from the earth. Lilith flew away, and even God’s angels could not bring her back. In the rabbinic tradition at large, Lilith is known as a menacing demon, and this particular tradition accounts for her behavior by claiming that she wandered the earth after leaving Adam, terrorizing men who slept alone and afflicting babies with disease (Kvam, 204). The significance of the woman’s encounter with the serpent in Genesis 3 has drawn even more attention among biblical interpreters, and the text itself sparks numerous questions. Why does the serpent engage the woman and not the man? Why does the woman state that God forbid them not only from eating the fruit but from touching the tree in the middle of the garden (3:3)? God forbade only eating the fruit;

“She took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her” (Gen. 3:6). The esteem, worth, and role of women is at stake in the interpretation of this verse. The significance of Eve’s act is perhaps one of the most disputed points in the history of biblical interpretation. Did this first woman cause all humanity to descend into a sinful state, or should one place ultimate blame at the feet of her husband? Is she a paragon of feminine beauty, power, and creativity, or a paradigm of vice, condemning all her descendants to hold a place of inferiority to men? Commentators, theologians, artists, poets, and readers alike have advanced various interpretations of the first woman in Genesis, often promoting certain assumptions about womankind as a whole. Consequently, Eve has garnered more attention than almost any other female biblical character. The discrepancies between the two creation stories in Genesis, as well as the significant ambiguities within each of them, provide plenty of room for contradictory opinions. In the first creation account, male and female are created simultaneously (1:26–27). They are equally in the image of God, charged to populate and care for the earth. In the second creation account, however, God forms the male Adam from the dust of the earth and later creates woman from Adam’s rib as a mate for him, only after all other creatures have been eliminated as adequate companions (2:20). Reconciling these two strikingly different accounts and their competing implications for the nature of male-female relations is a significant locus of dispute in the interpretative tradition. Many interpreters place more emphasis on the second account than the first, causing them to suggest that Eve, having been created from Adam, was inferior to him. The Jewish historian Philo, for example, posited a typology of women’s inferiority to men from the second account. Philo interpreted Eve allegorically as representative of sense perception, a faculty inferior to 46

GENESIS 47

God said nothing about touching it (2:17). Furthermore, the woman had not yet been created when God issued the injunction, so from whom did she get her information? The circumstances of the man and his wife change dramatically after they eat of the fruit, know their nakedness, and are expelled from the garden. But was there a larger existential change in their condition

and, by extension, the condition of humanity? If so, who is to blame? The story of Adam and Eve in the garden was retold and interpreted in many versions in early Jewish apocryphal texts. Sirach, for example, a second-century-BCE wisdom text, warns about the danger of women, insisting that “from a woman sin had its beginning, and because of

In Creation of Eve, an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), a faint image of the Creator is visible behind Eve and the sleeping Adam. This illustration was published in The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version (London: Cassell, 1866).

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her we all die” (Sir. 25:24). This text was the first to ascribe culpability to woman for all subsequent human sin and death, but it was certainly not the last to view her in negative light. In The Life of Adam and Eve, a first-century-CE text that elaborates various adventures of the first couple, Eve is a weak character, ridden with guilt for their expulsion from the garden. Adam, on the other hand, is a heroic figure who secures forgiveness for Eve so that the human race can endure. In the Greek version of the text, also called the Apocalypse of Moses, Eve tells in her own words the story of her encounter with the serpent. She describes the world before meeting the serpent, when she and Adam were equal caretakers, each charged with half of the garden and creation. This text alludes to the serpent’s encounter with Eve as an act of sexual seduction, for Eve recounts that the serpent poured on the fruit his poison of lust, “the origin of every sin” (Apoc. Mos. 19.3). Lust thus taints human sexuality from that point forward, and Eve holds herself responsible, proclaiming “all sin in creation has come about through me” (Apoc. Mos. 32.3). Early Christian texts contained different views about who is ultimately responsible for human sin. Like these Jewish apocryphal texts,

the New Testament epistle 1 Timothy indicates that Eve, not Adam, bears the blame for eating the fruit. The text also depends on the second creation account to undergird its claim that women ought to be subordinate to men: “For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor” (1  Tim. 2:13–14). On the other hand, Romans 5 attributes blame solely to Adam, for “just as sin came into the world through one man . . . so death spread to all because all have sinned” (Rom. 5:12). The gnostic Gospel of Philip, however, suggests that death came into the world not when Adam ate the apple but when Eve was created from Adam’s side. It suggests that the first human was an androgynous being, and when Eve and Adam were separated from a single body, death entered (Gospel of Philip, 63). The negative view of Eve in 1 Timothy had an inordinate influence on subsequent interpretations of Genesis by the church fathers. Tertullian, for example, advanced prescriptive advice for female modesty in dress, in order that each woman “might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve . . . the odium (attaching to her as the cause) of human

Fall of Adam and Eve, a woodcut by Virgil Solis (1514–1562), shows both the serpent offering the fruit and, at left, Adam and Eve being driven from the lush garden (Gen. 3:24). This illustration was published in Summaria uber die gantze Biblia, by Veit Dietrich, Philipp Melanchthon, and Johannes Brenz (Frankfurt am Main, 1562).

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perdition” (The Apparel of Women, i.1). Tertullian goes even further, alleging that all women are culpable with Eve for sin and conspirators with the devil in leading men astray. He thus condemns his female audience, saying, “You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert—that is, death—even the Son of God had to die” (The Apparel of Women, i.1). On the other hand, Ambrose, bishop of Milan in the fourth century, used the 1 Timothy text to different ends. While he too held that woman was inferior to man, he nonetheless noted that Christ was born of a woman. He thus interprets the phrase “she will be saved by childbearing” (1  Tim. 2:15) to mean that Eve brings forth human redemption (Paradise, x.47). Romans 5 shaped the Christian theological doctrine of the fall and original sin, the idea that after Adam and Eve’s disobedience, all humanity was thereafter tainted by sin. For this reason, Genesis 3 acquired weightier overtones as the origin of the human condition, and Eve herself was often held responsible for this plight. Augustine, and many theologians following him, associated the consequences of the first sin with shame and sexual lust and held that such effects passed from the first couple to all subsequent humans. He held together 1 Timothy and Romans, insisting that Eve and Adam together bore blame, for even though Eve was deceived, Adam also sinned (City of God, 14.11). The association of the first sin with sexual activity colored interpretations of Eve, and she was frequently associated with seduction and danger. For this reason, many viewed her as the antithesis of the pure Virgin Mary, who redeemed Eve’s disgrace by obeying God and giving birth to Christ. The notion of Mary as a second Eve who rectified the error of the first was introduced by Justin Martyr in the second century, yet it grew in importance after Augustine, as virginity became an ideal of discipleship (Phillips, 135). Although the notion of a “fall” does not hold a central theological position in Judaism, as in Christianity, Jewish tradition also suggests that Eve’s sin had repercussions for contemporary humans. The Talmud reports that God punished her with ten curses that now befall all women, including pain in conception, childbirth, menstruation, and the angst of raising children (b. Eruvin 100b), though another

opinion suggests that such curses do not pertain to righteous women (b. Sotah 12a). Other rabbinic sources take different approaches to the question of who should bear the blame for eating the fruit. Some traditions suggest that it was Adam’s fault, for in an attempt to prevent either of them from transgressing the divine command not to eat the fruit, Adam told Eve that she should not even touch the tree. This discrepancy between the divine command and Adam’s injunction left just the opportunity that the serpent needed to deceive Eve, for when he showed her that she would not die for touching the tree, she ate the fruit. Other traditions, however, place the blame squarely on Eve. One tradition suggests that once Eve ate the fruit, the Angel of Death appeared to her, and she quickly forced Adam to eat the fruit as well, lest he take another wife after she died (Avot of Rabbi Nathan 1.6). Muslim interpretations also consider similar questions. Although the Qur’an does not refer to the creation story, there are several accounts of the first disobedience. One indicates that both man and woman were equally culpable (Q. 7:19–24), but in another, man was the one tempted by Satan (Q. 20:120–21). Later interpreters had much more to say about Eve and her role in the first sin. Muslim commentator al-Tabari (839–923 CE) notes one interpretation in which Adam was tempted out of sexual desire for Eve, since Satan had made her beautiful in his sight, and another that Adam was not in his rational mind, because Eve had made him drunk with wine (Kvam, 189; cf. the rabbinic interpretation that Adam was drunk, Num. Rab. 10.4). In either case, there is an element of feminine danger in accounting for the first sin. Eve has also figured prominently in art and literature in ways that cohere with and diverge from interpretations in the religious traditions. In Milton’s Paradise Lost, for example, Adam willingly eats the fruit after Eve because he cannot bear the thought of being separated from her should she die, an inverse interpretation from that of the rabbinic tradition cited above, though similar to Augustine’s approach (cf. City of God, 14.11). Milton also suggested that Eve had more beauty than intellect and was inferior to her male mate, even claiming that she was less in the image of God than Adam (Paradise Lost, viii.538–46). Paul Gauguin produced several striking renditions of Eve throughout his career. Breton Eve

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(1889) depicted a frightened Eve with blue hair, crouching under the tree, a serpent hovering in the background, while in Exotic Eve (1890) she stands taller than the tree itself and unabashedly grasps its fruit. Gauguin also painted several works presenting Eve as a Tahitian woman in a jungle setting. In Te nave nave fenua (The Land of Sensuous Pleasure, 1892), she stands naked next to a lizard, not a serpent, while picking a flower. Gauguin wrote about this figure that she represented Eve after the fall, serious and not at all self-conscious, a deliberate antithesis to the wanton, seductive Eve found in much of Western art (Maurer, 149). Eve’s influence has not waned throughout the centuries. More recently, she has become a heroine to contemporary feminists who have offered their own readings of the Genesis story. Judith Plaskow, for example, reenvisioned the rabbinic legend of Lilith as Adam’s first wife. In her version of the tale, Eve, curious about this other woman who possessed so much strength and gumption, climbed an apple tree to scale the walls of the garden and meet Lilith on the other side. The two became fast friends, but their friendship was threatening to both Adam and God, for the “bond of sisterhood” between the two women promised to change the nature of the male-female relationship. Indeed, “God and Adam were expectant and afraid the day Eve and Lilith returned to the garden, bursting with possibilities, ready to rebuild it together” (Plaskow, 207). Plaskow’s essay became a touchstone for feminist theology and a rallying cry for those who found a model in Lilith as strong and independent, in Eve as curious and intelligent, and in their mutual friendship as emblematic of the support and camaraderie of the feminist community. Biblical scholar Phyllis Trible has perhaps done the most work to recover Genesis from patriarchal interpretations. Trible saw Eve, the final of God’s creations, not as secondary to Adam, but as the culmination of all creation. She emphasized Eve’s intelligence, sensitivity, and initiative, in contrast to Adam, who remains silent and passive throughout the encounter with the serpent. She viewed Genesis 2–3 not as a mandate for the inferiority of woman to man, but as an affirmation of the equality and mutuality of male-female relations at creation

and, consequently, a strong judgment against the oppressive structures that soured them, a result of disobedience (Trible, 128). Some feminists have found the story of Eve and its reception so troubling that they see little redeeming value in it, but Trible and other feminist scholars have refused to relinquish Eve’s interpretation to those who doubt her equality with Adam or her worth as a woman. Although Eve has been much maligned by some interpreters as inferior to her husband, solely responsible for humanity’s broken condition, and even a gateway for the devil, not all have seen her in such a negative light. Interpreters that emphasize her equality with Adam and her role as “mother of all living” (3:20) draw attention to important aspects of the biblical text, which figures Eve as a dynamic character and fails to cast blame on either Adam or Eve alone. Indeed, such positive interpretations may allow contemporary women to reclaim Eve as a pivotal biblical character of curiosity and intelligence, formed in the image of God. Bibliography

Anderson, Gary. The Genesis of Perfection: Adam and Eve in Jewish and Christian Imagination. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Kvam, Kristen, et al. Eve and Adam: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Readings on Genesis and Gender. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Maurer, Naomi M. The Pursuit of Spiritual Wisdom: The Thought and Art of Vincent van Gogh and Paul Gauguin. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998. Phillips, John. Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1984. Plaskow, Judith. “The Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology.” In Woman­ spirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, edited by Judith Plaskow and Carol P. Christ, 198–209. 2nd ed. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992. Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Sarah, Hagar, and Their Interpreters Elaine James

4:22–31. He describes their story as an allegory in which the women symbolize sides in his argument against Jewish Christians or Judaizing Gentiles: “these women are two covenants.” He traces the promise through Sarah’s son Isaac, who represents birth in the Spirit, and Hagar and her son are condemned “according to the flesh” and driven out. For Christians, this reading strategy legitimized their ascendancy over Jews and later over Muslims, as is evident in Pope Urban II’s reported invocation of Sarah and Paul’s phrase, “Cast out the slave woman and her son!” (Gal. 4:30) to galvanize Christendom for the First Crusade (Urban II, Council of Cleremont, 1095). Patristic readings were heavily influenced by Paul. In City of God, Augustine likewise dichotomizes the women: Hagar is in the earthly city, which symbolizes sin and wrath, and only prefigures the superiority of Sarah, who, in the heavenly city, denotes grace and divine mercy (De civitate Dei, 15.2). Origen’s seventh homily suggests that Hagar turned away from the letter of the law (represented by the bottle of water given her by Abraham) and drinks fully at the well of living water, which is Jesus Christ (Hom. Gen., 7.5–6). At the same time, he lifts up Sarah as an example of an upright wife who virtuously submits to her husband. This latter move is indicative of a broader patristic interest in the proper ordering of marriage, which reveals a concern for the rectitude of the forebears despite the sexual intrigue of their story (especially the wife-sister episodes and the problem of polygamy). The resultant emphasis on Sarah and Abraham’s virtue minimizes the harm done to Hagar, who remains a foil for their integrity. Early readers, though, are not entirely without sympathy for Hagar. For John Chrysostom, she exemplifies God’s compassion and care for the lowly, and the angel’s visitation dignifies her abject situation (Hom. Gen., 38.5–7). Hilary of Poitiers compares Hagar’s theophany to Abraham’s, which elevates her experience of divine revelation to the level of the patriarch’s (De trinitate, 4.23–27).

The stories of Sarah and her Egyptian slave Hagar (Gen. 16, 21) are intimately intertwined and desperately conflicted. Sarah, to compensate for her barrenness, offers Hagar to Abraham as a surrogate womb. But when Hagar bears Ishmael, the dynamics between the women become embittered, and Hagar flees, to return again by an angel’s command. After Sarah finally gives birth to Isaac, she convinces Abraham to cast Hagar back out into the desert, where she is saved by a theophanic intervention. The conflict between the two women is never resolved, and Sarah’s final words in the story are charged with spite: “Cast out this slave woman with her son; for the son of this slave woman shall not inherit along with my son Isaac” (21:10). The shadow of their conflict lingers in the history of interpretation, which has typically chosen sides between Sarah and Hagar, favoring one and neglecting or condemning the other. Theological and aesthetic representations alike tend to polarize the two characters and to understand them as symbols for other things. Philo’s comment might be taken as a kind of banner statement: “It is not women that are spoken of here” (Congr., 180). The discerned meaning of the women’s story varies widely (for Philo, they represent “minds” on a journey to the attainment of virtue), and their complex moral relationship continues to prompt reflection on broader conflicts of all kinds. Early on in other biblical and Christian traditions, attention focuses on the symbolism of Sarah. She is the foremother (Isa. 51:2), the fulfillment of God’s elective power (Rom. 9:9), and a symbol of obedience (1  Pet. 3:6). Philo allegorizes Sarah as virtue, which brings forth happiness represented in Isaac (Legum allegoria, 2.82). Jubilees, in summarizing the Genesis stories, omits many of the details of Sarah’s treatment of Hagar, and the latter’s arrogance, thereby avoiding some of the moral dilemmas of the biblical text (Jub. 14:21–24; 17). Most significant among these is Paul’s Christian typological interpretation in Galatians 51

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Rabbinic discussions tend to highlight the ethics of the story itself, albeit with characteristically diverse evaluations. In the Babylonian Talmud, Sarah’s fertility is a cipher for divine blessing, and the matriarch’s breasts are described as fountains flowing with abundant milk (Bava Metzia 87a). Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai (Rashbi) argues that Hagar was Pharaoh’s daughter (Gen. Rab. 45:1), which both elevates Hagar’s status and is occasionally taken as a sign of Hagar’s idolatry (Pirqe d’Rabbi Eliezer, “Horeb,” 29). Genesis Rabbah portrays Sarah very positively: “The Holy One, blessed be He, never condescended to hold converse with any woman save with that righteous woman” (45:10), yet offers various speculations about the kind of terrible mistreatment she inflicted on Hagar (45:6). Famously, Rabbi Moshe ben Nahman (Nachmanides, Ramban) accuses both Sarah and Abraham of sinning in their mistreatment of Hagar. The midrashic sensibility turns readerly attention back to the thorny story line and, in overtly critiquing Sarah’s behavior, anticipates modern feminist concerns. In Muslim tradition, Hagar has an esteemed position as the mother of Ishmael and the foremother of the Arab followers of Muhammad. The Qur’an mentions neither woman by name, but “Abraham’s wife” receives the promise of a son from the heavenly messengers (Surah 51: Adh-Dhariyat). Hagar’s story is included in the hadith (the oral traditions of the prophet Muhammad), book 15:9, called The Anbiya (Prophets). Here, Hagar’s tireless pursuit of water for Ishmael, and the angelic promise that Allah’s people will come from herself, ennoble her character. She represents the tradition of hijrah, or experiencing exile for the sake of God, and is accorded high esteem at ‘Eid alAdha (the Feast of Sacrifice). Sarah too has a place of esteem: in stories narrated by Bukhari and Muslim, she successfully defends her sexual purity when Abraham gives her to other men by pious invocation of the name of Allah. During the Protestant Reformation, interest in the literal sense of the text increasingly attends to the dynamics of the story, although this leads most Reformers to lift up Abraham and to chastise the womanly pettiness of both Sarah and Hagar. Luther condemns Hagar, but also zeroes in on her pathos, seeing her plight as an example of patience in suffering. She becomes a figure of repentance, modeling faithful confession when she names God (Comm.

Gen., 21:15–16). At the same time, he takes her as a symbol of Islam, and uses her haughtiness to condemn Turks (Muslims) of his own day. Another notable reader is Wolfgang Musculus, who observes that Hagar’s willing acceptance of her exile is more restrained even than Christ’s on the cross (Comm. Gen., 21:14–16). He thereby creates a moment of empathy that nearly compares Hagar to Christ. This theme of sympathy for Hagar is reiterated in the visual arts during this period. Georg Pencz’s Abraham Casting Out Hagar, for example, is a sixteenth-century German engraving that depicts Hagar wiping a tear from her eye as Abraham presses a skin of water to her back. Sarah stands in the doorframe, a hand raised in a gesture of angry expulsion. While aesthetic representations are relatively scarce until the sixteenth century, from this time forward depictions of Hagar’s suffering and Sarah’s spite become increasingly popular. In literary works during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, Hagar and Sarah appear mostly as stock characters: Hagar as the figure of an outcast, Sarah as a figure of wifely virtue. So, in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Launcelot, a Gentile, is pejoratively referred to as a “fool of Hagar’s offspring” (2.5.44). In Paradise Regained, John Milton compares Jesus in the desert to Hagar and Ishmael, which would seem to honor their status (2.308), but in Psalm LXXXIII, he lists them among God’s “furious foes” against whom the speaker appeals for God’s vengeance. In Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, Sarah is held up as an example of wifely virtue for May, the young bride-to-be (CT, 4.1703–5). Such uses suggest the reduction of these complex characters to standard types. One interesting counterexample is Theodore Beza’s Tragedie of Abraham’s Sacrifice (1577), in which Sarah shows some robustness of character in challenging Abraham’s discernment. She is portrayed here with motherly pathos and bids Isaac farewell with a tender kiss and the hope that God will save him. During the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age, Hagar becomes a significant preoccupation in painting and prints. Over one hundred extant paintings represent aspects of her story, the majority of which depict the expulsion or the wilderness rescue. Influenced perhaps by a confluence of theological pietism, increasing interest in the Hebrew Bible, and their own political upheaval, the Dutch

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represent Hagar with uncanny empathy and transform her story into one of redemption. In Jan Steen’s The Expulsion of Hagar (ca. 1660), for instance, Hagar holds a white cloth to her weeping face as Abraham stands on the doorstep between the two women. Ishmael gazes out at the viewer, inviting our sympathetic consideration of their fate. Rembrandt van Rijn

creates two versions of the expulsion scene, both of which place Abraham in a position of dubious mediation between the women. Italian painters are similarly interested in Hagar: Il Guercino produces several depictions in the 1650s, as does Francesco Cozza a decade later. The despondency of Hagar continues to be highlighted over the ensuing centuries. For

Hagar’s desperation and isolation are evident in Hagar’s Despair, an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), which was published in The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version (London: Cassell, 1866).

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example, Camille Corot’s Hagar in the Wilderness (1835) depicts Hagar wailing for her son while an angel soars in from high above. Similarly, Gustav Doré’s woodcut illustration of Genesis 21, entitled Hagar’s Despair, romanticizes Hagar’s desperation and isolation. Simultaneously, Sarah receives decreasing attention. Except as an ancillary figure in depictions of Abraham or Hagar, she tends to be the explicit subject only in scenes of her burial (as in a 1703 Bible illustration by Nicolas Fontaine). As interest in and sympathy for Hagar increases, Sarah slips out of her traditional role as a symbol of virtue and becomes a less honored foil for her maidservant.

In the modern era, readers focus increasingly on the injustice of Hagar’s rejection, and she becomes a representative of oppressed peoples. Perhaps the best example of this is her adoption as a representative figure by African Americans, who note her position as a racial outsider, her slave status, and her theophanic wilderness experience. Paul Lawrence Dunbar, for example, wrote about “the members of the Afro-American Sons of Hagar Social Club” (“The Defection of Maria Ann Gibbs,” 1903). And anthropologist John Langston Gwaltney describes “Aunt Hagar” as “the mythical apical figure of the core black American nation” (Drylongso, 1980, p. xv). African American artists also have shown an interest

California artist Wayne A. Forte’s Hagar (1996), drawn with charcoal on paper, focuses on the maternal bond between Hagar and Ishmael. The boy’s visible ribs reflect their perilous situation.

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in Hagar. Edmonia Lewis, a nineteenth-century sculptor, carved Hagar in the Wilderness (1868), a large white marble statue showing Hagar with a torn dress and her hands pressed together in supplication. Hagar also appears as a literary character, often as an oppressed or violated woman, as for instance in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon (1977). Contemporary feminist and womanist theologians too have been keen to rehabilitate Hagar. Phyllis Trible (Texts of Terror, 1984), and Delores Williams (Sisters in the Wilderness, 1993), and many subsequent others, have explored the story’s potential to illustrate women caught in malignant distortions of power, especially with respect to patriarchy and race. This discussion often emphasizes Hagar’s suffering and her final achievement of liberation and divine recognition. The contemporary visual arts also manifest an ennobling of Hagar. Depictions of Ishmael in Hagar’s arms portray her as a tenderhearted maternal figure. Jacques Lipchitz’s abstract sculpture Hagar in the Desert (bronze, 1969) captures a sense of dynamic power and protectiveness. Wayne Forte’s charcoal Haggar (1996) suggests a maternal intimacy between mother and child, and Hagar’s upraised arms echo Ishmael’s childlike resignation, perhaps even praise. In exonerating Hagar, sometimes blame is placed on Sarah. Marc Chagall, for instance, features Sarah positively in several works, including as a major figure in the angelic visitation, in which Abraham is noticeably absent (Sarah and the Angels, lithograph, 1960). Nevertheless when treating the two women together (as in Sarah and Hagar, colored chalks and ink, 1956), the sinister power of Sarah over her maidservant is striking, as Sarah towers over her with an upraised arm. The rift that lingers between Sarah and Hagar continues to speak powerfully to unhealed wounds of all kinds. Poet Alicia Suskin Ostriker

imagines each woman articulating a yearning for solidarity that remains unfulfilled, perhaps impossible: Sarah grieves, “We should be allies / we are both exiles, all women are exiles,” and Hagar wonders, “She threw me away /Like garbage. . . . But I still wonder / Why could she not love me / We were women together” (The Nakedness of the Fathers, 1995). Throughout the history of interpretation, readers have keyed into this unfulfilled longing and have represented the women as symbols for tragic breaches of all kinds. The story thus continues to prompt ethical reflection on broken relationships, both interpersonal and political. Bibliography

Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis: A New American Translation. Translated by Jacob Neusner. 3 vols. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985. Gwaltney, John Langston, ed. Drylongso: A Self-Portrait of Black America. New York: New Press, 1993 [1980]. Ostriker, Alicia Suskin. The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Visions and Revisions. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Philo. “On Mating with the Preliminary Studies (De Congressu Quaerendae Eruditionis Gratia).” In The Works of Philo: Complete and Unabridged, translated by C. D. Yonge. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1993. Thompson, John L. Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Trible, Phyllis, and Letty Russell, eds. Hagar, Sarah, and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

Exodus Nyasha Junior

Introduction area. After reuniting with his family, Joseph relocates his family from Canaan to Egypt. The last chapter of Genesis describes the death of Jacob and the death of Joseph. The first chapter of Exodus begins with Jacob’s descendants living and prospering in Egypt, but they are under the rule of a new king “who did not know Joseph” (1:8). The book of Exodus has two major sections, chapters 1–18 and chapters 19–40. Chapters 1–18 form a narrative that details the enslavement and subsequent escape of the Israelites from Egypt. Chapters 1–4 provide background on the oppression of the Israelites by the Egyptians and describe the birth of Moses and his commissioning by YHWH to lead the Israelites to freedom. Chapters 5–12 highlight the multiple confrontations between Pharaoh and Moses, who is accompanied by his brother Aaron. When Pharaoh refuses Moses’ demands repeatedly, the Lord sends multiple plagues on Egypt and the Egyptians. In chapters 13–18, the Israelites leave Egypt and begin their journey in the wilderness. Chapters 19–40 discuss the covenant relationship between these fugitive slaves and their god. In chapters 19–24, Moses receives the law at Mount Sinai, which provides instructions on the requirements of the covenant relationship. Chapters 25–31 and 35–40 provide detailed instructions on the tabernacle, the dwelling place for the Lord. The golden calf incident and its aftermath take place in chapters 32–34. In both Jewish and Christian tradition, Moses was considered to be the author of the book of Exodus as well as the other four books of the Torah/Pentateuch. Contemporary

The book of Exodus describes the miraculous deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt and the establishment of a covenant relationship between these former slaves and their god, YHWH. With its vivid imagery of the burning bush, the splitting of the water, and the cloud by day and the fire by night, the exodus story has been retold and reinterpreted within other biblical texts and in the art, literature, and music of many different cultures. Also, it has inspired men and women to fight against oppression in various times and places. While the narrative of the deliverance from Egypt is perhaps the most familiar aspect of Exodus, the establishing of the covenant at Mount Sinai and the obligations and legal codes that follow are also central to the book. The book of Exodus is the second book of the Pentateuch in the Hebrew Bible and the second book in the Torah of the Jewish Tanakh. The English title “Exodus” is derived from the Greek word that means “going out” or “departure.” In the Tanakh, the Hebrew title is “The book of ‘and these are the names’” or “Names.” This title comes from the first Hebrew word of the book, which in English begins, “And these are the names” (1:1).

Structure and Composition The book of Genesis ends with the extended family of Jacob (also named Israel, Gen. 32:28) living in Egypt. Joseph, the son of Jacob and Rachel, becomes an important official in Egypt, and his agricultural policies result in an abundance of food during famine conditions in the 56

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biblical scholars dispute this claim to single authorship and have offered various theories regarding the composition and redaction of the text. The book includes material from varied time periods and incorporates texts from different literary genres. Some of these genres stem from various oral traditions that were later written down and then woven together to construct the book in its present form. The majority of Exodus comes from three major written sources, including the Yahwist (J), Elohist (E), and Priestly (P) material. Some scholars find limited evidence for a separate E source. Thus, they join the Yahwist and Elohist into a combined JE source, although proponents of source analysis continue to debate this issue. Efforts to date the composition of the text are complex and disputed. Some scholars argue that parts of the text were composed as early as the eleventh century BCE and redacted in the postexilic period, while others argue for both postexilic composition and postexilic redaction.

Historical Issues In the book of Exodus, the people who are enslaved by the Egyptians are referred to as “Hebrews” and as “Israelites.” The terms are somewhat interchangeable, but “Hebrew” is used more often to distinguish the Hebrews from another ethnic group (e.g., Gen. 39:14; Exod. 1:19; 1 Sam. 4:6). Jacob, one of the patriarchs, is renamed Israel (Gen. 32:28), and his descendants are called the children of Israel or Israelites. The term “Israel” refers to both the people and geographic area that they inhabit within Canaan. Also, the geographic area “Israel” may refer to either the unified Israel of the united monarchy or to the northern kingdom of Israel during the divided monarchy. While scholars use biblical and extrabiblical materials together to attempt a historical reconstruction of the events and happenings in Israel, the biblical texts about Israel cannot be assumed entirely and accurately to reflect the historical Israel. For example, the Merneptah stele (ca. 1230 BCE), which is also called the Israel stele, commemorates the defeat of the Libyans by Pharaoh Mer-ne-Ptah. It may provide the first available written reference to Israel and suggests that “Israel” in some form existed within Canaan by the thirteenth century BCE. Yet it is unclear if the stele refers to Israel as a people or as a geographic area. Furthermore,

the mention of “Israel” in the stele does not confirm the particular events described in biblical texts. The book of Exodus is set in a biblical chronology that would place the events of the exodus at approximately 1300 BCE. Nevertheless, there is no archaeological evidence to corroborate the historicity of the events of the exodus. Some persons who are anxious to confirm the historicity of the events of the exodus point out that some of the miraculous events occur in nature and could have taken place. For instance, a low tide might explain the crossing of the sea, and red algae cause water to appear red in color like blood. Yet there is no compelling external evidence to support the notion of this literary text as historically accurate.

Women in Exodus The book of Exodus raises questions regarding the role and status of Israelite women. The text includes a mixed portrait of women and their power and influence. Exodus includes stories of women who are named and who speak and act independently. For example, both Zipporah and Miriam are strong women who exercise leadership in different ways. Yet Israelite women did not have full standing as members of the covenant community and were excluded from serving as priests. Feminist biblical scholars have focused attention on female characters in Exodus and have questioned the interpretation of these characters both as positive role models and as negative tools of patriarchy. Also, feminist biblical scholarship has examined the relationship between biblical texts and the social reality of ancient women. Since the Hebrew Bible is a literary production, scholars have difficulty in determining the extent to which these texts provide realistic depictions of the actual lives of ancient women. Using these texts to attempt a historical reconstruction of the lives of ancient women is difficult and controversial, since we do not know how these texts may relate to actual female experiences. For instance, Exodus mentions Israelite women who are skilled in spinning fabric (35:25; cf. Prov. 31; 2 Kgs. 23:7). Extrabiblical texts and cross-cultural ethnographic data confirm that the production of cloth was primarily a women’s role in the ancient world. Nevertheless, we do not have evidence regarding the role of Israelite women in cloth production or the

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place of these artisans within the economy or social structure. Thus, reconstructing the lives of these women is difficult. Furthermore, while the book of Exodus includes stories that feature women prominently, most scholars assume that biblical texts were written by and for men and preserve traditions that focus on men. Some scholars speculate that women may have had songs, stories, and ritual practices related to pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that were not part of the experiences or concerns of men within gendersegregated social contexts. Thus many women’s stories and women’s traditions may be lost to us. In contrast, Exodus includes the story of Shiphrah and Puah, who serve as midwives (1:15). Yet the text does not include information that would help us better to understand this gendered experience. Instead, this particular story

was preserved because it explains how male Hebrew babies survived Pharaoh’s attempt to kill them. Feminist biblical scholarship has engaged the book of Exodus using a variety of exegetical methods. In general, feminist interpretations of Exodus analyze power relations in the text, particularly as they relate to gender but also including ethnicity, class, and other categories of difference. Also, feminist readings of Exodus concentrate on women’s experiences. These experiences include those of female characters as well as those of flesh-and-blood women. Such readings highlight the portrayal of women and emphasize how female characters speak, act, and are named in the text. Additionally, some feminist readings draw attention to the ways in which interpretations of these texts have affected real women.

Comment Israelites in Egypt (Exod. 1–4) The descendants of Jacob number seventy when they arrive in Egypt. They multiply and fill the land of Egypt with language reminiscent of the fertility of creation in Genesis (Exod. 1:7; Gen. 1:28). In order to cope with the population growth of these foreigners, the king of Egypt devises four separate plans to address what he perceives as the potential political and military threat of the Israelites. This king is also called Pharaoh, but the text does not identify his name. First, he imposes forced labor on the Israelites. Second, he intensifies the forced labor with harsher treatment. Third, he orders two midwives to kill Hebrew boy babies. Fourth, he instructs the Egyptians to throw into the Nile every boy born to the Hebrews. Ironically, despite Pharaoh’s multiple plans, Moses, a Hebrew boy, is born, survives, and grows up to lead the Israelites out of Egypt. Several women play a role in Moses’ survival in the early chapters, but as some feminist scholars have observed, they fade into the background when Moses, the male deliverer, becomes an adult. The two midwives, Shiphrah and Puah, who are part of the Pharaoh’s third plan, are midwives to the Hebrew women, but one can translate the Hebrew text as either “Hebrew midwives” or “midwives to the Hebrews.” The

Septuagint and other versions treat the women as Egyptians. So the women could be Hebrews or Egyptians. Several arguments can be made to support the idea that the women are Hebrews. The names Shiphrah and Puah may derive from Semitic roots. Pharaoh may have ordered Hebrew women to kill Hebrew boys due to their proximity. Since these women would deliver the children of Hebrew women, they would be in the best position to kill the boys at birth. On the other hand, one could argue that the women are Egyptians. Perhaps Pharaoh would not have trusted such a mission to Hebrew women. The women claim to be familiar with births of both Egyptian and Hebrew women, which may suggest that they were Egyptians. The text depicts these women in a way that straddles the line between clear ethnic identities. This type of characterization intensifies in stories of Moses and the deliverance of the Hebrews from Egypt. Despite receiving orders from Pharaoh, the midwives disobey and let the boys live (1:17). Then, when Pharaoh confronts them, they claim that, unlike the Egyptian women, the Hebrew women give birth before the midwife arrives, which appears to be a lie. These women are in an important position that affects the political stability of Egypt. Their subversive activity allows the population growth to continue, and they themselves, as a result of their

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fear of God, are rewarded with families. The insubordination of these brave women allows the perceived Hebrew threat to grow. Their effective resistance strategy helps to support the eventual deliverance of the Hebrews. Like the midwives, women are instrumental in saving the baby Moses, who becomes the leader of the Israelites. Moses is the child of Jochebed and Amram, who are Levites (2:1, 6:20). Moses’ mother (unnamed in 2:1 but identified as Jochebed in 6:20) hides Moses for three months. Then she makes a basket for him and puts it in the river. Pharaoh’s daughter, having come down to bathe at the river, notices the basket. She says, “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children” (2:6). Presumably, she knows that Moses is a Hebrew child, due to the circumstances of Pharaoh’s order. The text does not mention any ethnic differences between Hebrews and Egyptians that one could detect by sight, such as physical features, hair texture, or clothing. Moses’ sister (unnamed here but identified as Miriam in Num. 26:59 and 1 Chr. 6:3) has watched the baby along the river and offers to find a nurse for the baby. Pharaoh’s daughter agrees, and ironically she consents to pay Moses’ biological mother to nurse her own child. After the child grows up, Moses’ biological mother brings him to Pharaoh’s daughter, who adopts him and names him “Moses.” The etymology of the name is disputed. It may derive from the Egyptian word “son” or from Hebrew verb “to draw out.” Moses is born a Hebrew but grows up in an Egyptian household. Again, the text is silent on any obvious physical characteristics that would have distinguished Hebrews and Egyptians. It seems that Moses is able to “pass” or to assume the identity of an Egyptian without difficulty, as ethnicity is a matter not simply of birth but also of socialization. Like the midwives, he is a deliverer of the Israelites (cf. Num. 11:12) whose ethnic identity is not clarified in the text. The literary motif of the endangered child appears in other ancient texts. For example, in the Akkadian story of Sargon (third millennium BCE), Sargon’s mother conceives a child and gives birth in secret. She puts the child into the basket and places the basket in the river. He is saved by a drawer of water who finds the baby when he dips his bucket. He adopts the baby, who still grows up to be king. This type of parallel points to the importance of oral traditions underlying the written biblical texts.

The Hebrew Bible does not provide a description of Moses’ childhood or upbringing. After an unspecified amount of time, Moses, presumably as an adult, sees an Egyptian beating a Hebrew. Moses kills the Egyptian and hides him in the sand. He may have intervened because he regards the beating as unjust, but his particular motivation for killing the Egyptian is unclear, as is his decision to kill rather than to intervene in some other manner. The narrator identifies the Hebrew as “one of his kinsfolk,” but Moses does not make any statements regarding his allegiances. Moreover, we do not know whether he is sensitive to the distress of the Hebrews in particular, because a few verses later he intervenes to save Midianite women (2:17). Because Moses “looked this way and that” (2:12) and conceals the body, he seems to regard his actions as illegal or improper in some way. Moses appears to be guilty of what we would call premeditated murder, but we do not know Moses’ motivation or intent. Still, this incident raises important questions regarding one’s ethical obligations to others and the appropriate use of violence. The next day, when Moses intervenes in a fight between two Hebrews, one challenges him and asks, “Do you mean to kill me as you killed the Egyptian?” (2:14). It is unclear if the Hebrew regards Moses as a Hebrew or as an Egyptian. In fear, Moses flees Egypt and goes to Midian. In Exodus, Midianites are portrayed positively, but in other texts, they are enemies of the Hebrews (Num. 25; 31:1; Judg. 6:1–10). Moses defends the daughters of the priest of Midian from shepherds who have driven them away, and then he waters the daughters’ flock. This priest has different names that may result from different Pentateuchal sources. Jethro (Elohist) and Reuel (Yahwist) are also referred to as Hobab (Priestly; Num. 10:29, Judg. 4:11). The daughters assume that Moses is Egyptian, but their reasons for doing so are not specified. Although Moses is biologically Hebrew, perhaps culturally he is marked as Egyptian due to his clothing, hairstyle, or language. This ability to “pass” highlights his in-betweenness in both the Israelite and Egyptian communities and illustrates the porous boundaries of ethnicity. While Moses is tending the flock of his father-in-law at Horeb (Yahwist; also called Sinai by the Elohist), he sees a bush that is burning but not consumed. In this theophany or appearance of the Divine, the Divine is

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identified as the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (3:6). Linking the God of the exodus with the God of Genesis identifies the God of the patriarchal promises with the God who delivers the Israelites. Having heard the cry of the Israelites, God promises to deliver them from Egypt and to give them the land of Canaan. In chapter 3 God reveals to Moses the divine name “I am who I am” (3:14). This cryptic name could also be translated in a future tense: “I will be who I will be.” Although it is given as the divine name, in Hebrew it is a verbal phrase, not a noun. In the following verse, the name is given as four Hebrew consonants, YHWH. This four-lettered name is called the Tetragrammaton, which is derived from the Greek and means “four-lettered.” Starting in the Second Temple period, Jews develop a custom of not pronouncing the divine name. When reading the Tetragrammaton, Jews pronounce an alternate Hebrew word such as “Adonai,” which means “my Lord.” Typically, the Yahwist uses the name “YHWH” to refer to the god of the Israelites, while the Elohist uses the name “Elohim.” In general, in English, “YHWH” is translated as “the Lord,” while “Elohim” is translated as “God.” These and other names are used to identify the god of the Israelites in the Hebrew Bible. Yet all of these sources present this deity as male. After revealing the divine name, the Lord instructs Moses on the events that will transpire in order to bring about the deliverance of the people. In contrast to the group of women who work together for deliverance in the opening chapters, the gender of the primary deliverers becomes male after chapter 4 and includes Moses, Aaron, and the Lord. As instructed, Moses and Aaron approach Pharaoh and request time off to celebrate a festival to YHWH (3:18; 5:1; 8:25). The time off is ostensibly to sacrifice to their god, but Moses deceives Pharaoh as part of the plan to take the Israelites out of Egypt (5:8–9). As in the story of the midwives, Moses seems to lie to Pharaoh in an effort to save the Israelites. The Lord explains that he knows Pharaoh will not let them go “unless compelled by a mighty hand” (3:19). Therefore, the Lord will bring about “wonders” in Egypt in order that Pharaoh will let them go (3:20). Further complicating the escape of the Israelites is the Lord’s hardening the heart of Pharaoh (4:21). This drawn-out process raises questions regarding divine power and human agency. In the text,

the Lord appears manipulative and controlling. He seems quite concerned with demonstrating his power, particularly his power over that of Pharaoh. Although Pharaoh also hardens his own heart (8:15), the text highlights the ultimate power of the Lord over the natural world and over human leadership. After being commissioned to lead the Israelites, Moses returns to Egypt with his wife and children. Along the way, the Lord “tries to kill him” (4:24). In this case, “him” may refer to Moses or to his son. It is not clear what would motivate the Lord to kill Moses or his son. Moses’ wife, Zipporah, cuts off her son’s foreskin and touches Moses’ “feet” (NRSV). Here, “feet” is used as a euphemism for genitals (cf. Ruth 3:7; Isa. 7:20). The Hebrew text is ambiguous here. It reads only “his” feet, which could refer to Moses’ genitals, her son’s genitals, or the genitals of the Lord. Circumcision is an important part of making a man a part of the Israelite covenant community (Gen. 17:9–26; 21:4; Lev. 12:3). Then Zipporah says, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” (4:25). This bizarre and enigmatic statement adds confusion to the already confusing text. She may be speaking to Moses or to the Lord. Zipporah has a major role in this curious incident. She is named, takes action, and speaks in this text. Once again, a woman saves Moses’ life. Also, she appears to perform a ritual function, which is unusual for a woman. The origins of this enigmatic story may be lost to us, but Zipporah’s role hints at possible priestly leadership roles for women that are not included in other biblical texts. Nevertheless, the book of Exodus restricts the priesthood to males at Sinai (Exod. 28–29).

Moses and Pharaoh (Exod. 5–12) As instructed, Moses and Aaron approach Pharaoh and request time off to celebrate a festival to YHWH. Pharaoh refuses and increases the Israelites’ work load by no longer providing straw to make bricks. The Israelites are angry with Moses, who in turn complains to the Lord. The Lord reassures Moses that the Israelites will be delivered, and as part of this reassurance YHWH again reveals the divine name. The Lord explains, “I am the Lord [YHWH]. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as God Almighty [El Shaddai] but by my name ‘the Lord’ [YHWH], I did not make myself known to them” (6:2–3). The meaning of “El Shaddai”

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is disputed, but it is traditionally translated as “God Almighty.” Yet some scholars have argued that the root of shaddai may link to the Hebrew word for breasts, which highlights maternal imagery for God as one who provides and who offers fertility (Gen. 28:3; 35:11). The genealogy in Exodus 6 interrupts the interaction of the Lord with Moses and Aaron. This genealogy focuses on the Levites and on Aaron. It includes the names of Moses’ parents, who were unnamed in Exodus 2. It includes the names of some of the women who marry into the lineage, but it does not include daughters in each family. The genealogy mentions that Shaul is the son of a Canaanite woman (6:15). Despite prohibitions against intermarriage in other texts (e.g., Exod. 34:15), the mention of a Canaanite within the genealogy provides an example of ethnic mixing among the Israelites and non-Israelites. The Lord instructs Moses that the Israelite women are to ask the Egyptian women for clothing and jewelry (3:21–22), and before the death of the firstborn, both men and women are instructed to ask for these items (11:2–3). When the Israelites leave Egypt, they follow these instructions (12:35–36). While the text has emphasized the harsh oppression of the Egyptians, this text gives an example of Egyptian generosity. They provide resources so that the Israelites do not leave empty-handed. As in the opening chapters, both Hebrew and Egyptian women play a role in the deliverance of Israel. Upon leaving Egypt, the Israelites number 600,000 men (12:37), but women and children are not included in this number. This group includes a “mixed crowd” (12:38) that presumably includes Egyptians and perhaps other peoples as well. The Israelites have a unique relationship to the Lord, who distinguishes Egypt and Israel (11:7). Yet the diversity among those who leave together suggests that, despite the Israelites’ particular notion of themselves as a people, there is an openness to inclusiveness within the community.

Exodus and the Wilderness (Exod. 13–18) When the Israelites leave Egypt, they do not take the route through the territory of the Philistines, although that is nearer. God thinks that the Israelites could be tempted to return to Egypt if they face war (13:17). Thus, the people are led toward “Red Sea” (13:18 NRSV). The

Hebrew here, yam suf, is better translated as “Sea of Reeds” despite its popular translation as “Red Sea.” There are several possibilities for the location of this sea, including the lakes and marshes near the Gulf of Aqaba or the Gulf of Suez. Given the difficulty in locating this body of water, it is also difficult to trace the Israelites’ route from Egypt to Canaan. Furthermore, it is unclear if these locations refer to actual sites. The Song of Moses (15:1–18) is one of the most ancient texts in the Hebrew Bible. It includes a number of archaic terms that suggest an early date. In the song, the Lord is a warrior god who makes his people victorious over their enemies. He controls the natural world, including the sea, and terrorizes other enemy kingdoms. In Psalm 74, God defeats the sea monster, Leviathan (Ps. 74:12–17), and in Isaiah, the Lord is remembered as defeating Rahab the dragon (Isa. 51:9–10). As a divine warrior, the Lord is similar to other ancient Near Eastern gods. For example, Baal is a Canaanite storm god who defeats Yamm and Nahar, gods of the sea and river respectively. In Enuma Elish, the Babylonian creation story, the god Marduk defeats Tiamat, the sea monster. These texts illustrate the ways in which the Hebrew Bible is not entirely unique but is, rather, part of ancient Near Eastern literature. While the notion of God as a divine warrior may seem disturbing to some readers, this militaristic image emphasizes God’s power and sovereignty. Within its ancient Near Eastern context, the Song of Moses does not focus on God as simply aggressive and violent. Instead, it celebrates God as in charge and in control of all creation. Following the Song of Moses, Miriam sings. She is described as a prophet and as the sister of Aaron (15:20). She leads the women with tambourines and with dancing. Traditionally, there was a custom that women would come out to welcome victorious warriors (Judg. 11:34; 1  Sam. 18:6–7), but the Israelites are not warriors but escapees in this instance. Miriam is one of the few women identified as a prophet in the Hebrew Bible. Other women include Deborah (Judg. 4:4), Huldah (2  Kgs. 22:14), Noadiah (Neh. 6:14), and the unnamed mother of Isaiah’s child (Isa. 8:3). While Miriam is named as a prophet, the text does not provide information on her leadership or her activity in using traditional modes of prophetic speech on behalf of the Deity. It may be that Miriam represents a form of female leadership that is

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not represented in other Hebrew Bible texts but may have been part of Israelite society. In Numbers 12, Miriam and Aaron have a dispute with Moses regarding his marriage to a Cushite women and regarding their leadership (12:1–2). Although Aaron is not punished for his impudence, Miriam is punished with an undetermined type of skin disease and is put out of the camp for seven days (12:14; cf. Deut. 24:8–9). This text hints at Miriam’s leadership due to the dispute with Moses. Yet it does not explain how or why Miriam and Aaron feel that their leadership, if it exists, is not respected. In Exodus 18, Jethro, Moses’ father-inlaw, offers advice to Moses on organizational management and leadership. He suggests that Moses handle major disputes and delegate minor issues to subordinate officials who will serve over groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens (18:21). Women are not included in leadership as officials in this text.

Revelation of the Law at Mount Sinai (Exod. 19–24) While the Israelites are encamped in the wilderness of Sinai, YHWH reveals the law to Moses at Mount Sinai, and Moses reports to the Israelites. In most cases, “Israelites” refers to both male and female Israelites, but women are excluded from observance of the law in this instance. The most obvious example takes place when the people are consecrated. As part of the instructions for consecration, Moses says, “Do not go near a woman” (19:15). Moses is instructing Israelite men to abstain from sex, which would make a man ritually impure (cf. Lev. 15:18 [P]; 1 Sam. 21:4), but he is not addressing women. This exclusion does not mean that women are permitted to transgress the law with impunity, but it does suggest that women are not treated as subjects. Nor are they full members of the community with the same obligations and responsibilities as men. Men are required to appear at the three major pilgrimage festivals, and the text specifies twice that it is the “males” who shall appear (23:17; 34:23). Women appear to be exempt from participation. Similarly, women are mentioned but not addressed directly in the Decalogue (20:1–17) or Ten Commandments, as they are commonly known. These texts are not set apart in any special way in the Hebrew text. The subheadings in many English Bibles are editorial additions.

A similar set of texts is found in Exodus 34 and in Deuteronomy 5 (cf. Lev. 19; Jer. 7). Different faiths and denominations have differences in how to order and to number these commandments. They are in the form of apodictic or unconditional laws, in contrast to conditional or case law that usually includes an “if . . . then” (e.g., Exod. 21:26). While ancient Israelite religion is often considered to be a form of monotheism, in some sense it might be better thought of not as strictly monotheism but as monolatry. Monolatry is the worship of a single god while acknowledging the existence of other gods. For example, the Decalogue reads, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery; you shall have no other gods before me” (Exod. 20:2–3). In Jewish tradition, this is the first commandment, while for Protestant Christians, it is the prologue to the Ten Commandments. Here “before me” can be translated also as “except for me” or “other than me.” Also, within the Covenant Code, Exodus 22:20 states, “Whoever sacrifices to any god, other than the Lord alone, shall be devoted to destruction.” These and other texts recognize the existence of other gods but require allegiance to YHWH alone. The other gods mentioned in this text could have included female deities, since female deities appear frequently in other ancient Near Eastern texts as well as in other parts of the Hebrew Bible (1 Kgs. 11:5, 33; 18:19; 2 Kgs. 23:4; Jer. 7:18; 44:17–25). These texts seem to acknowledge the existence of male deities even as they discourage Israel from worshiping them. In the Ten Commandments, women who are mothers are to be honored along with fathers (20:12; Lev. 19:3; Deut. 5:16). The length in the land that is promised may refer to either personal longevity or the length of time that the Israelites will remain in Canaan. Also, death is the result for anyone who strikes father or mother (21:15). Women are not addressed in the Decalogue. In Hebrew, the imperative or command forms are in the second person masculine singular. That is, the “you” who is addressed is male. The exclusion of women is obvious in the instruction not to covet. It specifies not to covet “your neighbor’s wife” (20:17; Deut. 5:21), which is clearly directed toward a male. It does not require that a woman not covet her neighbor’s husband. Exodus 20:18–23:33 is often called the “book of the covenant” or the Covenant Code

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(24:7). Many of the laws are similar to those found in the Babylonian Code of Hammurabi (second millennium BCE). Several segments of these legal codes relate especially to women. Among the laws relating to slavery is a stipulation regarding the selling of a daughter as a slave (21:7–11). If she does not please her master, he is not allowed to resell her. If he takes another wife, the daughter shall continue to retain the rights of a first wife. Otherwise she is set free. The daughter in question is an Israelite. While the book of Exodus involves the Israelites obtaining their freedom from the Egyptians, the Hebrew Bible does not support an antislavery agenda. The text is unconcerned with slavery of foreign people or of Israelites except regarding their payment and treatment. Slavery itself is not forbidden. This text reminds us of the difficulty in appropriating biblical texts for particular causes within our modern context. There is significant historical and cultural distance between contemporary peoples and the world reflected in the ancient text. In the ancient Near East, slavery was a legitimate institution that was embedded into the fabric of the culture and the economy. Readers who are citizens in modern democracies do not operate under the same presuppositions regarding the worth and rights of human beings. These texts are context-­ specific, and we are free to choose not to abide by these ancient practices. The law specifies that if a pregnant woman is injured during a fight and miscarries, the responsible party is to be fined. If further harm beyond the miscarriage takes place, then the law of retribution (Latin lex talionis), which requires “life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” shall apply (21:22–25; cf. Lev. 24:20; Deut. 19:21). Thus the punishment should be commensurate with the crime committed. If a man has sex with (“seduces,” NRSV) an unmarried woman (“virgin,” NRSV), he is required to pay her bride-price and to marry her. If her father refuses to give her to him, the father can require an amount equal to the brideprice for unmarried women (“virgins,” NRSV) (22:16–17; cf. Deut. 22:13–30). The exact nature of the sexual encounter is not specified in this text. The Hebrew verb, which the NRSV translates as “seduces,” can mean “entices,” “persuades,” or “deceives” (Deut. 11:16; 1 Kgs. 22:20; Ezek. 14:9). It implies a consensual encounter. In other instances, the Hebrew Bible

uses harsher language to convey the sense of a sexual assault (Deut. 22:25; 2 Sam. 13:14). The woman is an unmarried woman and her physical virginity is not a point of concern initially (cf. Num. 31:35; Judg. 11:39). The bride-price involves money or property that is paid to the father of the betrothed woman before the marriage (cf. Gen. 24:53; 31:15; 34:12). It is customary compensation for the loss to his household. If the father refuses to give her to him, the father is still paid, because the father has been damaged economically. Since the daughter is not a virgin, her marriage prospects may be hampered, which could affect the father’s getting paid the bride-price. Her virginity would make her more marriageable. Thus her virginity is an economic asset to her father. The law is silent on the woman’s desire to marry or her well-being. Exodus 22:18 states, “You shall not permit a female sorcerer to live.” While Deuteronomy states that “no one” may practice divination or cast spells (18:9–14), in Exodus the specific female grammatical form is used. It is possible that women are specified because they may have had a particular role in female cultic practices that were frowned upon by adherents of mainstream Yahwism. At the end of the Covenant Code, the Lord reiterates the promise to give the land of Canaan to the Israelites. The land that YHWH has promised to the Israelites is inhabited by at least six other groups: the Canaanites, the Hittites, the Amorites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, and the Jebusites (3:8, 17; 23:23). These people are to be rooted out in order that the Israelites may settle in their territory. After the crossing of the sea, the Israelites defeat the Amalekites, and the Lord tells Moses, “I will utterly blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven” (17:14). In chapter 23, the Lord promises to drive out the indigenous people of Canaan. While Exodus is often thought of as a text that supports liberation and freedom, that liberation is solely for the Israelites by the god of the Israelites. Furthermore, the Israelite deliverance is to be followed by genocide and forcible removal of the native peoples.

Instructions for the Sanctuary and Priesthood (Exod. 24:9–31:17) While on the mountain for forty days and nights Moses receives instructions for the

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construction of the tabernacle and the ark of the covenant, as well as instructions on consecration of priests and construction of priestly vestments. The tabernacle (“dwelling place” in Hebrew) will provide the Lord with a residence among the people, as indicated when he tells Moses, “I will dwell among the Israelites, and I will be their God” (29:45). Yet the golden calf incident, which threatens the presence of the Lord among the people (33:3), occurs before the Israelites can implement these instructions. Aaron and his sons are designated to serve as priests in perpetuity (29:9; 40:15). Thus women are excluded from service as priests. Also, women are not specifically mentioned as participating in the construction of the tabernacle. Nevertheless, women may have had a role in preparing garments for the priests and linens for the tabernacle. According to the Lord’s instructions, Aaron’s vestments are to be prepared by skilled workers (28:3). Since fabric production was largely the purview of women in the ancient Near East (Prov. 31; 2 Kgs. 23:7), it is possible that women could have been involved in making these vestments. Following the golden calf incident, female involvement becomes more explicit.

The Golden Calf and Its Aftermath (Exod. 31:18–34:35) For forty days and forty nights Moses is on Mount Sinai, where he receives instructions from YHWH (24:18). The text does not specify how much time has elapsed, but during this time, the people approach Aaron and ask him to make gods for them. Aaron instructs them to bring to him “the gold rings that are on the ears of your wives, your sons, and your daughters” (32:2). The text mentions only taking earrings from one’s wives and children. Yet in the following verse the people take off “their” earrings and bring them to Aaron (32:3). A Jewish midrash interprets the “people” in verse 3 as referring only to Israelite men. It contends that the women refused to give their earrings for idol worship. Stemming from this interpretation, women were rewarded for not participating in the construction of the golden calf. Thus it became a custom that women do not work during the holiday Rosh Chodesh (literally “Head of the Month”), a minor festival on the first day of each month, although men are permitted to work during the holiday.

Aaron constructs a calf from the gold. He gives this image credit for the people’s deliverance and claims, “These are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt!” (32:4). Yet Aaron conflates the calf and YHWH by building an altar before the calf and proclaiming that the next day would be a festival to YHWH (32:5). The Israelites are forbidden to construct idols (20:4, 23) or to worship idols (20:5; 23:24). It is unclear whether they are both constructing and worshiping a foreign god, or they are worshiping a representation of YHWH. Regardless of the particular commandment or commandments that they have violated, they have broken their covenant quite soon after making it. Aaron chooses to create an idol in the form of a calf. The calf is an important symbol of strength and virility in Canaanite religion. The calf was linked with the supreme god, El, who is sometimes called the bull god. Also, the Canaanite storm god, Baal, is often depicted riding on a bull. Jeroboam I (ca. tenth c. BCE), the first king of the northern kingdom of Israel, makes two golden calves, one in Bethel and the other in Dan. Jeroboam uses the same words as Aaron when he sets up these alternate worship site to Jerusalem: “Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt” (1  Kgs. 12:28). Although Israelites are warned not to be like other peoples, we find instances in the Hebrew Bible in which the worship of the Israelite god is not entirely distinct from or devoid of Canaanite practices. The people seem to be comfortable with mingling their worship of the Lord with worship of other gods. During this golden calf festival, the people offer burnt offerings, make sacrifices, and eat and drink, just as they did when cutting the covenant with the Lord in chapter 24. Yet during this festival the people “rose up to revel” (32:6). The Hebrew root for the term “revel” is also the root of the name “Isaac,” which is a play on the laughter of Abraham (Gen. 17:17) and Sarah (Gen. 18:12–13, 15) at the notion of having a son in their old age. The root has a sexual connotation (Gen. 21:9; 26:8; 39:14, 17) and suggests a grown-up get-together with adult sexual activity, which implies the participation of both men and women. The Lord is angry about the people’s idolatry and sends Moses back down the mountain. The Lord plans to consume them, but Moses intercedes. Moses suggests that destroying the

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Israelites would make the Lord look bad in front of the Egyptians. Also, he reminds the Lord of the covenant with the Israelite male ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Israel/Jacob (cf. 6:3). Then the Lord changes his mind about the planned destruction. This phrase can also be translated “He regretted or relented or repented of the evil” (32:14; cf. Gen. 6:6; 1 Sam. 15:11; Jonah 3:10). The notion of the Deity having a humanlike feeling of regret contrasts with other texts in which the Deity is more transcendent and mystical. Some scholars argue that these differences are the result of different sources, and they attribute to the Yahwist source these and other Pentateuchal texts in which the Deity exhibits anthropomorphic behavior. When Moses and Joshua approach the camp, there is so much commotion that Joshua thinks that an enemy has invaded the camp, but Moses clarifies that it is not war but a party going on. Moses throws down the two tablets of the covenant that had the writing of God engraved on them. Moses burns the calf, grinds it into powder, mixes it with water and makes the Israelites drink the concoction. When Moses confronts Aaron, Aaron blames the people. Surprisingly, despite Aaron’s lack of leadership, he is not punished (cf. Miriam in Num. 12). Moses calls, “Who is on YHWH’s side? Come to me!” (32:26). The Levites gather and they kill three thousand people (32:28). Their action results in their ordination to the Lord’s service and a blessing, although it has come “at the cost of a son or a brother” (32:29). Moses again attempts to have the Lord forgive the sin of the people, but the Lord says, “Whoever has sinned against me I will blot out of my book” (32:33; cf. Ps. 69:28/Heb. Ps. 69:29; Isa. 4:3). The book that the Lord refers to may be a type of genealogy or list of the names of the living. Mesopotamian gods had a similar “Tablet of Destinies” that listed the fates of those subject to the deities. In the New Testament, the “book of life” becomes a metaphor for salvation (Rev. 3:5). After the massacre by the Levites, the Lord sends a plague on the people (32:35). The text adds the justification for the plague by specifying “because they made the calf—the one that Aaron made” (32:35). In this way, the text holds both the people and Aaron responsible for the golden calf. At the tent of meeting the Lord would speak with Moses “face to face, as one speaks to a friend” (33:11 [E]). This tent, which is outside

of the camp, has a different placement than the tent of meeting with the tabernacle. The difference may be due to different sources, with the Priestly source including the tent of meeting with the tabernacle (cf. Num. 12:4, 8). Moses’ speaking with the Lord is inconsistent with the following section in which the Lord, responding to Moses’ request, says that Moses cannot see the Lord (33:20). In order to reconcile these texts, some contend that the Lord’s “face” was not a physical manifestation but a representation of the Lord in some way. Without resorting to such contortions, one can simply acknowledge that the texts offer multiple and conflicting traditions regarding the Lord and the form that he takes. Under instructions from the Lord, Moses cuts two replacement stone tablets, which are described as both “the terms of the covenant” and the ten “words” or commandments (34:28; Deut. 4:13). In contrast to the Ethical Decalogue in Exodus 20, this text is sometimes described as the Ritual or Cultic Decalogue, because it focuses on worship practices. Exodus 34 mentions the dangers of interacting with the Canaanites. Intermarriage will result in idolatry, as their daughters will “prostitute themselves to their gods,” and in turn will make the Israelites’ sons “also prostitute themselves to their gods” (34:16). This text uses imagery of gender and ethnicity to discuss safeguards for mainstream Yahwism. In another theophany on Mount Sinai, the Lord describes himself as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (34:6) among other positive qualities, but also punishing. The violence inflicted by the Lord against the Egyptians, the Canaanites, and even the Israelites may seem difficult to reconcile with the notion of a god who cares for and is concerned with creation. While the Deity in the Hebrew Bible is often caricatured as angry and cruel, in fact, the Hebrew Bible includes multiple portraits of a deity, which range from forgiving to wrathful, even within the same story. It is impossible to narrow such rich literature into a singular image. In the aftermath of the golden calf incident, the Lord renews the covenant with the Israelites and again promises to drive out the residents of Canaan. The people are to tear down the Canaanite altars and to cut down their “sacred poles [asherim]” (34:13). These asherim were wood cultic objects that were part of the worship of the Canaanite goddess Asherah. While

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the asherim are regarded as improper, in several instances Israelites incorporate them into their worship of the Lord (Deut. 16:21; Judg. 6; 1 Kgs. 21; 2 Kgs. 21:7). Also, based on inscriptions from archaeological sites at Kuntillet ‘Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qôm, Israelites may have regarded Asherah as the Lord’s consort. Thus some speculate that goddess worship may have been practiced by Israelites alongside of Yahwism and that it may have been part of female-centered worship practices (Jer. 44:17–19).

Construction of the Sanctuary and Priesthood (Exod. 35:1–40:38) After the golden calf incident, the Israelites begin construction of the tabernacle as God has instructed. Women have multiple roles in these final chapters. For example, women spin yarn and linen for the tabernacle, and they are specifically referred to as “skilled women” (35:25–26). Both men and women bring offerings for the construction of the tabernacle, and due to the abundance of offerings both men and women are prohibited from bringing additional offerings (36:6). Women serve at the entrance to the tent of meeting (38:8), but the text does not detail the nature of their service (cf. 1 Sam. 2:22). In the closing chapter, Moses alone assembles the tabernacle (40:17–33). The book concludes with God occupying the tabernacle

(40:34–38). Nevertheless, Moses does not build the Lord’s dwelling place without the benefit of the work of others. As in the beginning of Exodus, Moses requires women to accomplish his task. Women are intimately involved in the activities that ensure that God will dwell among his people. Bibliography

Ackerman, Susan. “Why Is Miriam Also among the Prophets (and Is Zipporah among the Priests?)” Journal of Biblical Literature 121 (2002): 47–80. Dozeman, Thomas B., ed. Methods for Exodus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Langston, Scott M. Exodus through the Centuries. Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Meyers, Carol. Exodus. The New Cambridge Bible Commentary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Propp, William H. C. Exodus 1–18: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 2. New York: Doubleday, 1999. ———. Exodus 19–40: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 2. New York: Doubleday, 2006.

Miriam and Her Interpreters Elaine James

musical instrument and leading the women in song and dance. In reading the Exodus tradition, patristic exegetes preferred to highlight the role and integrity of Moses, and so Miriam largely slips out of view in theological interpretation. This bias toward Moses is also evidenced in the frescoes from the Jewish synagogue at Dura Europos (third c. CE). A panel that depicts Moses’ infancy shows Moses’ sister passing the baby from Pharaoh’s daughter in the river into the arms of another woman on the shore. But at the depiction of passage through the Red Sea, Moses and Aaron appear, with no representation of Miriam at all. There are hints, though, that the tradition surrounding Miriam may at one time have been larger than what we now have: In one fragmentary manuscript from the Dead Sea Scrolls, in a somewhat expanded text from the Pentateuch, there is a psalm of praise that is apparently attributed to Miriam (4QRPc6). While the text is broken and incomplete, it suggests that Miriam, like David, may have been ascribed an important role in worship traditions, and it points to the possibility that there once existed a body of songs and psalms ascribed to women that has not survived. Christian tradition will come to interpret Miriam as a prototype of Mary (Mary in Greek is Mariam). Both figures have crucial roles in bringing redemption (through Moses, and through Jesus, whom the NT describes as the new Moses), and both women sing a song of triumph praising God for overturning the powers of the world (Exod. 15:21; Luke 1:46–55). Ambrose, for example, connects Mary with Miriam in his treatise on virginity; he extols Mary’s purity and imagines Miriam welcoming her into heaven with a victorious song, timbrel in hand (De virginibus, 2.2.17). In medieval Judaism, there emerges an emphasis on Miriam’s liturgical leadership, and particularly her dancing. The four extant fourteenth-century Spanish Passover seder

Miriam is a prophet and leader alongside her brother Moses during the exodus and wilderness wanderings. Tradition holds that Miriam is the unnamed sister who saves the infant Moses from death (Exod. 2:4–8), since two genealogies list Aaron, Moses, and Miriam as the only children of Amram (Num. 26:59; 1 Chr. 5:29 [NRSV 6:3]). Her actions are bold and loyal, as the girl stands guard over the baby. In Exodus 15:20–21 she is identified as a prophet and leads the women in song and dance in celebration of the triumph over Pharaoh’s armies after the crossing of the Red Sea. In Numbers, however—the other major source for traditions about Miriam—the question of who can legitimately lead the people becomes a contentious issue. Amid accounts of the Israelites’ grumbling in the wilderness, Miriam and Aaron speak against Moses, and two reasons are given for their rebellion: first, “because of the Cushite woman whom he had married”; and second, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses? Has [the Lord] not spoken through us also?” (Num. 12:1–2). God overhears them and punishes Miriam with a skin disease, of which she is healed only after Moses’ intervention and a period of seven days’ quarantine outside the camp. After this, Miriam is not heard from again, except in the mention of her death (Num. 20:1–2). In the history of interpretation, Miriam does not receive a great deal of attention. Other biblical texts mention her in passing, either in connection with her leadership alongside Moses and Aaron (Mic. 6:4) or, in the case of Deuteronomy 24:9, in conjunction with skin diseases that require purification. Treatments of Miriam by later interpreters tend to focus on one of these two strains: they emphasize either her liturgical presence (following the Exodus tradition) or her rebellion (following Numbers). Of the two, her prophetic, liturgical leadership at the exodus is far more commonly evoked, and is often symbolized in the arts by her holding a

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guides—the Haggadot—include illuminations of women dancing. The Golden Haggadah, from Catalonia, depicts Miriam holding a timbrel, joined by young maidens dancing and playing contemporary musical instruments (folio 15). Bible illustrations similarly represent Miriam embodying motion, swaying her hips in corporeal worship, as in “Miriams Tanz” from the 1360 Bulgarian Psalter. This theme is taken up in the mystical Spanish text, the Zohar, which describes Miriam as performing her dance in the courts of heaven (3167b), and in commentary on Exodus 15:20, leading the women’s choir of heaven in singing the Song of the Sea three times each day. This tradition highlights the importance of physically enacted worship practices, and may point to historical women’s worship traditions that have been overlooked or forgotten. The Exodus tradition of Miriam continues in the visual arts. In a Sistine Chapel fresco (attributed to Cosimo Rosselli), the drowning of Pharaoh’s army is dramatically depicted, and Moses and Aaron stand on the shore in triumph, Miriam kneeling between them, playing a psaltery (a medieval stringed instrument). Contemporary artists too focus on her

musicianship: in one of his Bible illustrations, Marc Chagall depicts a statuesque Miriam with upraised hands, each holding a tambourine (Plate 35, 1958). Phillip Ratner’s sculptural depiction of Miriam shows her head thrown back in a deep backbend as she worships God. Her triumphal song is a text for musical compositions as well, as for example Schubert’s Miriams Siegesgesang, composed for soprano, mixed chorus, and piano (Op. 136). Representations of the Numbers tradition are far less popular. In the third century the Apostolic Constitutions took her skin disease to be a symbolic warning of inevitable punishment against those who would instigate schism in the church (6.1.1). A miniature from a History Bible from Utrecht depicts the scene of Aaron and Miriam complaining and being rebuked by God (Alexander Master, 1430). A sixteenthcentury Bible from Strassburg dramatizes the scene, depicting Miriam with a monstrous outstretched hand kneeling below Aaron, whose hands are folded in a gesture of supplication before an angry Moses (Wolf Köpfl, 1532). Miriam’s death (Num. 20:1–2) report hints at a connection between the Exodus and Numbers

Miriam leads the women in song and Moses produces water for the people in Bitter Water and Miriam’s Song, a woodcut by an unknown artist from Bibell, das ist, alle Bücher Alts und News Testaments nach alter in Christlicher Kyrchen gehabter by Johann Dietenberger (1582).

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traditions: when Miriam, whose life has been associated with water—from Moses on the Nile, to the celebration at the exodus, to the finding of wells (Exod. 15:22–27)—dies, the water in the wilderness dries up. Pseudo-Philo writes, “And these are the three things which God gave his people for the sake of three persons, that is, the well of the water of Mara for Maria’s [Miriam’s] sake, and the pillar of cloud for Aaron’s sake, and the manna for the sake of Moses. And when these three came to an end, those three gifts were taken away from them” (Biblical Antiquities, 20:8). According to a midrash, “Miriam’s Well” miraculously accompanied the people for their forty years’ wandering by virtue of her prophetic eminence (Legends of the Jews, 3, 50–54). A sixteenth-century Bible illustration by Dietenberger makes this connection explicit. In it, Moses strikes a rock, while Miriam leads the women in song and dance beside them. Among Jewish feminists, Miriam’s Well has become a symbol of female fortitude and

leadership. To ritualize her role, sometimes a second cup, called Miriam’s cup, is added to the Passover dinner table, filled with water to symbolize the miracle of Miriam’s well. Such practices honor the role of Miriam in the exodus, her importance as Moses’ sister and as a prophet in her own right, and highlights the past and present contributions of women to Judeo-Christian tradition. Bibliography

The Biblical Antiquities of Philo. Edited by Harry M. Orlinsky. Translated by M. R. James. New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1971. Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Trible, Phyllis. “Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows.” Bible Review 5.1 (1989): 170–90.

Leviticus Hannah K. Harrington

Introduction eligibility (Lev. 21–22), and the calendar of holy days and years with attending rituals (Lev. 23–25). Two short narratives are included as well: the untimely deaths of Aaron’s sons who offered “strange fire” in the sanctuary (10:1–11), and the case of the blasphemer (24:10–23), all of whom were killed by divine action. The book ends with blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience (Lev. 26) and an appendix on sacred vows and dedications (Lev. 27). Consideration of the book’s date and audience is at the heart of contemporary scholarship on Leviticus. The book includes traditions that claim to be Mosaic (e.g., God speaks to Moses from inside the tabernacle, 1:1; some laws were given at Mount Sinai, 26:46; 27:34), and in antiquity the book was often referred to as “the book of Moses” (Ezra 6:18; Mark 12:26). Many of the rituals prescribed in Leviticus, for example, sacrifices and festivals, are presupposed by First Temple authors (Lev. 23:5; Josh. 5:11). Further, modern scholars have argued for the antiquity of many of the cultic rites by comparison with neighboring cultures of the biblical period. At the same time, there is no doubt that the book reflects a long history of editing and compilation. Critical scholars recognize two large blocks of material in the book, the first being the Priestly Writings, or simply P (Lev. 1–16), part of a larger set of cultic material also apparent in other parts of the Pentateuch, primarily in Numbers. The second block is known as the Holiness Code, or H (Lev. 17–26), because of its repeated calls for all Israel, not just the priests, to be holy (e.g., 19:2; 20:7–8, 26; 21:8,

Leviticus, the third book of the Pentateuch, treats matters that are the responsibility of the Levitical priests (descendants of Levi through Aaron, the high priest), although much of the book is addressed to the laity as well. The title is taken from the Latin Vulgate, which translates the Greek Septuagint’s Levitikon. The Hebrew title, VaYikra, “And he called,” follows Jewish tradition to name books after their first word(s). It reflects the opening sentence, where YHWH calls to Moses from inside the sanctuary. The early rabbis considered Leviticus a priestly manual and called the book Torat Kohanim, “Instruction of the Priests.” Indeed, several instructions within the book begin with the formula: “This is the instruction for . . .” (e.g., the burnt offering, 6:8; cf. 6:14, 24; 7:1). Nevertheless, most of the book is addressed to all Israel. From a narrative point of view, the story of Leviticus begins at the Israelite camp at Mount Sinai a little over a year after the divine revelation described in Exodus 19–24. YHWH speaks to Moses from the newly constructed sanctuary and gives specific instructions for its operation. The giving of the entire law runs from Exodus 20:1 to Numbers 10:10, and the laws of Leviticus stand significantly in the center of this corpus. The book’s main concerns are the maintenance of holiness among Israel, in both its cultic and its ethical dimensions. To this end, the book details the proper workings of the cult, including prescriptions for sacrifices (Lev. 1–7), the inauguration of the priesthood (Lev. 8–10), ritual purity (Lev. 11–15), the Day of Atonement (Lev. 16), eating meat (Lev. 17), sexual and social relations (Lev. 18–20), priestly 70

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23; 22:9, 16, 32). Chapter 27, which treats vows and dedicated items, functions as an appendix. It is likely that the compiler of H also edited the entire book of Leviticus (so Milgrom). Most scholars place the final product in the Persian period (although some argue even for a Hellenistic context). Leviticus was certainly prominent during the early Second Temple period and played a strong role in shaping Israel’s self-identification. It may have been used to combat narrow modes of thinking about holiness and purity as the entitlement of only a small segment of Israel, which considered the people in general as impure, simply because they were outside of the privileged group. Texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls (such as the Temple Scroll and other legal texts), as well as many passages of the New Testament, show that intimate knowledge of Leviticus’s rules was shared by the priests of the Second Temple period. Even after the destruction of the Second Temple, the book remained central in rabbinic circles, and until today children begin their Torah study with this book.

Scholars have wondered why, in an important collection of national origins such as the Pentateuch, the central core preserves a lengthy catalogue of cultic rituals. While the prescriptions of the cult may appear formulaic and dry at first glance, upon further investigation they reveal theological principles that characterize the relationship between YHWH and his people. These continue to have significance for all faith communities who hold Leviticus as part of Scripture. The instruction to eat the thanksgiving offering for well-being in one day or forfeit it (7:15), for example, is the way the law encourages fellowship between the offerer and friends and relatives who will be invited to the sacred meal. Similarly, the laws separating pure and impure animals for Israel’s diet seem incomprehensible and unnecessary, but they force Israel’s separation from non-Israel and protect the nation from absorption into other cultures (20:24–26). The writer offers no lengthy treatise explaining these matters but simply sets forth well-crafted rituals and requirements that will produce the desired results.

Comment Holiness The overarching theme of Leviticus is the pursuit and maintenance of holiness in Israel. “Holiness” (Heb. kedushah) can be defined, on the one hand, as YHWH himself. (Note: masculine pronouns are used for YHWH in this article to reflect the way in which Leviticus genders YHWH as masculine.) Holiness is what he is that no one else can ever be, since his essence is completely different. He is supreme in perfection and power, yet he is also unfailingly good and concerned with the welfare of his people. Like others in the ancient world, Israel worships its God through a cult, that is, a system of sacrifices offered at a sanctuary through priestly agents. In this way, Israel maintains a working relationship with YHWH as a people who belong to him and reflect his holiness. The sons of Aaron, the priests (Heb. kohanim), function as YHWH’s representatives to the people and the mediators in this relationship. They are the only ones who may enter the sanctuary, tend to its sacred objects, and offer sacrifices on the bronze altar in its court. But this is no priestly

secret society; they are also commanded to teach Israel “the statutes” (10:10–11). In order for YHWH to be in residence among Israel, he must have his “own space,” a high-voltage area that is free of impurity. The tabernacle (Heb. ohel mo’ed) and its sacred objects, already set up in Exodus 25–40, are assumed by the writer of Leviticus. The impurities of Israel, both ritual and moral, contaminate this space, even though the laity may not enter it, and sacrificial blood is the means of purgation and purification (17:11). The people must bring expiatory offerings to God’s house (Heb. qorban, “sacrifice,” comes from the verb “to bring near”) to appease the Deity after their inadvertent violations and to purify his house with the lifeblood of an animal that substitutes for that of the sinner. One can think of the animal’s blood as a kind of spiritual detergent or disinfectant that makes the sacred space clean and holy again. Altogether there are five types of sacrifices: burnt, grain, well-being, purification, and guilt. The burnt offering, although used for various purposes throughout Scripture, is primarily

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a habitual twice-daily sacrifice on the bronze altar. A large animal is to be burnt to its embers morning and evening in order to keep the altar fire burning and atonement continuous for Israel (6:12–13). According to Leviticus 9:24, this fire originated from YHWH himself. The duty of Israel’s priests is to maintain this fire and keep it going for the needs of the cult. The grain offering is usually an accompanying offering to the blood sacrifices but may be used for atonement if the sinner is too poor to offer an animal. Well-being sacrifices are eaten by offerers, priests, and friends to mark the completion of a vow or simply to give thanks to God for particular blessings. Purgation (often called “sin”) offerings provide purification of the sanctuary against unintentional moral and ritual impurity. Guilt (or “reparation”) offerings are offered after one has committed “sacrilege” (Heb. ma’al), including improper handling of sacred things or false oaths using the divine name. Also, wrongful action against the property of another person is taken personally by YHWH and constitutes ma’al. Repentance and restitution with a fine in cases of violation of another person’s (man or woman) property is required before God will accept any sacrifice. The sacrificial system is designed to rectify inadvertent transgressions and pollutions against God, his sanctuary, and people. Atonement is not guaranteed by the mechanics of the rituals. Rather, confession and repentance are required (5:5). According to Numbers, defiant sinners, who will not repent, are to be excised from Israel (Num. 15:30–31). Yom Kippur is a national day of atonement and purification of the sanctuary from inadvertent sins and impurities that might have been overlooked throughout the year (Lev. 16:33–34). Although no human can truly be holy like God, paradoxically Israel is commanded by Leviticus, “Be holy, for I, YHWH, your God am holy” (19:2; cf. 11:44). On the surface, this is a conundrum. Yet it is YHWH’s way of designating Israel as belonging to himself and requiring the people to maintain their identification with him. To this end, Israel does not aspire to divinity but rather imitatio Dei, the human reflection and imitation of the divine character. Thus the pursuit of holiness is not limited to cultic laws of ritual and sacrifice but also requires ethics. The task of maintaining ethics is explained in the holiness traditions of the latter part of Leviticus. Here the command to be holy (19:2)

is placed between a list of commands regarding suitable sexual partners (Lev. 18) and a section regulating social ethics (19:3–37). The most famous of these laws is “Love your neighbor as yourself ” (19:18b), quoted by Jesus as one of the two greatest commandments, the other being to love God (Matt. 22:39; Mark 12:31). Leviticus 19:14 orders Israel not to insult the deaf or obstruct the blind on account of one’s fear of God. Thus YHWH takes personally Israelites’ treatment of each other, and improper interrelationships will diminish holiness. Even holding a grudge and withholding compassion will obstruct holiness (19:18a). Holiness also permeates time. In addition to the Day of Atonement, Leviticus provides a calendar of sacred times, including the Sabbath (Lev. 23–25). Most of these holy days are festivals marking important moments in the agricultural cycle. The people give the best of the crops to God via his agents, the priests, and celebrate the bounty of the land together. God is the owner of the land, and they are his fortunate tenants who are promised crops and safety as long as they are obedient to his commandments. Giving back the firstfruits and prescribed portions to him is part of their duty. The Sabbath year (25:1–7) and the Jubilee (25:8–55) are also important periods of time and affect the “holy land.” Leviticus 25 is the most explicit statement in the Torah guaranteeing the right of Israel to the land of Canaan. The land is owned by YHWH, who has given his tenant Israel the right to live on the land. Along with this privilege comes the responsibility of stewardship. Every seventh year the land enjoys a “Sabbath rest” and lies fallow. In the Jubilee, the fiftieth year, all debts are forgiven, slaves are released, and land returns to its original owner. This institution preserves the original land promise to Israel according to its tribal allocations and prevents monopoly by greedy landowners and permanent confiscation of family homesteads. It also functions as an early welfare system that prevents lifelong slavery for debtors who might be forced to sell themselves or family members into slavery to repay what they owed to a creditor. At first glance, it might appear that women do not play a role in Leviticus, since they are ineligible for the priesthood, which was limited to the male descendants of Aaron. However, the vast majority of this book is not addressed just to priests, but also includes the laity. Its major

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concerns of holiness and purity are the responsibility of all Israel, men and women, a trait that has been called “the democratization of holiness.” Unlike in most other ancient cultures, the whole community and even the land are included in this quest and responsibility.

Purity Like the sanctuary, the bodies of Israel must be kept pure, although at a lower degree of purity. The human being is susceptible, not only to moral infractions that pollute the sanctuary, but also to various ritual impurities, which, if not rectified, will also pollute the sanctuary and community; thus Israel is commanded to purify itself. Ritual purification is not for health or sanitary reasons but, rather, marks the difference between the sacred and the profane, and psychologically prepares the individual to interact with holiness. Also, ritual cleansing symbolizes the moral purity required of YHWH’s people and reinforces the distinction between them and others. Significantly, throughout the Hebrew Bible the word tahor (“pure” or “clean”) rarely refers to physical cleanness but is often used in a figurative sense to indicate moral uprightness and ethical goodness (Job 4:17; 15:14). Rites of passage and purification are common across the globe. Biological changes in life—for instance, birth and death—are times of great concern and thus are marked appropriately by special purity rituals. But while many peoples of the ancient Near East conceived of impurity as a demonic force that had to be appeased and curtailed, Israel’s impurity was considered a byproduct of the human condition. Purity provides a foundation for holiness; the latter cannot exist without the former. While holiness is the active divine force, purity is a state of being. The specific ritual impurities that threaten Israel’s holiness are discussed in Leviticus 11–15 (also cf. Num. 19) and can be outlined in three categories: death, scale disease, and sexual emissions. Few of these laws are direct prohibitions; rather they concern temporary conditions of the body, most of which are part of the normal course of life. Nevertheless, according to the biblical system, they defile the Israelite community and threaten the sanctity of the sanctuary if not properly purified (Num. 19:20). Impurity related to death is addressed in Leviticus 11 by means of a catalogue of non­ kosher animals that are defiling when dead. Not

only may their carcasses not be eaten (see below on “Food”), but even touching them or having their bodies in contact with many household items can communicate impurity. Since coming into contact with a human corpse also transmits impurity, in some cases only the closest kin prepare the body for burial (21:1–4). Becoming impure is a part of being human. One must care for the dead, and sometimes contact with unclean dead animals is unavoidable. Leviticus does not treat this impurity as a wrongful act, but it does insist that a person take steps to purify what has been made impure. When comparing Israel and her neighbors, one is struck by the universality of certain taboos; becoming impure is part of being human. For Greeks and Romans, as for Jews, death was the greatest impurity and had to be kept away from the sacred realm. Artemis abandons Hippolytus on his deathbed with the words, “Farewell. Sacred law forbids me to look upon the dead, or stain my eye with the exhalation of death” (Eur., Hipp., 1437ff.). In Greece, contact with death temporarily excluded a person from worshiping the gods. In the play Antigone Sophocles describes scraps of an unburied corpse being dropped by birds of prey upon sacrificial altars, dousing the sacred fire and dooming the city (Soph., Ant., 999–1015). Scale disease, with no relationship to modern leprosy, was one of the severest ritual impurities, and two chapters are relegated to its symptoms, contagion, and purification (Lev. 13–14). The sight of a person with extreme psoriasis, with skin peeling off, is a picture of decay, an image of living death. The condition can also exist in fabrics and houses infested by mold and fungus, and affected areas must be torn out. Throughout the ancient world, scale disease was considered a severe pollution. The Babylonians regarded it as a divine curse requiring immediate ostracization of the diseased person from society in order to avoid disaster. The Greeks too regarded scale disease as the result of a divine curse. In Jewish tradition, as well, the disease was definitely considered a punishment from God (Lev. 14:34; Num. 12:11–12; 2 Sam. 3:29; 2 Chr. 26:33; 4Q266–272; 1QH 1:32; t. Neg. 6:7; b. Arakh. 16a; Lev. Rab. 17:3; 18:4). The extensive rites prescribed for purification were not curative, however, only purificatory. Just as the curse came from God, so healing had to be entreated from him via repentance. Then the purification rituals could be employed.

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Sexual discharges from both men and women were considered polluting in Israel. Leviticus 12 and 15 detail both abnormal discharges, such as gonorrhea and abnormal menstruation, and normal discharges, such as seminal emissions and blood flows resulting from childbirth and menstruation. Individuals engaged in purification rituals after the cessation of their discharges. Ritual purification is thus a rite of passage. The initial “normal condition” has been breached, and thus the impure person has been separated from the community. Purification rituals provide the way back into the community and restoration to the “normal condition.” Depending on the degree of impurity, uncleanness is removed by sacrifices, ablutions (e.g., immersion in water), sprinkling with special mixtures, and waiting for sunset. Blood and fire are also used for certain purifications (Lev. 14:6; Num. 31:21–23). Leviticus indicates that spring water or a natural pool large enough to cover the body is good for purification (11:36; 15:13–16). The rabbis explain that only water flowing directly from its source, such as rain or spring water, is capable of purifying from impurity, because it is given directly by the Holy One. No human intervention, such as drawing out or pouring water in vessels, is allowed for ritual immersion (m. Miq. 8:5). Although no “immersion pools” (Heb. miqva’ot) have been discovered from First Temple times, many have been uncovered from the Second Temple period. Archaeologists report that these pools were cut into bedrock, deep enough for complete immersion, contained steps leading to the bottom, and were often filled by means of channels that carried rain or spring water. Stepped pools large enough for full immersion have been found in many places, including the Hasmonean palaces at Jericho, Herod’s palaces, the Upper City in Jerusalem, Qumran, and synagogues and ordinary homes in Jerusalem, Sepphoris, Gamla, and Masada. What then is the meaning of Israel’s impurity system, and how does it reinforce notions of holiness in contrast to its neighbors? As suggested above, much of the implicit symbolism associated with the purity system has to do with the contrast between life and death. The corpse is the most impure item in the system. Even items secondarily contaminated by death and animal carcasses are ritually polluting. The person afflicted with scale disease appears to be a visibly decaying person, and thus a constant

reminder to the living of the realm of death. Sexual flows that create life, that is, menstrual blood and semen, are impure when they waste away from the body. Indeed, the most common cause of extended bleeding outside of a woman’s period, and one of the most severe impurities, is bleeding from a miscarriage. Thus, just as Deuteronomy urged the Israelites to “choose life” instead of death (Deut. 30:19), the observance of the purity laws was a way of embodying the value of life in everyday activities.

Women’s Issues The pursuit of holiness and purity is not just a priestly concern but a mandate that rests on the entire nation. Holiness must be lived out, not just in the sanctuary but also in the home and in interpersonal relationships. As Tamara Cohn Eskenazi puts it, “In Leviticus, a person’s body, the sanctuary and the community each constitute a microcosm of the universe in its sacred aspect. Each reflects and has an impact upon the larger, integrated whole” (Eskenazi, 567). Despite the preponderance of instructions for the priests, a men-only cadre, many matters treated in Leviticus are, as it turns out, of special interest to women. Some of the most important of these topics are (1) food preparation; (2) sex, menstruation, and childbirth; (3) marriage; and (4) women and the cult. It is to these matters that we turn now. Food Preparation Food for the Israelite table is under the auspices of the women of Israel. The diet of the Israelites was largely based on grain, beans, and vegetables, supplemented with milk products like curds and yogurt cheese, together with some wine and olive oil. Women were responsible for preparing these foods: making flour from the grain; kneading, shaping, and baking the bread; making cheese and yogurt from the milk of the goats and sheep; gathering olives and fruit and preparing them for consumption. Leviticus mentions particularly the activity of baking bread as a woman’s job (26:26). Thus it is women in charge of the family kitchen who ensure the kashrut, or dietary purity, of the home. To a large extent the woman’s responsibility in the home parallels that of the priest’s responsibility in the sanctuary. Like the woman in the home, the priest cooks the grain offerings for YHWH’s house in a griddle,

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pan, or oven and flavors them with olive oil, salt, and frankincense (2:1–7). Just as sacred meat is washed, flayed, and cooked on the altar according to detailed prescriptions, so also the meat of Israel is prescribed. Although the consumption of meat is a rarity in the diet of most Israelites, a series of laws differentiate between what is pure and what is impure. The main categories of acceptable meats follow these criteria: land animals must both chew the cud and have a split hoof, fish must have scales and fins, and fowl must not be on the list of twenty prohibited birds. Also, insects with both wings and legs—except for the grasshopper, cricket, and locust, and eight “swarmers”— are forbidden. Fat and blood too are prohibited at the Israelite table. Blood represents life and atonement; thus, out of reverence it is not to be eaten but drained at the altar (17:10–12). For this reason, kosher meats have to be ritually slaughtered from an early period and continue to be so now in Orthodox Jewish homes. Scholars have searched relentlessly for a rationale for these food laws. The underlying symbolism appears to be that the clean animals are seen as analogous to Israel, while impure animals represented surrounding nations (so Milgrom). Also, a number of the laws reflect the polarity between life and death. For example, the identifiable forbidden birds feed on carrion. Most significantly, the food laws reinforce a barrier between Israel and non-Israel (20:24–26). Israel does not eat the same food as the cultures around them, and so they are less likely to engage in social intercourse leading to intermarriage that might threaten the continued existence of the people. The early Christian movement, consisting of both Jewish and Gentile Christians, struggled with the status of these laws, given by YHWH and ingrained for centuries within their culture, but gradually let them go. Acts 10 reflects this struggle. Nevertheless, much of the cultic language was retained and new symbolism attached. The New Testament depicts Jesus Christ as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world,” the supreme sacrifice to end all sacrifices (John 1:29; Heb. 10:12). The central sacrament of Christian worship, which commemorates the sacrifice of Jesus’ body and blood, is a ritual meal, celebrated at every Eucharist across Christendom. In rabbinic Judaism, the importance of sacrifice becomes an academic matter after the

destruction of the temple, but the household meal grows in significance as rituals surrounding it remind the participants of temple practice. The woman’s role is highlighted, because, like the sanctuary priest, she is the one in charge of “differentiating between the pure and the impure” in the home. The Talmud, in fact, makes the analogy of the family table and the sacred altar explicit (b. Ber. 55a). As the priests washed before officiating, so the layperson washes before the meal. As the priests prepared the weekly shewbread for the sanctuary, so the Jewish woman prepares challah, the Sabbath bread. Sex, Menstruation, and Childbirth Ritual purity regulations had to be observed by women as well as men, in order to keep impurity outside of Israel. The concerns are not unique to ancient Israel. Cross-culturally, sexual emissions are considered polluting and threatening to sacred things. In Greek culture too, sex must be kept apart from the sacred. In the play Lysistrata, Myrrhine pleads with her eager husband, “[If I yield to you] I won’t be pure enough to go back up to the acropolis.” “No trouble about that,” answers her husband; “you can wash in the Clepsydra fountain” (Ar., Lys., 912f.). Similarly, when Electra tells her brother that her husband has never approached her, her brother asks, “Is he under some sacred requirement of purity?” (Eur., El., 256). In Israel, purification is necessary after sexual intercourse, even if one is not entering the sanctuary. According to Leviticus, both a man and a woman who have engaged in sexual intercourse must bathe (15:18). In the area of sexual discharges, women are especially affected by the blood flows of childbirth (Lev. 12) and menstruation (Lev. 15). It is the close association of blood with life that makes its discharge from the body a matter of such ritual concern. The menstrual taboo is also cross-culturally attested, and some cultures go as far as to seclude the woman from the rest of the community during this period. Babylonians, for example, isolate menstruants from the community for six days. The Greek philosopher Aristotle claims that a menstruant dims the mirror in front of her. Roman writers insist that menstrual blood damages wine and blights trees and crops, even blunting knives, killing bees, rusting metals, and making dogs crazy (Parker, 103). None of these fancies is present in Leviticus. Nevertheless, a label of

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impurity is attached to the menstruant and, to a lesser degree, also to those who make contact with her or her bed or seat. The menstruant remains impure for an entire week, even if her bleeding stops earlier. It is not clear from Leviticus to what degree the woman should be separated from those around her; nevertheless, the menstruant’s bed and seat are defiling to anyone who touches, sits on, or lies on them, requiring them to wash themselves (15:20–23). Since these persons are required to wash, it makes most sense that the menstruant herself is also required to bathe, although this is not explicit in the text. Abnormal menstruation, that is, vaginal bleeding that continues beyond a week or is simply inconsistent with the normal cycle, is a severe impurity requiring the woman to bring a sacrifice to the sanctuary after healing. Any bed or seat belonging to this woman also transmits impurity to one who touches it (15:27). In the New Testament a woman who had abnormal bleeding for twelve years comes to Jesus for healing. Probably from a desire to remain anonymous and to prevent ritual contagion, she simply reaches for the hem of Jesus’ garment and is healed (Matt. 9:20; Mark 5:25; Luke 8:43). Leviticus does not explain how one recovers from such a condition but simply provides purification procedures after one is cured. After a period of seven days of health with no emissions, the individual brings two birds to sacrifice at the sanctuary on the eighth day to complete her purification and mark reentry into society. Abnormal emissions from a man (e.g., gonorrhea) are also severe and require the same purification rituals after healing. Childbirth, a more severe impurity than menstruation, due to extended vaginal bleeding, is addressed in an even more prescribed set of regulations divided into two periods. The first is the initial week after the birth, when a mother comes to the sanctuary and offers a burnt offering and a purification offering. The translation in many versions, “sin offering,” has led to unnecessary leaps of interpretation. But the term often translated “sin offering” (from Heb. hata’), when it is applied to matters of ritual impurity, is morally neutral. Thus the better translation is “purification offering.” According to Leviticus, a new mother remains impure forty days if she gives birth to a boy and eighty days if a girl (12:2–5). During the first stage of her impurity, seven days (boy)

or fourteen days (girl), she contaminates others like a menstruant (by touch but not by sharing the same roof). During the second stage, she is not contagious to anything but sacred objects. This differentiation is curious and has been analyzed repeatedly since ancient times. The implicit logic behind this difference is apparently this: a daughter, over her lifetime, will be ritually impure and contagious more often than a son, because of her own menstruation and childbearing, and so her birth causes greater defilement to the mother. This should not be understood, however, as a value judgment. In fact, the mother is the vessel through whom holiness is continued in Israel, and childbirth is the normal channel for the next generation of holy people. Marriage In Israel, the body is a microcosm for the sanctuary. Just as the sanctuary is sacred and only certain items may be sacrificed within it, so the body is protected by guarding who has access to it. Hence, laws regarding appropriate sexual partners are of utmost importance. Leviticus 18 lists sexual partnerships that are forbidden to a man: mother, stepmother, sister/half sister, granddaughter, stepsister, aunt, daughter-in-law, sister-in-law, a woman and her daughter or granddaughter, two sisters, menstruant, a married woman, a man, and an animal. The text is directed to a male audience, so interpreters have had difficulty figuring out how it would read if addressed to women. For example, the community responsible for the Dead Sea Scrolls considered both aunt/nephew and uncle/niece marriages forbidden by the principle of analogy, but the rabbis took the literal approach and prohibited only aunt/nephew marriages, since Leviticus does not explicitly address the question of an uncle/niece marriage. The most striking omission in the list is sexual relations between a father and daughter. Some regard this prohibition as self-evident, since the introduction to the list prohibits a man from having any sexual relations with “his own flesh” (18:6). Also, a man’s granddaughter is off-limits to him sexually, so it follows that his daughter would be also (18:10). Finally, a man is forbidden to have relations with a woman and her daughter, thus precluding his own daughter (18:17). Same-sex intercourse between males is forbidden directly by the text (20:13). While the text prohibits the sexual act between men, it

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does not condemn genuine affections and close relationships between them. Since the specific reference here is to homosexual intercourse between males, commentators continue to argue about the ramifications for women. Women in ancient Israel, like their nonIsraelite counterparts, did not have full rights to their own bodies. Their marriage and sexual relationships were controlled by their fathers and brothers. While a father had every reason to protect the chastity of his daughter in order for her marriage and children to be of the highest order, she belonged to him until she was married, when control passed to her husband. Nevertheless, a father must not “desecrate” his daughter by turning her into a prostitute; this action degrades the whole land (19:29). The text continues with an order to keep the Sabbath and revere the sanctuary (19:30). Thus the bodies of women as well as men are to be sacred vessels analogous to the Sabbath and the sanctuary. These laws reveal the concern of the writer to maintain the family’s integrity and hence the nation’s. Israel is exhorted not to follow the sexual practices of the Canaanites, who lost their rights to the land when it “spewed them out” because of their immorality (18:1–4). The destiny of the nation of Israel is bound up with the sexual and social ethics of each Israelite family. Furthermore, from a practical point of view, the value of marriage dowries depends on legitimate blood lines and proof of virginity, and proper marriage practices are necessary to establish the legitimacy of children and their claims to inheritance rights. Women and the Cult Women are forbidden to be priests, as are most men. The priestly line is limited to the male descendants of Aaron between the ages of thirty and fifty (apprenticing at age twentyfive). Nevertheless, women participate in the cult, bringing sacrifices to the sanctuary, as is recorded in other biblical texts. Along with her husband, Hannah brings and slaughters an animal as payment for a vow (1 Sam. 1:3–4, 21, 24–28; cf. Num. 30:4). Indeed, Leviticus requires a woman to bring a sacrifice after giving birth (12:6–8). Other biblical texts depict women, as well as men, slaughtering animals for sacrifices (1 Sam. 28:24; Prov. 7:14). The women of a priest’s family are associated with him and his holiness in direct ways, and thus greater restrictions apply to them.

Expectations are often physical as well as moral; just as the sacrifices of Israel have to be without defect, so also do the cultic personnel. This high standard affects whom, which women, priests are allowed to marry. A prostitute, any woman born from an illegal sexual union (this second category is open to interpretation), and a divorcee (probably due to suspicion of adultery) are forbidden (21:7). The high priest can marry only a virgin of a priestly family, not a widow (21:13–14). The daughter of a priest who engages in prostitution (probably meaning any illicit sex) “defiles her father” and must be burned (21:9). Although women of priestly families have to follow greater restrictions than other women, they also reap special benefits. Most sacred offerings, including the grain offering, purification offering, and guilt offering, are eaten only by priests. However, the choice parts of the well-being sacrifices, the breast and right thigh, as well as the firstfruits offerings, which are given to the priest, can be enjoyed by his family members as long as they are in a state of ritual purity. A daughter of a priest who has married a nonpriest, however, is not allowed to eat of the priest’s food (22:12–14). Nevertheless, if she is widowed or divorced and without children, she can rejoin her father’s household and again eat of the family’s food. Of special interest to women may be the priestly vestments. The Torah describes six garments of the high priest: the breastpiece, an ephod, a robe, a fringed tunic, a headdress, and a sash (Lev. 8:7–9; Exod. 28:2–43). Twelve jewels, each representing a tribe of Israel, are affixed to the breastpiece, which also carries the Urim and Thummim, the items by which the high priest communicates with God. The headdress is adorned with a gold crown inscribed with the words “Holy to the Lord.” Thus the high priest functions as a mediator between God and the people. Only he has access to the most sacred area, but he symbolically carries Israel into the presence of God with him as represented by the jewels on his breastpiece. All of these garments are probably sewn by women, since they weave the same types of fabrics for the tabernacle (cf. Exod. 35:25; 28:5). Hannah too makes a little robe for her son Samuel to go with his linen ephod when he serves in the sanctuary (1 Sam. 2:18–19; cf. also Exod. 28:5–12; Lev. 8:7). Women as well as men are allowed to make dedications to the sanctuary (although

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according to Num. 30:4–9 a father or husband can annul a woman’s vows). In Leviticus 27:1–8 one finds a provision for vowing to the sanctuary the equivalent value of a human being. These verses specify different valuations for males and females and for different age groups. A man age twenty to sixty is worth fifty shekels, whereas a woman is valued at thirty shekels. At first glance, it seems that the author is suggesting that men are intrinsically more valuable than women. However, the text is concerned with the economic productivity of each gender at various stages of life. Since a woman on average is of less physical strength and is occupied with childbearing and childrearing, her labor potential outside of the home, and thus her economic value, is lower. Similarly, the valuations for young children and old people are less than for men and women in the prime of their lives.

Conclusion Leviticus is a book about Israel’s access to and continued relationship with its God through a life centered around holiness. Women, although in significant ways under the control of men, are instrumental in this endeavor. Both women and men offer sacrifices for atonement, and both consume sacrifices of fellowship. Both create impurity by moral infractions and ritual impurity, and both are offered a means of purification. Women’s issues loom large in the middle of Leviticus concerning purity in the home, especially with regard to the kitchen table and the marriage bed. The book also emphasizes the importance of proper treatment of others and considers interpersonal relationships a matter of holiness. Although many mistake the book

as simply an ancient treatise on cultic matters, Leviticus continues to resonate with both men and women today on scholarly and devotional levels. Examining the themes and issues of this book from a feminist perspective opens up new ways of understanding the profound theology behind the practices it describes. Bibliography

Douglas, Mary. Reading Leviticus: Conversations with Mary Douglas. Edited by John F. A. Sawyer. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Eskenazi, Tamara Cohn, et al. “Leviticus.” In The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, edited by Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea L. Weiss, 567–786. New York: URJ Press, 2008. Harrington, Hannah. Purity Texts. Companion to the Qumran Scrolls 5. London: T. & T. Clark, 2004. Klawans, Jonathan. Impurity and Sin in Ancient Judaism. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Levine, Baruch. The JPS Commentary: Leviticus. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989. Milgrom, Jacob. Leviticus 1–16. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1991. ———. Leviticus 17–22. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ———. Leviticus 23–27. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 2000. Parker, Robert. Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.

Numbers Katharine Doob Sakenfeld

Introduction and sacrificial system. They also incorporated significant portions of an earlier tradition that scholars call the Old Epic, probably composed sometime during the first two centuries of Israel’s monarchy (ca. 1000–800 BCE) and updated periodically in the intervening centuries. Many scholars suggest that some further revising and editing of the exilic work took place in the years after return from exile. The basic framework of Numbers is a prose narrative about Israel’s forty years “In the Wilderness” (the Hebrew name for this book). Into this narrative are incorporated all sorts of other literary forms, most notably instruction for religious practice (e.g., Num. 28; 4; 19), elaborate examples of “case law” (e.g., 5:11–31), poetry, and lists. The poetry includes a blessing (6:24– 26), several songs (e.g., 10:35–36; 21:27–30), and a series of oracles in Numbers 23–24. The lists include a travel itinerary (Num. 33) and two census summaries (Num. 1; 26). It is from these “numberings” of the people that the book received the name “Arithmoi” in the ancient Greek version and its English name “Numbers.” Numbers is among the most disjointed books of the Bible. Although it contains a narrative sequence, many of the pieces of religious instruction and civil legislation seem to be introduced randomly, so much so that explanations of their location in the book seem artificial or arbitrary. Scholars have attempted to outline the book in various ways. The approach developed by Dennis Olson is gaining wide acceptance. Olson focuses on the two censuses of the “whole congregation of the Israelites” in chapters 1 and 26 as markers of two major divisions

The book of Numbers is the fourth of the five books that make up the Pentateuch or Torah. These books appear first in the Bible partly because they belong there chronologically; they tell the story of God’s dealing with the world and with ancient Israel from the creation onward until the Israelites are poised to cross the Jordan River into the land promised to their ancestor Abraham. But the Pentateuch also appears first in the Bible because its content is theologically foundational to understanding the rest of the Hebrew Bible. Thus the book of Numbers, even though it is not well known today by comparison to Genesis or Exodus, helped to provide basic religious guidance for the ancient Israelite community.

Composition, Authorship, Structure Biblical scholarship of the last 250 years has reached a broad consensus that the Pentateuch is a composite of materials put together over many centuries in the life of ancient Israel and attributed to Moses only very late in its history. Although there is disagreement about details, it seems likely that the first four books of the Pentateuch received their present shape during the period called the Babylonian exile (587–538 BCE). It is hypothesized that this work was done by a group of Jerusalemite priests who had been exiled to the city of Babylon in Mesopotamia after its king, Nebuchadrezzar, and his army had destroyed Jerusalem. These priests drew on ancient traditions from their own religious heritage and are thus responsible for a great deal of our knowledge of Israel’s priestly 79

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of Numbers. Chapters 1–25 present a picture of the original generation of Israelites, those who fled from Pharaoh’s oppression in Egypt, as a sinful generation disobedient to God. By the end of chapter 25, all of this generation has died in the wilderness; chapter 26 then provides an enumeration of the second generation, born in the wilderness. This new generation, by contrast, is presented as living fully obediently and is meant to serve as a positive example to future generations. Beyond these two major divisions, it is difficult to identify a coherent outline; here only the broad contours of the sequence of material can be traced. The book opens with the people still at Mount Sinai, and the opening chapters concern arrangements for the journey through the wilderness toward the promised land. After an initial census of the adult males (except for the Levites), Moses is given instruction for the arrangement of the Israelite camp during the wilderness march, along with elaborate instruction for the special duties of the Levites. A census of male Levites is followed by a miscellany of laws relating to uncleanness, restitution of damages, suspicion of adultery, and Nazirite vows. After the famous Aaronic benediction (end of Num. 6), the dedication of the altar and the consecration of the Levites are reported. Then the people move out from the area of Mount Sinai (10:12). Complaints about food lead to the establishment of a body of elders (all male) to assist Moses (Num. 11). Aaron and Miriam complain against Moses and are rebuked (Num. 12). In a critically important climax of the narrative, the people refuse to obey God’s command to go up into the land (Num. 13–14). As a result of their disobedience, this first generation is condemned to die in the wilderness. The events recorded for the remaining thirty-eight years of that generation include a rebellion against Moses (Num. 16), confirmation of Aaron’s leadership (Num. 17), Moses’ and Aaron’s failure to “show God’s holiness” (Num. 20), and the well-known story of Balaam and his talking donkey (Num. 22–24). Again, regulations of special interest to priestly groups are interspersed in the narrative. The first part of the book concludes with a story of Israelite men involving themselves with foreign women and their gods, and resulting judgment upon them (Num. 25). The second census (Num. 26) is taken as preparation for an eventual equitable division

of the land among the tribes. At this point only Joshua and Caleb (two heroes of the Num. 14 story) and of course Moses himself remain alive of the original generation. This second section of Numbers is bookended by the two-part story (Num. 27; 36) of the five daughters of Zelophehad, a story about the rules for tribal inheritance. The capture of the east side of the Jordan is reported (Num. 32), and the book concludes with the people near the Jordan River opposite Jericho, poised to enter the land. Other chapters in this section give the impression of miscellaneous appendixes, including topics such as the keeping of vows (Num. 30) and cities of refuge (Num. 35).

Numbers and Women’s Experience In many ways the presentation of women in the book of Numbers illustrates the typical existence of women in many cultures throughout many historical periods. The book, written by males from an elite group, proceeds generally as if there were no real difference between women and men. Thus stories about the “congregation” or the “people” are told as if everyone were involved in the same way. But from time to time unintended clues remind attentive readers that women are not really in the narrator’s mind, as when the dissidents against Moses worry about their wives (Num. 14) and when the laws governing unintentional taking of human life (35:22–28) seem highly unlikely to be enforceable for female perpetrators. The absence of women from public religious leadership is completely taken for granted, and their role as congregational participants is left unspecified. When questions concerning women come explicitly to the fore, they are focused primarily in the domestic realm, the realm in which most women of that culture functioned and the realm that the male writers regarded as in need of special regulation with regard to women’s place. Marriage, divorce, sexual relations, passing on of the family name, control of land, and family economic condition are all singled out for special attention in this book. The notable exception to this domestic focus is, of course, Miriam. She serves as a reminder that even in cultures that emphasize domestic roles for women, some women do achieve public leadership. Miriam’s story here typifies much of such leadership: it is exceptional, it is not regarded as fully comparable to that of the men,

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and it is much more easily challenged, compromised, and undercut. As people attuned to the modern debate about the place of women in contemporary cultures read this ancient book, they may well be first aware of the great gulf between that ancient culture and their own. But it is important that this sense of distance not deceive the reader, for the correspondences to the situation of modern women and men continue to be very great indeed.

Themes and Central Concerns Numbers is about a people on a journey, a journey from a context of economic and racialethnic oppression (the land of Egypt) toward a context (the land of promise) where justice, righteousness, freedom, and joy are envisioned as the order of their existence. The journey was initiated by God in their deliverance from Egypt (book of Exodus) and will still be incomplete at the end of Numbers. Indeed, the larger biblical story bears witness that a community of justice, righteousness, freedom, and joy always remains more a future hope than a present reality. Thus many racial-ethnic and women’s groups, believing that God has promised a better future, have constructively appropriated the biblical theme of a wilderness journey. The Numbers story reminds readers of the difficulties, dangers, and disagreements that seem always to arise on such a journey, as well as of the persistent determination of God to carry through. Although women remain mostly “invisible” within this book about community counted as adult males, they do appear here and there, either as examples of faithful living or as potential or actual threats (from the viewpoint of the male-oriented tradition) to communal stability. Themes such as human authority, leadership, trust in God, and insider-outsider that pervade the book raise significant issues for feminist readers, even when women are not explicitly in view in the text. In both explicit and very subtle ways, the narrative of Numbers deals with the meaning of living faithfully before God and with how God deals with unfaithfulness. The people’s failure to enter the land (Num. 13–14) is the central example, although their various other rebellions are also part of this theme. In chapter 14, we see how easily fear can subvert trust in God, how easily a “herd” mentality can develop

in a community under stress, how easily a community can move backward. While God cannot ignore the disobedient unfaithfulness of the people, they are neither destroyed nor abandoned. The promised future is delayed, but the promise is reiterated: God’s plan will indeed come to fruition. In the meantime, the wilderness becomes a place of learning, growing, and testing. So also modern women and men still ask over and over again, as did ancient Israel: Is God really doing a new thing? To whose opinion should we listen about the way forward? How are we called to express our resistance to the present scene, while preparing for the right moment for change yet to come? The censuses show that the size of the Israelite community remains constant through the wilderness period, a sign of divine faithfulness despite the pattern of persistent rebellion. The basis for land distribution in the promised land will be the ancestral houses identified in the second census, with procedures to ensure that each group receives an equitable share. In a subsistence agricultural economy with limited food transportation and storage, where nearly everyone farms and must survive on the food grown by a family or small village, the rules for ownership of arable land are foundational for economic justice. In this context, women and their concerns receive special attention in Numbers 27 and 36, as the daughters of Zelophehad ask whether women may receive land if there are no male heirs. Moses’ complaint about his inability to lead single-handedly results in a cadre of divinely designated male assistants (Num. 11). Challenges to leadership are made by Moses’ immediate relatives (including Miriam, Num. 12), by the people as a whole (Num. 14), and by the Korahites (Num. 16). Moses and Aaron are rebuked for failing as leaders (Num. 20). With the significant exception of Miriam’s challenge to Moses, women play no role in these leadership questions; but the disputes among males resonate broadly with twenty-first-century feminist questions about authority, power, control, how to initiate change, and what counts as evidence of divine approval for religious leaders. The material concerning correct worship specifies the leadership duties of priests and Levites, roles reserved for men in Israelite practice. The various texts concerning offerings, sacrifices, and festivals do not make clear what role, if any, women could play on these

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occasions. It seems to be assumed that among the laity the male heads of households, clans, or tribes have primary responsibility for carrying out the commanded religious rites. Numbers incorporates a variety of rules concerning spiritual and bodily purity, most of which explain how to reestablish a “clean” state of being after some defilement. Defilement may come through committing an unintentional sin (15:22–31) or through contact with a dead body or a person with a skin disease (5:1–4; 19:1–22). In these cases the rituals appear to be applicable equally to men and women, as the inclusive phrasing of the NRSV indicates. The

laws concerning Nazirite vows (6:1–21) may be regarded as a special case of ritual purity, especially since the prohibition concerning contact with dead bodies is so stringent for the Nazirite (6:6–8). Here the law is specifically applied to women as well as to men (6:2). Scattered legal material provides guidance for the Israelite community in matters of family life. Most notable are the regulations concerning women who make sacred vows (Num. 30) and concerning wives whose husbands suspect them of adultery (5:11–31). Israel’s patriarchal presuppositions about family structure are particularly evident here.

Comment Numbers refers to women sporadically and in uneven ways. In large sections of the book they are noticeable by their absence, most obviously with respect to priestly and Levitical leadership in worship, but also as they are absorbed invisibly into a community in which male spies are chosen to represent each tribe (13:2) or only males of military age are counted in each census (Num. 1; 26). Nonetheless, women have some significant part in no fewer than nine of the thirty-six chapters of this book. The following comments will focus especially on these chapters.

Part One: The Old Generation (Num. 1–25) Preparations for Leaving Sinai (Num. 1:1–10:10) Although Part One of the book concerns the rebellious failure of the exodus generation, there are no narratives of rebellion in the opening chapters. Topics covered include census reports, the sacred duties of the L ­ e­vites, instructions for organizing the physical arrangement of the tribal camp and procession away from Sinai and through the wilderness, and a review of the dedication of the tabernacle. The well-known Aaronic benediction, found in 6:24–26, expresses God’s intent to bless, keep, be gracious, and give peace to the Israelite community. God’s blessing and keeping presence among them is a gift, but God’s holy presence must not be violated, lest disaster ensue. Thus divine instruction establishes zones of sacred space around the tabernacle and identifies

ranks of sacred officials who may safely operate in the “danger zone” closest to the holy space. Although the text says nothing of special honor accruing to those allowed closest to the sacred things, it is easy to imagine how such thoughts might arise. Challenges to the leadership structure recorded in subsequent chapters reveal such tensions in the community. Chapters 5 and 6 present the first of numerous blocks of legal materials scattered throughout the book. Most of the regulations in chapters 5 and 6 (concerning, e.g., bodily impurity, restitution, Nazirites) apply to women and men alike, but the case of a woman suspected of adultery requires special attention.

Suspicion of Marital Infidelity (Num. 5:11–31). This legislation specifies procedures that a husband is to follow if he suspects his wife of having intercourse with another man but has no proof that she has done so. (Various cases susceptible to proof are covered in Deut. 22.) The text begins in a style typical of ancient Near Eastern case law: “if thus and such circumstances happen . . .” (5:12b), with a variety of subclauses (5:13–14), followed finally by a “then . . .” clause (5:15) specifying what the husband shall do. According to this law, the husband may bring his wife before the priest, whether he has genuine suspicions or is simply overcome by a “spirit of jealousy.” The wording of the law generally presumes that the woman is guilty; it is only in the last phrase of verse 14 that the possibility of her innocence is finally mentioned. Editorial headings such as “concerning

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an unfaithful wife,” found in some Bible translations, misleadingly accept this presumption of guilt without reflecting the dominant theme of the husband’s unverifiable suspicion. Verses 16–28 describe the procedure to be undertaken by the priest to determine the woman’s guilt or innocence. The key to understanding the procedure is the requirement that the woman say “Amen, Amen” (5:22), thus accepting the potential results of the curse to be laid upon her if she is guilty. The effect of the potion not only shows her guilt or innocence but also constitutes the punishment if she is guilty. The meaning of the Hebrew describing the results in a guilty case (“her womb shall discharge, her uterus drop,” 5:27) is obscure, so it is not possible to associate the phrase with a specific medical condition. The social consequences of being regarded as “an execration among her people” are not spelled out but may well have involved severe social ostracism. The concluding paragraph of the law (5:29– 31) provides a topical recapitulation typical of such legislation. It then goes on, however, to note that “the man shall be free from iniquity.” Since the law presupposes that the woman’s partner (if she is guilty at all) is not legally identifiable, the man referred to here is apparently the husband, who is absolved of any guilt for making a false accusation. Not only may he invoke this procedure on mere suspicion; he is not to be held accountable for his suspicions, even if his wife is vindicated. Even though this law seems outrageous to modern Western sensibilities, and even though the possibility that the potion (apparently only dirt and water) might have a real effect on a woman seems remote by modern Western standards, one should not conclude that the practice was never carried out or that this curse-bringing water could not produce an effect in the context of a culture that accepted the possibility of such powers. The law invites readers to reflect both upon the many ways in which diverse cultures have sought to control women’s sexual behavior and upon the terror reigning among women wherever such customs prevail. The Journey from Sinai to the East Bank of the Jordan (Num. 10:11–25:16) Once the journey is underway, the bulk of this section of Part One focuses on disputes about leadership. Wholesale disobedience

(Num. 14) results in a thirty-eight-year pause in the journey. Once the community finally arrives in Transjordan, this section concludes Part One of the book with a dramatic contrast between God’s determination to bless the people through the foreign seer Balaam and the Israelite men’s worship of foreign gods.

God Like a Mother (Num. 11:11–15). Chapter 11 records Moses’ complaint that leadership of the people is too burdensome for him, and God’s establishment of a cadre of (male) elders to share the leadership with Moses. Moses initiates his complaint by pressing God with a rhetorical question: “Did I conceive all this people? Did I give birth to them, that you should say to me, ‘Carry them in your bosom, as a nurse carries a sucking child’?” Of course Moses’ point is that God, not he, has conceived and given birth to this people, so that God should carry them as a nurse carries a sucking child. The maternal imagery for the work of the Deity here is indirect, and such imagery is rare in the Bible, but the comparison is unmistakable. God, who is so often portrayed as king of the people and occasionally in the OT as father of the people, is here described as their mother (cf. Isa. 49:14–15). Miriam’s Challenge to Moses (Num. 12). In chapter 11, Moses seeks and receives help in managing the needs of the community, and Moses’ spirit is shared with others. But is Moses’ role still unique? Chapter 12 takes up this question. Together Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother, complain about Moses’ Cushite (Ethiopian) wife and go on to suggest that God has spoken through them as well as through Moses. In the narrative, the matter of Moses’ Cushite wife is quickly dropped in favor of a focus on God’s pronouncement that Moses’ relationship to God is indeed unique. But the Cushite wife must not be overlooked; she is presumably black, and this text has therefore played significantly in religious debates over interracial marriage. Because of their questioning, whether about Moses’ wife or about his special authority, Miriam and Aaron are rebuked by God (12:5, 8c). In the course of emphasizing Moses’ unique position, the narrator uses Miriam as a foil. This is the same Miriam who led Israel in song after the deliverance at the Reed Sea (Exod. 15:20– 21) and presumably is the sister who watched

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Pharaoh’s daughter find the baby Moses (Exod. 2:4–8, although there she is not named). The prophet Micah remembers her as a leader together with Aaron and Moses (Mic. 6:4). And yet here Miriam is severely punished for speaking against Moses, while Aaron receives no punishment at all. God’s anger is kindled against both, but only Miriam becomes “leprous” (i.e., having some skin disease, probably not modern Hansen’s disease, which does not occur in the Middle East until later times). Why is only Miriam punished? Some suggest that Aaron is spared by his quick words to Moses (“Do not punish us,” 12:11) upon seeing Miriam’s leprous condition, but this view does not explain why both have not been equally affected in the course of God’s appearance to them. Alternatively, one may speculate that the answer is related to the role of Aaron as priest and the rules about ritual cleanness of the priests that are known from Leviticus 21–22. The regulations of Leviticus emphasize that the Aaronic priesthood must be physically unblemished and that those priests who find themselves ritually unclean at any time must absent themselves from priestly duties and special priestly food until they are purified. Skin diseases such as that infecting Miriam are explicitly listed as a source of such uncleanness (Lev. 22:4). Since Aaron is the paradigmatic priestly figure, the one from whom all priestly lineage is descended, it is perhaps inconceivable to the narrator that Aaron can be presented as contracting such a skin disease. This “narrative impossibility” is further compounded by the great care exercised by the Priestly writers throughout Exodus and Numbers to achieve a delicate balance between the power and authority of Moses and Aaron. This balance would clearly be upset if Aaron were pictured as unclean and outside the camp. Our modern question of “unfairness” to Miriam does not appear to have worried the ancient storytellers; at least they do not express any explicit concern for the difference in treatment of Aaron and Miriam. When Aaron sees Miriam’s condition, he turns to Moses for protection (“Do not punish us”) and to intercede for Miriam, and Moses responds by interceding with God on Miriam’s behalf. How is God’s response to Moses’ intercession for Miriam to be understood? Moses’ request for her healing is met with God’s command that she “be shut out of the camp for seven days, and after that she may be brought in again”

(12:14). The text is not clear whether Miriam is healed immediately, or only at the end of her seven days outside the camp. Neither the regulations of Numbers 19, nor those of Numbers 5, nor Leviticus 13–14 seems to correlate precisely with Miriam’s case, though the theme of being outside the camp because of skin disease or for ritual purification may be present here. Apart from these legal details, God’s comparison of Miriam’s case to one whose “father had spit in her face,” that is, to a woman who has heinously disrespected male authority, appears to be the central issue. Miriam (and only Miriam) is shut out of the camp to shame her because she has tried to claim authority comparable to that of God’s chosen leader Moses. Aaron is not so judged. Even though the camp awaits her return, the unfairness of Miriam’s treatment by comparison to Aaron’s remains a painful signal of the patriarchal perspective underlying the narrative. The lineage of Miriam is a lineage of generations of women who have been rejected or humiliated for doing exactly the same thing as their male counterparts. But the larger biblical tradition presents us with another face of God, beyond the face of the One who puts Miriam outside the camp. That other is the face of a God who stands close to and defends those on the “outside,” a God who has likewise been rejected, put outside, by people who thought they knew best. God appears to Hagar after her expulsion from Abraham and Sarah’s camp (Gen. 21); even as the exile is portrayed as divine judgment, God is portrayed as present with the exiles for comfort and restoration (esp. Isa. 40–55); the NT portrayal of Jesus’ crucifixion in an unclean place outside the Jerusalem walls (Heb. 13:12) reprises this theme for Christian readers. The starkness of Numbers 12 must not be undercut, but Miriam outside the camp may point us not only to the painful arbitrariness of her situation but also, however indirectly and allusively, to God’s presence beyond the camp and even to the suffering of God in the face of human injustice.

Miriam’s Death (Num. 20:1). In contrast to the fuller reports of the deaths of Aaron (Num. 20:22–29) and of Moses (Deut. 34:1–8), the one-sentence statement concerning the death and burial of Miriam is uninformative. Its very brevity, with absence of detail and no reference to a period of mourning, indicates her lesser

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status in the tradition in comparison with her two brothers. On the other hand, that her death is reported at all suggests her importance, and the location of her death geographically and narratively functions to raise her status closer to that of her brothers. Miriam dies in the same location (Kadesh) where the story immediately following, concerning Moses and Aaron, takes place. In 20:2–13 her two brothers fail to respond properly when the people cry out for water. What exactly they do wrong is debated, but clearly they violate their responsibilities as God’s designated leaders. God therefore says to Miriam’s two brothers, “You shall not bring this assembly into the land” (20:12), and by the end of this chapter Aaron’s death is also reported. Moses, of course, continues on to lead the people to the edge of the Jordan, but here in Kadesh, where Miriam dies, Moses’ death outside the land is announced as well. Thus the narrator heightens the significance of Miriam’s death by reporting it immediately before the announcement of the fate of her brothers.

The Danger of Foreign Women (Num. 25). In this complicated narrative, both Moabite women generally and a specific Midianite woman named Cozbi (25:15) are portrayed in a classical biblical role of the foreign woman who leads Israel (at least the males) astray from the true God. The theme reappears, for example, in the criticism of Solomon’s foreign wives (1 Kgs. 11) and in the requirement of divorcing foreign wives (Ezra 10 and Neh. 13). Through this painful story the narrator explains God’s selection of the descendants of the priest Phinehas for special privilege; this honor is gained because Phinehas kills Cozbi and her lover and thus averts a threat to Israel’s faith. Elsewhere in the canon the book of Ruth presents a powerful challenge to this negative perspective on foreign women. Part Two: The New Generation (Num. 26–36) A second census (Num. 26) marks the opening of a new phase of God’s work with the people. By contrast to Part One, the final chapters include stories where disobedience may have been brewing but is averted. Sometimes communities that have gone off track do indeed make a fresh start.

Women Challenge Authority (Num. 27:1– 11). This chapter presents the first of a two-part story about five daughters whose father has died without sons. The story occurs immediately following the second census of the people and God’s instructions to Moses about how the promised land is to be allotted among the families of the second generation. The five daughters of Zelophehad present to Moses their special situation, pointing out that according to the rules (26:52–56) their father’s name will be lost because no one from his family will receive an inheritance in the land. Moses seeks God’s guidance, and God announces the specific decision concerning their petition (27:7), followed by a more general and extended law of inheritance (27:8–11). Only verse 8 of this extended law is directly related to the petition of the five women. How incredibly daring are Mahlah, Noah, Milcah, Hoglah, and Tirzah in coming forward to speak personally and publicly (27:2) to the great Moses! Moreover, their question involves not just Moses’ opinion but a suggestion that a direct decree of the Deity is inadequate and should be revised. The narrative is dramatic and suspenseful. What will Moses’ response be in this extraordinary situation? Once he turns to the Deity, what will be God’s response? The rustle in the crowd is almost palpable as the women approach, as everyone waits, as the word is announced: “The daughters of Zelophehad are right.” But why was this story preserved in the canon? The drama of the story and the courage of the sisters are not sufficient explanation. It seems probable that the story survived because the basic point at issue was the preservation of the father’s name (27:4). The storyteller presumes an intricate connection between possession of land and preservation of family name. The women themselves are pictured as taking action for the sake of their father’s name, not for the sake of their own opportunity to possess land. This story could be heard even in ancient Israel as a story of comfort for women who would not be left destitute, but it was preserved primarily as a story of comfort for men who had the misfortune not to bear any male heirs: their names would not be cut off from their clans. Part two of their story appears in chapter 36 and concludes the book of Numbers. Women’s Vows (Num. 30). Chapter 30 concerns the requirement that all vows must be

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fulfilled. The requirement for men is stated succinctly in verses 1–2: no exceptions are allowed. The remainder of the chapter focuses on conditions under which vows made by women are and are not binding, and specifically on circumstances in which a male in authority over a woman may nullify her vow. The chapter treats vows made by women living within their fathers’ households (30:3–5) or within their husbands’ households (30:10–15), covers divorced women and widows (30:9), and gives special attention to changes in jurisdiction when a woman marries (30:6–8). There is very little evidence concerning the typical subject matter of women’s vows, though it seems likely that they are often concerned with fertility and the possibility of children (see 1 Sam. 1:9–11; Prov. 31:2). Whatever was typical, there is no evidence for restriction on the goals women can hope to gain through their vows. With regard to what women vow to do or to offer if their requests are granted by God, again the evidence is slim. Three main possibilities have been suggested: fasting, sexual abstinence, and some economic payment. What might a male authority figure gain, practically speaking, by being able to nullify such vows? With regard to sexual abstinence, a father might want the right (for economic reasons) to ensure that his daughter remain marriageable, while of course a husband would want control of his conjugal rights. If the goal of a vow is to bear a child, of course, it seems unlikely that sexual abstinence would be what the woman would offer. But with regard to sexual abstinence as well as to fasting, interpretation is hampered by lack of information about special women’s rituals that may exist alongside the more official male world of religious practice attested in the Bible. Is there “another world” of religious practice over which men hope to have at least some rudimentary control? Might it provide a means for women to “evade” or “get an intermission from” an oppressive family situation? The absence of evidence must be noted, but the possibility of such women’s rituals cannot be discounted. Finally, it seems obvious that men would have sought to maintain economic control within their households. Vows often involve payment of animals, property, or even persons to the sanctuary. If a woman in her desire for a child follows the example of Hannah, the mother of Samuel (1  Sam. 1), that child will either be lost to the economic future of the

family or perhaps be redeemed for a payment according to the categories laid out in Leviticus 27:1–8. A vow involving animal sacrifice might likewise affect the economic status of a family rather substantially. However the law is read, its ancient purpose seems to be the promotion of family stability within a culture of male-­ dominated households.

War Captives (Num. 31). After a military victory over the Midianites, the Israelite soldiers kill all the males but keep all the women, children, and animals as booty. An angry Moses reminds the officers that these Midianite women are responsible for the apostasy of Israel recorded in chapter 25 (the stories disagree about which women were involved) and commands that all except the virgin women be killed (31:17–18). The number of virgin women reported (32,000, in 31:35) is surely an exaggeration, but it leaves the reader appalled at the number of others who are slaughtered, as well as at the fate of the virgins taken by force into the Israelite camp. What becomes of those allowed to live is not of interest to the narrator, but Deuteronomy 21:10–14 gives some indication of the procedures involved if an Israelite man chooses to marry a war captive. Civilians Left at Home (Num. 32). After the capture of land east of the Jordan, Moses rebukes the tribes of Reuben and Gad for asking to settle there before the rest of the land has been taken. After extended discussion Reuben and Gad are given the land on condition that they cross the river to fight alongside the other tribes. For their part, they decide to leave their children, wives, and animals settled east of the Jordan for the duration of the military action (31:26). The story highlights the full obedience of the generation born in the wilderness, but it shows the thoughtful reader that it is solidarity among the males of Israel that is the focal point of obedience for the narrator. Reflection on the place of the women and children in this story also points to the Bible’s glaring silence concerning the role of the women and children of the other tribes in the battle narratives of the book of Joshua. Repercussions (Num. 36:1–12). After the capture of Transjordan, the male relatives of the tribe to which Zelophehad belongs suddenly wake up to what from their point of view is a

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major omission in the ruling announced back in chapter 27. Numbers 36 is concerned with their appeal. The heads of the other families of the Joseph tribe to which Zelophehad belonged come before Moses and state their concern: If these five women marry men from other Israelite tribes, then “their inheritance will be taken from the inheritance of our ancestors and added to the inheritance of the tribe into which they marry” (36:3). Moses announces the divine decision that the daughters of Zelophehad must marry within their own tribe so as to avoid any possibility of transfer of property from one tribe to another, and again the law is generalized beyond the specific case. The story concludes with an account of the women’s compliance with this regulation, so that the entire book ends with an illustration of the narrator’s overarching theme of the perfect faithfulness of the second generation. Although chapters 27 and 36 exhibit a superficial similarity of pattern, there are significant differences between them. In the second story the place of meeting is not specified, and the only audience is the (male) heads of ancestral houses. The specifically religious elements of chapter 27 (tent of meeting, priest, and congregation) are missing from the proceedings in chapter 36, as indeed are the five women themselves. Furthermore, in the second story Moses proceeds directly to the announcement of God’s decision, without consultation with the Deity. Thus the narrator here reports Moses’ speech to the Israelites, rather than God’s speech of command to Moses, as is recorded in chapter 27. The women themselves are completely invisible, and the Deity is present only by indirection. In fact, the pronouncement that “the descendants of the tribe of Joseph are right” (36:5) appears quite abruptly, since the petitioners, unlike the daughters in chapter 27, have not proposed any solution to their problem. Information concerning Israelite marriage customs and regulations is so scanty that it is difficult to project the effect of this law. If the story

implies that women without fathers or brothers can choose their own husbands (36:6), then the law simply restricts their choice of mates. If, however, other males in the extended family are responsible for the choice of husbands for such women, then the law restricts the greed of such men (who might otherwise maneuver to get the best price for that rare woman who brings to marriage a parcel of arable land, the ideal dowry in an agrarian society). In this sequel to the basic story, the focus has shifted; suddenly land and the rights to it, rather than the father’s name, are the center of attention. It becomes evident that the daughters’ landholding is only temporary, until their marriage, at which time the property will pass to their husbands; a battle among males for male property rights takes shape. The women do not end up where they began, with no place or space of their own within Israel’s inheritance and property structure; yet the limits of their freedom are made very clear by the end of the story. Bibliography

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. “The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah (Numbers V 11–31).” Vetus Testamentum 34 (1984): 11–26. Kramer, Phyllis Silverman. “Miriam.” In Exodus to Deuteronomy: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), edited by Athalya Brenner, 104–33. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 2000. Olson, Dennis T. Numbers. Interpretation Commentary. Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1996. Sakenfeld, Katharine Doob. Journeying with God: A Commentary on the Book of Numbers. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995. Shemesh, Yael. “A Gender Perspective on the Daughters of Zelophehad: Bible, Talmudic Midrash, and Modern Feminist Midrash.” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007): 80–109.

Deuteronomy Carolyn Pressler

Introduction These and other parallels led an earlier generation of scholars to identify Deuteronomy with the “book of the law” that, according to 2 Kings 23, prompts Josiah’s religious reform. The historicity of the 2 Kings account is no longer assumed, but scholars continue to find Josiah’s nationalistic reform the most likely setting for Deuteronomy. At the time of Josiah’s rule, Assyria, the empire that has long dominated Judah, is itself struggling to survive. Josiah takes advantage of Assyria’s loss of control over the western edges of its empire to make a bid for national independence and even to extend Judah’s rule over parts of the former northern kingdom, Israel. Many key characteristics of Deuteronomy, such as its emphasis on Israelite unity and hostile attitude toward all it deems non-Israelite, its martial character, and its centralization efforts, are understandable in the context of Josiah’s nationalist campaigns. Josiah’s efforts are abruptly halted with his death at Egypt’s hands in 609 BCE. For a few years Judah is subject, first to Egypt, and then to Egypt’s conqueror, Babylon, before rebelling against Babylon repeatedly during the opening years of the sixth century BCE. Babylon razes Jerusalem, destroys the temple, ends the kingdom, and exiles the Judahite elite in 587 BCE. The final form of Deuteronomy is shaped by exilic editors, who add a new framework to the law (1:1–4:48), revise some of its laws, and use it to introduce their massive history of Israel in its land (Joshua–2 Kings). Much of Deuteronomy may be understood as exilic editors’ efforts to explain Judah’s national trauma, to offer hope, and to help Judah resist assimilation

Deuteronomy, the fifth and final book of the Pentateuch, gets its name from the Greek to deuteronomion, “second law,” a phrase found in Deuteronomy 17:18 referring to the copy of the law that the king is to study. In keeping with the Jewish practice of naming biblical books after their opening words, it is also called haddebarim, “the words.” Both names are apt. The Pentateuchal story line presents Deuteronomy as “the words” of Moses, addressing Israel on the plains of Moab at the end of their long wilderness sojourn. God entrusted Moses nearly forty years earlier with a “second law,” in addition to the laws of Exodus 20–23. Now Moses, about to die, conveys that second law to his people. The literary setting imbues Deuteronomy with tremendous authority, presenting it as the last will and testament of Israel’s great founder. Moreover, it makes Deuteronomy foundational, given to Israel upon entering its land. In actuality, Deuteronomy was composed centuries after Israel arose in its land. To be sure, numerous Deuteronomic laws revise cases found in Exodus 21–23, an earlier monarchical or even premonarchical collection. Indeed, part of a common Afro-Asiatic legal tradition, Deuteronomy’s roots go deeper in time to Mesopotamian laws from the early second millennium. Scholars widely agree, however, that the book itself was decisively shaped during the reign of Judah’s King Josiah (640–609 BCE). Deuteronomy’s distinctive drive to centralize sacrificial worship, and its impassioned opposition to idolatry, parallel key aspects of Josiah’s reform as described in 2 Kings 22–23. 88

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to Babylonian culture. Still later, Persian period editors detach Deuteronomy from the historical work and join it to Genesis through Leviticus. The form of Deuteronomy is nearly as complex as its composition history. As noted earlier, the book is presented as speeches of Moses. In addition, it is heavily influenced by ancient Mesopotamian law collections and treaties. Despite its complexity, Deuteronomy pre­ sents a coherent vision, calling on a unified Israel to exclusive, impassioned loyalty to Israel’s one God, YHWH, who is to be worshiped in one place, (implicitly) Jerusalem. The vision would serve Josiah’s centralization movement well. After the Babylonian conquest, it would help the fragmented, colonized, and geographically scattered community maintain its identity and its courage. At a highly abstract level, the Deuteronomic reimagining of Israel’s narrative and legal traditions offers women’s biblical studies a usable resource. The Deuteronomic authors and editors provide their people with a story and ethos grounded in their sacred, collective ancient memories, yet dynamically serving the urgent needs of their own times. Women who have opted to remain within biblical religions may

find warrant for reimagining their faith traditions in the dynamism of the Deuteronomic reappropriation of Israel’s stories. At a concrete level, Deuteronomy is more problematic for womanist, mujerista, and feminist interpreters. Without question, Deuteronomy emerges from and is thoroughly shaped by a patriarchal culture. Both its sermonic framework(s) and the laws at its core reflect a male perspective and support patriarchal authority structures. Moreover, the aims of Josiah’s nationalist independence movement and, later, the urgent survival needs of the beleaguered colony of Judah result in a call for strong and fiercely defended boundaries between “us” and “them,” “Israel” and “Canaanite other,” couched as religious intolerance (Deut. 12) and even genocide (Deut. 7; 20). Understandable in its historical contexts, this “minority literature” has been used by dominant cultures to legitimize and motivate imperialistic aggression. Womanist, mujerista, and feminist interpreters face the challenge of listening respectfully to the text in their own contexts, identifying and appropriating resources it offers current-day liberation struggles, while critiquing its patriarchal and exclusivist dimensions.

Comment Construction of a Shared Story (Deut. ­1:1–4:43) The first of the Moses speeches, Deuteronomy 1:1–4:43, consists of two sections: a “historical review” (Deut. 1–3) and a sermonic interpretation of the commandment against idolatry. The speech presupposes a male audience. The “you” of chapters 1–3 is slippery; most often, it refers to Israelite warriors. In 3:18–22, the second person pronoun refers more narrowly to the warriors of three tribes: Reuben, Gad, and Manasseh, whom Moses charges to lead the invasion of Canaan, leaving behind “your wives, children, and livestock.” At a concrete level, these legends of origins offer little in the way of resources for women’s biblical studies. At a more abstract level, the chapters may contain clues for women’s reappropriation of biblical traditions. According to the Pentateuchal story line, by the opening chapter of Deuteronomy, nearly all of the exodus

generation has died out; the story speaks of Moses addressing the second, wilderness generation. Yet his speech puts them at Horeb. The narrative resists literal interpretations of it. Viewed through a historical-critical lens, the “historical review” addresses an exilic audience, whose sense of identity and unity has been shattered by the Babylonian conquest and subsequent colonization. The redactors who preface an earlier version of Deuteronomy with freely reshaped traditions of origin understand the importance of a shared story to rebuilding communal identity. The aniconic message of chapter 4 may also be a resource for women’s biblical interpretation—again, at a highly abstract level. The chapter elaborates on the second commandment’s prohibition against creating any graven or molten images of YHWH. No creaturely form can contain Israel’s God. Feminists have argued that the exclusive use of male imagery for God amounts to idolatry, containing the divine in

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the “likeness of male” (Deut. 4:16); similarly, African American scholars have argued that racism idolatrously reifies white skin.

Moses’ Second Speech (Deut. 4:44–28:68) Moses’ second speech, 4:44–28:68, opens with the heart of Deuteronomy: the Ten Commandments (5:6–21) and Israel’s central confession of God’s sovereignty and unity, the shema‘ (6:4–5). In contrast to chapters 1–3, these chapters, setting out foundational principles binding on the entire community, specifically mention women. Mothers as well as fathers are to be honored (5:16). The Sabbath commandment is enjoined on “you, your sons and daughters, your male and female servants.” (See also Deut. 12:12. Deut. 16:11, 14 adds to these household members who are to celebrate festival meals four categories of particularly vulnerable people: Levites, resident aliens, fatherless minors, and widows.) As elsewhere in Deuteronomy, the “you” of the Sabbath command is masculine; commentators debate whether or not it includes the otherwise missing householder’s wife. Some believe that wives, whose work is essential to daily life, are exempt. Others (including myself) find it difficult to believe that the command, encompassing daughters and female slaves, would not also include wives. The Deuteronomic vision is inclusive. “Inclusive” does not mean egalitarian, however. Here as elsewhere in the book, the Deuteronomic vision of Israel is patriarchal. The perspective of the commands is that of male heads of households who possess land, slaves, and animals, and to whom other members of the household are subordinate. This is most clearly indicated in 5:21, which prohibits the addressee from coveting “your neighbor’s wife”; no comparable command prohibits a woman from coveting her neighbor’s husband. Presumably women are prohibited also from killing, committing adultery, stealing, and so forth, but they are included in the commandments only derivatively. The first commandment, to have no gods besides (or before) YHWH, is positively restated in the Shema, which may equally well be translated “Hear, O Israel, YHWH our God, YHWH is one,” and “Hear O Israel, YHWH is our God, YHWH alone.” The former affirms the unity of Israel’s God; the latter, God’s sovereignty. Confessing divine unity may be particularly

important for women. Women’s lives are often fragmented by conflicting demands of family, work, faith, community, and so on. That the power and purpose at the heart of reality is whole, not divided against itself, can provide a hope of wholeness. Confessing the sovereignty of one’s God can serve and has served both liberating and oppressive ends. For ancient Israel, affirming their God’s sole sovereignty undercut human claims to ultimate allegiance. Numerous scholars, noting the influence of ancient Near Eastern suzerainty treaties on Deuteronomy, characterize it as a countertreaty, set forth in deliberate opposition to the claims of Assyrian or, later, Babylonian overlords. For beleaguered communities today, the same may hold true; acknowledging their God’s sole sovereignty can undergird survival efforts and fuel resistance against oppressive claims of power. Ethnocentrism and Religious Chauvinism (Deut. 7; 20) These chapters make starkly visible the violently chauvinistic possibilities inherent in claiming the sole sovereignty of one’s own God vis-à-vis other religions. Deuteronomy 7 commands Israel to destroy utterly all the indigenous peoples of Canaan, prohibits them from intermarrying with those peoples, and exhorts them to destroy non-Israelite worship centers. The reason for this commanded genocide is to eliminate the temptation to worship others’ deities. The exhortations are formulated as law in Deuteronomy 20. There, an older stratum of law calls for subjecting to forced labor the populations of towns that surrender to them, and slaying the warriors of towns that resist them; women and children may be taken as spoil. A later editor amended that law by adding 20:15– 18, which distinguishes populations inside the boundaries of the land promised to Israel from those at a distance. Like 7:2, Deuteronomy 20:15–18 requires Israel to annihilate the entire indigenous population. Deuteronomy 7 and 20, along with the conquest stories (Josh. 1–12), are among the most problematic in the Hebrew Bible. Deuteronomy 7:2 and 20:15–18 cannot be intended literally; when they are composed in the late seventh century BCE, there are no Canaanites. The martial tone of Deuteronomy would support King Josiah’s military resistance. Especially after the Babylonian conquest, when Judah is a small,

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unarmed colony, the command to destroy the indigenous peoples would help Judahites resist assimilation to the dominant and presumably attractively cosmopolitan culture of their overlords. Deuteronomic Revision of Worship (Deut. 12:1–16:17, 21–22) The exclusivist tone is found again in chapter 12. Until the time of Josiah (640–609 BCE), Judahites offered sacrifice at sanctuaries throughout their land. One main concern of the Deuteronomic authors is to centralize all such worship in the Jerusalemite temple. Deuteronomy 12 weaves together several layers of text commanding Israel to worship at “the place that YHWH your God will choose out of all your tribes” (Deut. 12:5). As a corollary, the texts deem as “Canaanite” worship places, objects, and practices outside Jerusalem, which have previously been acceptable parts of Yahwistic worship, and order their destruction. Within their historical context, these centralization laws may be understood as the Deuteronomic authors’ efforts to promote a unified, nationalistic spirit, first in the face of Assyrian (and possibly Egyptian) domination, and later in the struggle to help Judah survive exile and subsequent colonization. Nonetheless, the passage directly contradicts a key tenet of most mujeristic, feminist and womanist theologies: acknowledging and respecting cultural and religious differences. The command to “burn their sacred poles” presents a particular problem for women’s biblical studies. The term underlying “sacred poles” is a plural form of Asherah, a Phoenician goddess found linked to YHWH in some ancient Judahite inscriptions. The precise relationship of the sacred poles and Asherah is uncertain, but it is clear that Deuteronomy commands the destruction of poles that are in some way related to a goddess (12:3; 7:5). How centralization of worship in Jerusalem would have impacted women is related to questions about the religious concerns and practices of Israelite women that go well beyond the limits of this essay. Scholars, drawing on crosscultural studies, suggest that local and regional worship sites would have been more important to Judahite women than the great Jerusalemite temple. If so, the elimination of worship sites outside of Jerusalem would have adversely affected women. On the other hand, Israelite

women’s religious concerns may have been so centered on birth, lactation, childraising, mourning, healing, and other family-related matters that the centralization of official maledefined sacrificial worship, including worship sites, may not have mattered to them particularly. (For discussion of Israelite women’s religious lives, see Meyers, 2005.) Centralization would have had at least one positive impact on women. Prior to the Deuteronomic reform, the slaughter of animals eligible for sacrifice (such as cattle, sheep, and goats) had to be carried out sacrificially; only those who were ritually clean could eat the meat. Both women and men were subject to periods of ritual uncleanness. The uncleanness associated with menstruation and childbirth, however, would have disproportionately barred women from participating in sacrificial meals. Women may thus have disproportionately benefited from the possibility of profane animal slaughter, which ritually unclean persons could eat (12:22). Deuteronomy 13 starkly illustrates the religious intolerance inherent in Deuteronomy’s nationalistic campaign. The chapter calls for the death of any prophet (13:1–5), individual (13:6–11), or town (13:12–16) advocating the worship of a “foreign” god. While the perspective of the chapter is that of male heads of households (13:6 refers to the “wife” but not the “husband” “whom you embrace”), female as well as male offenders were liable (13:6; 17:2, 5). The law was probably never practiced. Rather, the chapter expresses the passionate urgency of the Deuteronomic command to worship YHWH alone. That urgency would have served Josiah’s nationalistic movement well, and may later have helped beleaguered Judah resist assimilation to the dominant culture. Historically, however, these biblical ideals have dangerously fueled cultural and religious crusades. Concern for the Poor (Deut. 14:22–15:18) Deuteronomy is both inclusive (of those comprising “Israel”) and, at the same time, exclusive (of non-Israelites). It is composed by and addressed to urban elite and at the same time, expresses a much-noted concern for the poor. Deuteronomy 14 reframes the tithe in light of centralization and of Deuteronomy’s inclusive vision of Israel. The head of household is not to give the tithe to the temple or palace, but to eat it in a celebratory meal shared by his whole

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household (14:26) and by the Levites, landless priests, many of whom would have been made unemployed by the elimination of local and regional shrines. Deuteronomy 14:28–29 mandates that every third year, the tithe be set aside for four groups of landless, and thus vulnerable, people. Resident aliens (refugees forced by lack of land and kinship networks to seek the patronage of landed households); widows, particularly those without other male kin to protect them; and fatherless children were together considered special objects of concern and charity by the elite of Israel and its neighbors. To these three groups, Deuteronomy adds the Levites. Recent studies have criticized Deuteronomy for not addressing the structural causes of these groups’ poverty. In the case of widows and fatherless children, the causes are specifically patriarchal; patrilineal inheritance practices left women and children without male protectors highly vulnerable. Nonetheless, as my nation extends tax cuts for the wealthy, while slashing health and human-service programming, I hesitate to disparage Deuteronomic compassion for the poor. The theme of alleviating the worst effects of poverty continues into Deuteronomy 15, which sets out the Deuteronomic sabbatical law. Deuteronomy 15:1–11 requires Israelite creditors to cancel debts owed by their fellow Israelites every seven years. Deuteronomy 15:12–18 mandates the release of Israelite debt slaves after seven years of servitude. The latter has been the topic of much gender analysis. It revises an earlier law in ways that some scholars have argued sought to improve women’s status. According to Exodus 21:2–11, if a man was married when he was enslaved, his wife and children followed him into servitude and were released with him. If, however, his master had provided a wife for the debt slave, she and their children remained the master’s property. The Exodus law also includes a subcase, ruling that a daughter sold as a slavewife would not be released after six years, presumably because her release would frustrate the purpose of the sale. The subcase does require the owner/husband to provide the slave-wife with certain basic necessities or let her go free. The Deuteronomic law of release makes no mention of the slave’s wife or children following him into servitude, and does not deal with the competing claims of the slave and his master over his dependents. Moreover, it explicitly includes women in the release (15:12 and 17b).

The differences between Exodus 21:2–11 and the Deuteronomic revision are probably more apparent than real, however. Under the Deuteronomic law, the indebted man’s family would still have followed him into slavery and would still have been released with him. Under the Exodus law, widowed or divorced women who were unable to pay their debts probably would have been released after six years. The differences amount to the absence of any regulation in the Deuteronomic law exempting the slave-wife from release. That exemption may have been taken for granted; alternatively, the Deuteronomic authors may have considered the statuses of “slave” and “wife” to be incompatible and so eliminated the subcase. It is unlikely that they sought to secure the release of a daughter sold into slave-wifery. Distribution of Powers (Deut. 16:18–18:22) Deuteronomy 16:18–18:22 deals with four national offices that together comprised Israel’s leadership: the judiciary (16:18–20; 17:8–13); kingship (17:14–20); priesthood (18:1–8); and prophecy (18:10–22). The chapters raise three issues specifically related to gender. First, the law of the king prohibits him from acquiring “many wives.” The law explains that his wives might cause “his heart” to “turn away”; that is, foreign wives might lead the king to worship their national deities (cf. 1 Kgs. 11). Implicitly, the prohibition is part of a remarkable effort to restrict royal powers. “To acquire many wives” allowed a king to cement regional and international alliances, just as acquiring horses allowed him to build up his military power, and accruing gold and silver to exploit his royal position to enrich himself. The law restricts the role of the king to studying and observing Deuteronomic law (17:19). A second issue is that women would have served in some of the offices treated by these laws. Given the martial character of Deuteronomy, the masculine pronouns used throughout the book, and the patriarchal assumptions and ideals that many of the laws convey, it is easy to picture the officers as exclusively male. During the monarchical and postmonarchical periods, women were excluded from the Israelite priesthood. There were female prophets, however, including Huldah, who according to 2 Kings 22:12–20 authenticated the book of the law that scholars associate with an early form of

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Deuteronomy (see also Exod. 15:20; Judg. 4:4; Neh. 6:14; Isa. 8:3). The book of Judges depicts Deborah as a prominent judge, indeed, the only one of the book’s heroes to judge in the technical sense of rendering legal decisions. Even Judah’s list of monarchs includes two women: Athaliah (2  Kgs. 11:3) and the Hasmonean queen Salome Alexandra. That a culture is patriarchal does not mean no women serve in official roles. Rather, it means that positions of power are normally reserved for men, and that female leaders are exceptions. The third gender-related issue arises in connection with the office of prophecy. Afro-­ Asiatic cultures, including Israel, acknowledged numerous ways of discerning and influencing a deity’s will, such as necromancy, divination, and dream interpretation. Exodus 22:18 condemns female sorcerers to death. Deuteronomy 18:9– 12 expands this law, proscribing seven other forms of mediation. Although Deuteronomy identifies the prohibited activities as Canaanite, some of them were probably considered legitimate Yahwistic practices before the Deuteronomic reform. Carol Meyers cites cross-cultural studies and various biblical clues to argue exclusion from central roles in the male-dominated national cultus may have drawn women to religious expressions commonly labeled “magic.” If so, and if the prohibitions were put into practice, they would have restricted women disproportionately (Meyers, 2005, 19–22). Beyond these explicitly gender-related issues, the Deuteronomic description of national offices raises a more general matter related to women’s biblical studies. To the extent that womanism, mujerista theory, and feminism oppose totalitarian forms of power, this ancient blueprint for distributing the powers of governance is a relevant and welcome part of our heritage. Family and Civil Laws (Deut. 21:10–25:19) The family laws of Deuteronomy 21–26 contain the greatest number of explicit references to women. Not surprisingly, they have garnered much attention from womanist and feminist Deuteronomic scholars. Assessment of the treatment of women (or construction of gender) in these laws varies widely. Some scholars believe that Deuteronomic family laws represent a significant advance in the status of women, establishing a woman’s legal personhood and making her a full member of the covenant community. A majority of feminist, pro-feminist,

and womanist scholars disagree. I have previously argued that the Deuteronomic family laws primarily serve male interests by undergirding patriarchal family structures, while offering limited protections to dependent family members (Pressler, 95–105). Cheryl Anderson goes farther, considering that the construction of gender in Deuteronomic laws not only describes or reflects patriarchal violence against women, but also, by excluding female perspectives, is itself violent (Anderson, 2004). The subject of these laws is not women per se, nor is the subordination of women their direct purpose. Rather, they seek to safeguard the continuity and integrity of the family, and to strengthen familial authority structures (Frymer-Kensky, 57–68). In practice, however, the interests of the Israelite family in large part coincided with its (normatively) male head. The integrity of the family was defined vis-à-vis the father, who could have numerous wives, but whose wives must be unilaterally loyal to him; its lineage was traced from father to son, and its authority structures were patriarchal. Gender was not the only factor determining the status of a family member; generation, class, and ethnicity interacted with gender to determine each member’s privileges and responsibilities. The father’s primary wife would have had authority over sons as well as daughters, over male as well as female clients and slaves, and over other wives and daughters-in-law. Nonetheless, comparing women in given family positions with their male counterparts (mother/father; daughter/son; wife/husband) reveals consistent gender inequality. The laws protect and define rights of dependent family members, but never do so in ways that challenge the basic patriarchal structure of the Israelite family.

Relationships in the Family (Deut. 21:10– 21). Three laws in Deuteronomy 21:10–21 define relationships of authority between the male head of the household and certain dependent family members: a captive woman whom a warrior has chosen to marry, a firstborn son, and an incorrigible son. The case of the captive bride, Deuteronomy 21:10–14, was traditionally interpreted as prohibiting rape on the battlefield: “If you see among the captives a beautiful woman and desire her, (then) you shall take her as your wife.” The term “then” is implied rather than explicated; the verse can be read: “If you see among the captives a beautiful

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woman whom you desire and want to bring into your household, then she shall shave her head.” So read, the law provides a way for a man legally to marry a captive, when the normal way of legalizing marriage is not possible (Pressler, 10). Marriage was normatively a contractual arrangement between a groom or his parents and the parents (or other agent) of the bride. In the case of a captive woman, such a contract is not possible. The law provides a way for the man to marry her and also to ensure that their children are his legal heirs. The rituals that it sets out for her to perform and the thirty-day mourning period facilitate the foreign woman’s assimilation into the Israelite household. The thirty-day period also provides time to ensure that she is menstruating and, hence, not pregnant by another man. The main case of the law thus serves the interests of the warrior who wants to marry her. Subsequently, a number of scholars, noting that the woman has no say in the matter, have argued that, far from prohibiting rape, the law actually codifies and legalizes it. Whether one accepts this reading probably depends on one’s methodology. A culturally cued reading asks how a text might have been heard by an ancient Israelite (male) audience. The earliest audience is unlikely to have interpreted it as a matter of legal rape. Read from our twenty-first-centuryCE perspective—and, plausibly, from the perspective of a young captive woman, torn from her people and forced into marriage with one of their conquerors—the law indeed legitimates violence. At any rate, the main case of the law (21:10–13) serves the warrior’s interests, not the interests of his captive. The subcase, verse 14, is intended to protect her. Once she has been made a wife, she cannot be reenslaved. The man has “dishonored her.” The Hebrew term that the NRSV translates “dishonored,” when referring to sexual intercourse, does not necessarily imply force. It does, however, imply that the intercourse was outside the bounds of a normative marriage. If the man no longer wants her, he may not sell her as a slave. He must let her go free (see Exod. 21:11 for a similar provision). In Afro-Asiatic cultures, a man’s firstborn son inherited a double share of his father’s property. Deuteronomy 21:15–17 restricts the father from assigning the firstborn’s inheritance to a younger son. The law does not seem to be intended to protect the hated wife.

Ancient Israelite law dealt with concrete cases, not with principles. Probably the reference to the “hated” and the “loved” wives provides a concrete example of circumstances that would lead a father to prefer a younger son over an elder, rather than restricting the prohibition to that situation. It does make clear that a father’s choices are not unlimited. The third family law rules that parents must bring an incorrigibly rebellious son before the elders of their village for judgment. If the son is convicted, the men of the village are to stone him to death. The law has been interpreted in two distinctly different ways. Perhaps a majority of interpreters understand it as limiting a father’s power over his children. Prior to Deuteronomy, they argue, fathers had nearly unlimited power to condemn their children to death, suggested by Judah’s sentencing of his widowed daughter-in-law when she is found to be pregnant (Gen. 38:24). Deuteronomy requires the parents to bring their son to be tried by village elders, rather than to execute him summarily. Others (including myself) doubt that, by the late monarchical period when Deuteronomy was compiled, fathers had the authority to execute dependent family members. Timothy Willis most fully develops this interpretation. He presents cross-cultural evidence to show that a community is far more likely to pressure disruptive offspring’s parents to give them up for execution than to restrain parents from killing their children. Parents are more likely to try to protect their offspring from community pressure, and themselves from dishonor, than to kill their child. By this reading, the law is intended to force parents to surrender incorrigible sons to the elders’ judgment, underlining the importance of filial submission to parental authority. It is notable that both father (i.e., the male head of household) and mother (i.e., the father’s primary wife, not necessarily the son’s biological mother) have to be obeyed. Both father and mother bring their son to court, and both parents complain that he is a drunkard and glutton. The authority of the parents is a matter of generation, not of gender; in the intrafamilial affair of a consistently rebellious son, they play symmetrical roles.

Inadmissible Mixtures (Deut. 22:5). Deuteronomy 22:1–12 interweaves cases expressing concern for the neighbor (22:1–3, 4, 6–7, 8) and prohibitions against inadmissible mixtures

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(22:5, 9, 10, 11). The first of these, verse 5, prohibits cross-dressing: “No warrior’s object shall be on a woman, nor shall a man wear woman’s clothing” (my trans.; NRSV: “A woman shall not wear a man’s apparel, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment”). In an earlier day, when women were not allowed on stage, this was one of the scriptural passages invoked to demonstrate the immorality of playacting and actors, which involved men dressing in women’s clothes. Further, the case is cited to admonish women against wearing slacks; and it is used as a basis for condemning transgendered persons and transvestitism. In fact, scholars continue to debate the meaning and rationale of the verse. The meaning of keli-geber, which NRSV translates “apparel of a man,” is uncertain. The term keli is not found elsewhere in biblical Hebrew with the meaning “clothing.” It can refer to an article of leather or to jewelry that one wears; it also frequently means vessel, weapon, or instrument. Geber derives from a root meaning “strong, powerful”; it primarily refers to a warrior or some other man of prowess. The verse may prohibit a woman from bearing a warrior’s weapons or other accoutrements. The meaning of the first half of the verse is further obscured by its highly unusual construction. If the verse stated that a woman shall not “carry” or “wear” or “utilize” a strong man’s object, the verb would give us some clue to the object’s nature. Despite the NRSV’s translation, however, “woman” is the object of the preposition “upon,” not the subject of the verb “wear.” In part because of this translation issue, scholars interpret the underlying rationale of the prohibition differently. Some suggest that wearing the clothes of the opposite gender was part of “pagan” rituals and so was to be avoided by YHWH worshipers. Others envision a military background for the rule; men were not to dress as women in order to avoid military service, nor were women to carry a warrior’s weapons into battle. A third proposal envisions men dressing as women and vice versa in order to gain access to members of the opposite sex for the purpose of seduction. Still others maintain that the drafters of the law found transvestitism inherently repugnant. The placement of the prohibition in a chapter that deals with prohibited admixtures (22:9, 10, 11) and sexual offenses suggests to some, including myself, that its rationale has to do with maintaining clear boundaries and categories.

In Afro-Asia, the opposite of creation was not “nothingness” but chaos. Structures needed to be kept carefully in place, lest creation revert to primordial chaos. To that end, sowing two kinds of seed in a vineyard was prohibited, as was making cloth of wool and linen. As evidenced by the unusually strict sexual offense laws found later in this chapter, the Deuteronomic authors had rigid views of gender roles, and much anxiety about the boundary-blurring capacity of sexuality. They may have felt that socalled cross-dressing blurred those gender roles and threatened the created order. For those of us who do not feel that the integrity of creation is fundamentally threatened by women wearing slacks, the primary value of the law may be to illustrate how uncertain the biblical bases of dogmatic ethical pronouncements can be.

Sexual-Offense Laws (Deut. 22:13–23:1 [ET 22:30]). Deuteronomy 22:13–29, the most extensive biblical treatment of the topic of adultery, is a valuable if ambiguous source of at least one Judahite group’s assumptions and ideals about women’s sexuality; they have been the subject of much feminist and womanist scrutiny. It is not possible in the space allowed to discuss the issues and questions that the varying scholarly positions raise, much less to assess them in detail. There are many possible interpretations of nearly every verse. Careful reading of these laws requires an understanding of how their ancient drafters worked. They did not set out abstract principles that were then applied to specific cases. Rather, they began with a set of similar concrete cases, then changed one or two variables. Not every possible permutation was included. Rather, the reader was expected to reason from one case to another. Deuteronomy 22:13–29 revolves around two variables: (1) the girl or woman’s marital status and (2) whether she consented or was forced. Deuteronomy 22:13–23:1 (ET 22:30) is composite. In its final form, the six laws comprising Deuteronomy 22:13–29 have been redacted into a unit tightly bound by subject matter, genre, and repeated terms. Deuteronomy 23:1 (ET 22:30), which prohibits a man from sleeping with any of his father’s wives, appears to have been appended to the adultery laws because it also deals with a sexual offense. The first law consists of a case (22:13–19) and subcase (22:20–21). The main case deals

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with a newly married man, who, disliking his bride, charges that she was not a virgin at the time of her marriage. The law instructs the girl’s parents to inform the elders of their town about their son-in-law’s slanderous accusations and to show them proof that the accusations are false. In numerous cultures, a blood-stained sheet is regarded as proof of a bride’s virginity prior to marriage. Presumably, the parents guarded the stained sheet after their daughter’s wedding night and now bring it out to the gate as evidence of her innocence. The groom is either punished (probably with a flogging) and then fined 100 shekels, or punished by being fined 100 shekels (the Hebrew leaves room for either translation).The shekels go to the girl’s father. Later, the rabbis assigned them to the girl. A brief description of marriage in ancient Afro-Asiatic cultures is necessary to understand this judgment. Marriage was a contractual matter by which authority over the girl was transferred from her father to the groom or (if the latter is too young) the groom’s father. Normatively, this transfer involved an exchange of goods. The groom or his family gave bride wealth to the bride’s family, who, in turn, provided a dowry for their daughter. Bride wealth is not a purchase price; in fact, cross-culturally, it is often less than the dowry. Anthropologists studying preindustrial tribal societies indicate that women often have more power when marriage involves bride wealth. In any case, the exchange of goods complicates divorce. In the ancient Afro-Asiatic world, a man who divorced his wife without cause had to return her dowry; the bride or her family kept the bride wealth. If, on the other hand, she was at fault, the groom kept the dowry and the bride’s family had to return the bride wealth. Deuteronomy 22:13–19 probably envisions a groom spreading slander in order to establish he had cause to divorce his despised bride and thus had a right to keep the bride wealth and dowry. Deuteronomy prohibits the husband, who sought to secure for himself a cheap divorce from his spurned bride, from ever divorcing her. To our ears, this provision sounds appalling, binding a young girl for the rest of her life to a man who “hates” her. In patriarchal ancient Judah, where women’s social status and economic survival depended on membership in a male-headed household, the provision was probably intended to guarantee her security.

If the parents cannot or will not disprove the groom’s accusation that the bride was not a virgin at the time of her wedding, the penalty is harsh (22:20–21). The men of the town are to stone her to death. The communal execution indicates that her offense harmed the whole community. The site of the stoning, outside the door of her father’s house, mirrors her offense— she fornicated while living in her father’s household, and shamed her father, who was unable to control his daughter’s behavior. Many scholars believe that the Deuteronomic authors added verses 20–21 to the main case (22:13–19). With this addition, the husband’s exclusive and unilateral rights over his wife’s sexuality become retroactive. The verses appear to be in tension with the resolution of the case of violation of a never-betrothed girl in 22:28–29. There, and in Exodus 22:15–16 (ET 16–17), the couple who engaged in premarital sex are forced to marry; neither the man nor the girl is executed. The case is also in tension with Deuteronomy 17:6 and 19:15, which require the evidence of two or more eyewitnesses before a guilty party can be executed. The nonvirgin bride is executed on the basis of circumstantial evidence. Probably Deuteronomy 22:20–21 was never intended to be a practicable law. As Tikva Frymer-Kensky argues, parents could have saved their daughter’s life—and their own honor—by falsifying the evidence (Frymer-Kensky, 62). Rather, the countercase forcefully inscribes the Deuteronomic ideal that a girl must guard her virginity until marriage. Tensions between the subcase and other Deuteronomic laws would have mattered less if the case were not intended to be enforced. Why an unmarried girl’s virginity was considered so important is beyond the scope of this commentary. The case provides insights into the various roles of ancient Israelite women. Here, as she did in the case of the rebellious son (21:18–21), the mother (that is, the father’s primary wife) appears in court. Unlike the case of the rebellious son, however, only the father speaks. Perhaps the mother shares authority with the father in intrafamily affairs, but not in disputes between families. Verse 22 is the oldest and most basic of the adultery laws. If a man is discovered having sex with another man’s wife, the adulterous couple shall die. The law makes the woman’s marital status very clear. The Hebrew term underlying “wife of another man” is be‘ulat-ba‘al, the

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feminine passive participle of a verb meaning “to master or rule over” and the masculine noun derived from that verb; hence, it means “a female ruled over by a master.” She is under the authority of her husband, who has exclusive rights to her sexuality. Here, as elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible—and in legislation still current in the state where I live (!)—adultery is unilaterally defined as sex between a married woman and a man other than her husband. In the Hebrew Bible, for a married man to have sex with a woman other than one of his wives is discouraged (Prov. 5:15–19) but is not a crime unless he violates another man’s claims over his paramour’s sexuality. The phrase “is found” indicates that the adulterous couple is caught in the act; there are eyewitnesses to testify against them (Deut. 19:15). Like 22:20–21, verse 22 may not reflect Israelite practice. Other texts in the Hebrew Bible indicate an ancient Israelite husband’s discretion to respond to his wife’s adultery in any of several ways. Proverbs 6:35 presupposes that an offended husband might accept payment from the male culprit. In none of the biblical narratives that treat adultery are the offenders put to death (and see Hos. 2). The uncompromising language of the Pentateuch laws concerning adultery appears to be a statement about the drafters’ view of the gravity of the offense. Presumably Deuteronomy 22:22 applies to cases of consensual sex. Deuteronomy does not deal explicitly with the rape of a married woman, but the next two laws establish that a rape victim is not to be punished. Deuteronomy 22:23–27 sets out the case and countercase of a betrothed young woman caught in consensual adultery (22:23–24), and a betrothed young woman who is raped (22:25–26). The English word “engaged” does not capture the nature of betrothal in ancient Israel. The exchange of bride wealth and dowry radically changed the girl’s status vis-à-vis a third party. The couple was not yet fully married. The bride’s family or the groom could still back out of the arrangement, albeit with a financial penalty for breach of contract, but for another man to have sex with her was now adultery, a theoretically capital offense. The two cases use location as a rough way of indicating the girl’s consent or lack of consent, rather than take them as absolute rules. Presumably, as the ancient rabbis believed, a young woman who could prove that she had been

raped, even if it happened in the city, would be considered innocent. Similarly, if witnesses could prove the betrothed woman seduced a man in the countryside, she would be held guilty, even though it happened in the country. The use of force does not impact the gravity of the offense; that is established by the girl’s marital status. The last of the six closely related cases (22:28–23:1; ET 22:28–29) involves a young girl who has never been engaged; thus her father has not received bride wealth for her. It is resolved by requiring the man who lay with her to pay her father fifty shekels and marry her, without the option of divorce. The case parallels an older law found in Exodus 22:15–16 (ET 22:16–17), concerning the seduction of a virgin who had never been engaged. The two cases differ in that the Exodus law requires the seducer to pay the father the “bride wealth of a virgin,” while Deuteronomy sets the sum at fifty shekels. Exodus explicitly gives the father the right to withhold his daughter from the seducer, who must still pay the bride wealth, a right that Deuteronomy does not mention. The ancient rabbis and many modern commentators have interpreted the Exodus case as one of seduction and the Deuteronomic case as one of rape. The verbs used in each law do suggest such a distinction. In Exodus, the verb is pth, “entice.” In Deuteronomy, it is tps, which connotes force. The distinction does not correlate with the judgments given in the two cases, however. Why would the father be able to prohibit the marriage in the case of seduction, but not in the case of rape? Nor are fifty shekels a large enough sum to suggest that the assailant is required to pay a fine greater than bride wealth would be. It seems, rather, that the drafters considered the girl’s consent or lack of consent irrelevant. She had no right to engage in sex with her seducer in the Exodus case; her sexuality belongs to her father. Deuteronomy shares that perspective, depicting rape not as a violation of the girl, but as an offense against her father, who had the right to arrange his daughter’s marriage, and thus, control the alliances into which his household entered. The law also recognizes an economic injury to the father, who no longer can command as much bride wealth for his daughter. The violator pays the father fifty shekels and marries the girl, with no right of divorce. As in

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the case of the slandered bride, the clause ruling that the guilty man may never divorce his victim was probably intended to force him to provide for the girl whom he had violated. It was probably meant to protect her. To our sensibilities, of course, this constitutes further abuse of her; it is not clear what the ancient Israelite girl would have felt. 2  Sam. 13:16 reflects its author’s or redactors’ view that the girl would share the perspective shaping Deut. 22:29—but the author and redactors were themselves male. Deuteronomy 23:1 (ET 22:30) is the only Deuteronomic incest law. The injunction prohibits a man from marrying any of his father’s wives, presumably after the father’s death or in the case of divorce. Otherwise, it would be a matter of adultery. Engaging in sex with one’s father’s wife is deemed “uncovering the father’s skirt.” The phrase recalls the language of the incest laws of Leviticus 18, which calls the “nakedness of the woman” “the nakedness of ” the man who has authority over her. His wife’s sexuality belongs to the father so intimately and entirely that uncovering her skirt is equivalent to uncovering him, and similarly dishonors him. The distance between ancient ideals and twenty-first-century values is well illustrated by the Deuteronomic sexual offense laws. They presuppose that women’s sexuality is a man’s possession or, rather, since property offenses in ancient Israel are never punishable by death, belong to the man’s very person. The father has the right of disposal, the husband an exclusive and unilateral right of access. Rape is considered a violation not of the girl or woman, but of her father or husband. The gravity of the offense is determined by her marital status. Her consent or resistance is relevant only to the question of whether she, along with the man, is culpable and subject to death. Daughters and wives are not chattel. Five motive clauses insisting on the rape victim’s innocence demonstrate that the authors recognize her as a person who, if innocent, cannot be executed. Two cases that prohibit a man from ever divorcing the wife whom he has wronged appear aimed at providing her the security of marriage. The prohibitions also illustrate the failure of these laws to attend to her perspective.

The “Assembly of YHWH” (Deut. 23:2–9 [ET 23:1–8]). Deuteronomy conveys an inclusive vision of Israel: sons, daughters, male and female servants, resident aliens, all are bound

by Torah and benefit from its protections. The “Assembly of YHWH” is exclusive: a subsection of Israel, composed of adult, male, presumably landholding Israelites who collectively make decisions and act in religious military and judicial matters. Deuteronomy 23:2–9 (ET 23:1–8) establishes the parameters of the Assembly. The first to be excluded are men with damaged genitalia. Scholars debate the rationale underlying this exclusion. Some suggest it refers to eunuchs, a class of men castrated either by themselves or their parents, who served as officials elsewhere in ancient Afro-Asia, and plausibly also in Israel. If so, the exclusion may reflect repugnance felt toward deliberate mutilation. This understanding of the verse seems to underlie the ancient rabbis’ ruling that the exclusion did not apply to men whose genitals were damaged by a birth defect, injury, or illness. Other commentators note that the Assembly functions at times as a religious body and so, like priests, its members are required to be physically whole. Crushed testicles are among the “blemishes” that disqualify a man from the priesthood (Lev. 21:20). Others believe that the prohibition reflects respect for male power, and particularly male reproductive power. In any case, this quintessentially male-oriented ruling requires that participants in Judah’s protodemocratic decision-making assembly have unblemished male genitals. The effort to maintain clear boundaries continues in verses 18 and 19 (ET 17 and 18), two laws intended to maintain the sanctity of Israel’s temple. The first prohibits women and men from serving as a qedeshah or qadesh, some sort of cult functionary. Traditionally, the terms have been translated “sacred prostitute” and “male sacred prostitute,” temple personnel with whom male worshipers were supposed to engage in ritual sex. Recent studies convincingly challenge the existence of sacred or cultic prostitution in Israel and the cultures surrounding it. The actual function of the qedeshah and the qadesh is uncertain. Biblical texts do associate the qedeshah with the zonah, promiscuous woman, but that may simply mean that the qedeshah, a woman free from the strictures of male authority, is automatically deemed sexually suspect by the elite male authors and editors of the biblical texts. The following verse (23:19; ET 23:18) prohibits bringing the fee of a prostitute or “pay of a dog” into the temple. The NRSV translation of the term “dog” is based on the parallel between it and the prostitute. However, keleb, “dog,” is

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not associated with prostitution elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, and its use as a man’s name makes that translation doubtful. Jewish tradition has taken the term literally and assumed that payment received for a dog could not be used for a temple donation because dogs were unclean. Discovery of a massive canine graveyard in Ashkelon (a Philistine city) has led others to suggest that dogs played a role in some non-Israelite religious practices. Commentators are probably correct that the Deuteronomic authors sought to maintain the sanctity of the temple by prohibiting the payment of vows or offerings with “dirty money.” The assumption underlying the law (and many modern interpretations of it), that prostitution is primarily a matter of immoral choices on the part of the prostitute, is highly problematic. In the ancient world, as now, the sex trade is—at best—a matter of the exploitation of impoverished women and men who feed themselves and their families using the only means available. At worst, in our day prostitution is less a survival strategy than out-and-out slavery. Minneapolis, where I live, is the third largest center of human trafficking in the United States. The average age at which its young victims enter—or are forced into—the sex trade is between twelve and thirteen. The young women and boys caught up in it often recount experiences of kidnapping, gang rape, and threats against their lives or the lives of their families. A womanist, feminist, or mujerista response to Deuteronomy 23:19 might be to call for congregations to investigate who is making “dirty money” by human trafficking in their own communities, and how they might minster to sex-trade victims.

Prohibition of Remarriage (Deut. 24:1–5). Deuteronomy 24:1–4 prohibits a man from remarrying a woman whom he had divorced if she subsequently had married a second man, who has either divorced her or died. The law is much discussed, in part because it includes a rare biblical reference to grounds for a divorce: “she does not please him because he finds something objectionable about her.” The meaning of “objectionable thing”—and hence what Torah deems grounds for divorce—has been debated for more than two thousand years. The reference to a bill of divorcement provides the biblical basis for the Jewish practice of requiring a man who divorces his wife to give her a “get,” a Jewish divorce decree.

The case is also much discussed because there is no agreement on its rationale. Scholars have offered multiple proposals including the following: The remarriage would be incestuous, since the first marriage made the man and woman close relatives. The prohibition is intended to discourage the first husband from divorcing his wife too hastily. The law seeks to prevent the woman and her first husband from colluding against the second husband. The remarriage too closely resembles adultery, in that the woman first has sex with man A, then man B, then again with man A. The first three explanations ignore at least one of the clauses of the law. The fourth, which I have previously followed, is an argument from desperation. Raymond Westbrook proposes another rationale that provides an elegant economic explanation that accounts for all of the clauses in the law. Emphasizing the phrase “he found something objectionable in her,” Westbrook argues that the first man divorced the woman for cause, allowing him to keep her dowry and the bride wealth. The second husband either dies or divorces her because he dislikes her; that is, without cause. Whether the woman was widowed or divorced without ­cauuse, she would keep the dowry and the bridewealth. By this reading, the case prohibits the first husband from remarrying his former wife in order to control her property. Westbrook’s argument hinges on the distinction that he draws between the clauses “finds something objectionable in her” (v. 2) and “dislikes her” (v. 3), which is far from certain (Westbrook, 387–405). Perhaps the most honest response to this case is to acknowledge that we do not know why such remarriage was prohibited. The text does provide insight into Deuteronomic assumptions about the divorced or widowed. It appears that the women may marry men of their choosing. While Deuteronomy views the young woman as an object, not a subject of her first marriage, it appears to regard a widow or divorcee as a subject of a subsequent marriage. Deuteronomy 24:5 relates back to the war laws of Deuteronomy 20, especially 20:7, which exempt from military service a man

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who had betrothed but not married a woman, lest another man marry her. In 24:5, a recently married man is given a one-year military deferment. The purpose of the law differs from 20:7. Here, he is given the year, not because of his own needs, but to “give pleasure,” including conjugal pleasure, to his new wife. Some ancient manuscripts read “enjoy his new wife,” but the textcritical principle that the more difficult reading is the more likely one supports “give pleasure to his wife.” In any case, the law shows that while the Deuteronomic lawgivers forcefully asserted a man’s authority over his wives’ or daughters’ sexuality (22:13–29), they did not view sex as inherently wrong. According to the Masoretic Text, the lawgivers explicitly cared about the woman’s pleasure. A second, implicit concern of the law is maximizing the opportunity for the couple to have a child, which was vital not only to the woman’s economic security and to establishing the man’s lineage, but also to the seriously underpopulated Judahite society.

Levirate Marriage (Deut. 25:5–10). In numerous preindustrial societies, a male relative of a deceased man is expected to marry or to have sex with the dead man’s widow. Such relationships, called “levirate” from the Latin levir, “brother-in-law,” vary in form and purpose from culture to culture. In ancient Israel, the purpose of the levirate institution appears to have been multipronged. First of all, it provided an heir for a man who died without sons. A kinsman was to marry the widow; by legal fiction, the first male child born to them counted as the deceased’s son. Another function of the levirate institution in Israel was (apparently) to provide for the widow of the deceased and to ensure social continuity by preserving the family’s lineage (so Josephus, Antiquities, 4.8.23). Based on the two biblical narratives that entail the levirate (Gen. 38 and Ruth), the kinsman who fathers a son for the deceased could be any one of several relatives. The Deuteronomic levirate law (25:5–10) appears to deal with only one aspect of the levirate institution. The main case of the law (25:5–6) comes into effect in a very narrowly defined set of circumstances. When two brothers live together and one dies childless, the surviving brother must marry the widow in order to provide his dead brother with an heir. “Live together” probably means that the brothers had

not yet divided the property they inherited from their father. Such a brother would at once be the deceased man’s closest possible relative, and the one with the least incentive to raise up an heir for him. If the two brothers had co-owned the land, after the one brother’s death, the other would have sole ownership of it, so long as he did not father an heir for the deceased. The narratives that involve the levirate suggest that a kinsman other than such a brother may have been morally but not legally obligated to father an heir; the law seeks to pressure the brother who had the least incentive to fulfill his moral obligation to do so. The purpose of the Deuteronomic law is also narrower than that of the institution, to ensure that the dead man’s “name is not blotted out of Israel.” Establishing his “name” appears to refer to establishing a household or lineage for the deceased and seems to involve his fictive descendants inheriting the dead man’s share of the property. In the Hebrew Bible, one’s “name” carries something of one’s essential being. Preservation of one’s name seems to secure one’s ongoing existence—or at least the meaning of one’s existence—after death. The extreme importance of having offspring who will perpetuate one’s name is widely attested in the Hebrew Bible. Among the worst possible fates for an Israelite is to die childless (Isa. 14:22; Job 18:17–19; 1 Sam. 24:22 [ET 24:21]; 2 Sam. 14:4ff.; Num. 27:4; see Isa. 56:4–5). In any case, the main case of the law clearly serves the deceased man’s interests. The subcase of the law (25:7–10) provides the surviving brother with a way out of his obligation, even as it exerts some pressure on him to marry his sister-in-law. If the brother fails to have sex with her, the widow is to tell the elders. They in turn summon and question the brother. If he refuses to marry her, then the woman is to engage in three ritual acts intended to humiliate her brother-in-law: she is to draw off his sandal, spit in his face, and declare, “This is what is done to the man who does not build up his brother’s house.” The subcase seems to serve multiple purposes. The humiliation would pressure the brother to fulfill his obligation, even as it provides him with a way out. The ritual also provides a way for the woman to be released from her obligation to her dead husband’s family. The passage provides a number of insights about Deuteronomic assumptions and ideals vis-à-vis gender. First, it envisions inheritance

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exclusively through the male line. In the Hebrew text, the wording of the law makes it clear that during the monarchical period, the heir who establishes a man’s name must be male (the term “firstborn” is gender exclusive). In the postmonarchical period, this apparently changed, allowing daughters to inherit if their father had no sons (see Num. 27:8; the Greek translation of Deut. 25:7–10 used gender-­ inclusive language of the man’s heir). Second, the obligation of a woman to her husband’s family extends even beyond his death. Third, the emphasis on providing a name for the deceased man raises the question, how is a woman’s name established? Isaiah 4:1 suggests that the woman’s name is derived from her man’s: “Seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying, ‘. . . take away our disgrace.’” Fourth, at least when she has no male relative to speak for her, an ancient Judahite woman had access to elders in their role as judges and could, moreover, perform legally meaningful acts. If verses 7–10 provide a way for the woman to be released from levirate obligations, the law reflects some concern for her well-being. Nonetheless, the release is necessary only because of the gender inequality inherent in the law; the woman is not free to dissolve the bond. The following law, Deuteronomy 25:11–12, treats the case of a woman who intervenes in a fight between her husband and another man by seizing the genitals of her husband’s opponent. The law mandates an extreme punishment: her hand is to be cut off. Apart from the legal principle stated in the words “an eye for an eye (etc.),” this is the only law in the Hebrew Scriptures to punish an offense with physical mutilation. The rationale behind this harsh law is far from obvious. Some have argued that the woman’s action risked damaging the opponent’s genitals, thus making him incapable of fathering children. Others suggest that the woman’s offense is that of immodesty. Defending her husband would have been seen as the most extenuating possible circumstance. Even then, a woman dared not touch the genitals of any man besides her husband. If so, the case witnesses to the Deuteronomic lawgivers’ extreme anxiety about female sexuality. The woman’s action may have been understood as a violation of the man seized, akin to our modern understanding of rape. If so, the contrast between the

lawgivers’ treatment of the female “assailant” of a male, and that of the violation of a young woman (Deut. 22:28–29), is striking. This law once again demonstrates the Deuteronomic view that male genitalia are sacrosanct (see on Deut. 23:2 [ET 23:1]).

Equal-Opportunity Curses (Deut. 27–28) As noted in the introduction, the shape of Deuteronomy has been influenced by ancient treaties. Curses are part of the treaty genre. Chapters 27 and 28 set out blessings that will result from obedience to Deuteronomic torah and curses that will result from disobedience. The curses in chapters 27–28 include women as well as men. Both sons and daughters will go into captivity, to their parents’ anguish (28:32, 41). The famine will be so severe that the most tender man (28:54–55) and most tender woman (28:56–57) will cannibalize their offspring, refusing to share that ghastly food with their surviving family members. Most scholars view chapter 28 as one of the later layers of Deuteronomy. It is possible that the explicit references to both men and women reflect a rise in women’s status. Some evidence suggests that women’s condition improved after the monarchy ended. Alternatively, the explicit references to women as well as men may be a stylistic matter. The curses of Assyrian treaties, which greatly influenced Deuteronomy, frequently refer to both men and women.

Covenant at Moab (Deut. 29:1–31:30) Exodus 19 depicts the covenant at Sinai as enacted between God and the men (not the women) of Israel. “The people” prepare for the event by not going “near a woman” (Exod. 19:15). In keeping with the Deuteronomic vision of “all Israel,” the late editor who added the description of the covenant at Moab explicitly included women, along with children and resident aliens (29:10–11). Women are also part of the assembly that is to gather every seven years to hear the law read (31:12). The language of these verses sets out Israel’s hierarchical structure: “the leaders of your tribes, your elders, and your officials, all the men of Israel, your children, your women, and the aliens who are in your camp” enter into covenant with YHWH (Deut. 29:10–11).

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Moses’ Final Words and His Death (Deut. 32:1–34:12) As noted in the introduction to this essay, the Deuteronomic redactors shaped the whole of their book as the last will and testament of Moses. After the discussion of law and covenant, redactors have appended materials couched as Moses’ very last words. “The Poem of Moses” (Deut. 32), widely regarded as exilic, indicts Israel for disloyalty and declares divine judgment against them. “The Blessing of Moses” (Deut. 33) draws on traditions of a father offering a final blessing to his children as he is about to die (Gen. 49). In Deuteronomy 34, Moses dies. One final text of special interest to women is found in these materials. Deuteronomy 32:18 includes one of the relatively few texts in the Hebrew Bible that depicts God with female metaphors: “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you; you forgot the God who gave you birth” (32:18). The verb that NRSV translates “gave you birth” (JPS “brought you forth”) literally means “writhed in travail” with reference to labor pains. A similar image of God as a powerfully creative mother writhing in labor is found in Isaiah 42:14. At a concrete level, Deuteronomy is problematic for women’s biblical studies. Its authors’ and editors’ religious vision of Israel was inclusive, but it was also patriarchal and fiercely nationalistic. The need to establish a unified, clearly boundaried community, during Josiah’s reign

and later in the conquered, colonized Judah, resulted in dangerously intolerant and warlike rhetoric. While a few specific passages (such as 32:18) offer positive resources for gender justice, the greatest contribution of the book to a womanist, mujerista, or feminist hermeneutic is at a more abstract level. That is, the book serves as a model and a warrant for reappropriating sacred faith traditions to serve a beleaguered people’s new and empowering vision. Bibliography

Anderson, C. B. Women, Ideology, and Violence: Critical Theory and the Construction of Gender in the Book of the Covenant and the Deuteronomic Law. London: T. & T. Clark Int., 2004. Frymer-Kensky, T. “Deuteronomy.” In Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by C. Newsom and S. Ringe. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. Meyers, C. L. Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Pressler, C. The View of Women Found in the Deuteronomic Family Laws. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1993. Westbrook, R. “The Prohibition of Restoration of Marriage in Deuteronomy 24:1–4.” In Studies in Bible, edited by S. Japhet. Jerusalem: Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1986.

Joshua Amy C. Cottrill

Introduction The sixth book in the Hebrew and Christian canons, the book of Joshua falls directly after the book of Deuteronomy and is the first book of the Hebrew (former) prophets. Its position in the canons connects it both with the Pentateuch and with the narratives that follow. Representing events from approximately 1400–1200 BCE, the book of Joshua continues the narrative of the Hebrew people’s flight from Egypt. At the end of Deuteronomy, Moses, the liberating hero and lawgiver, dies overlooking the promised land. It is Joshua, the military leader, who will conquer the land inhabited by the Canaanites and pave the way for Hebrew settlement. Because of Joshua’s role as the successor to Moses, much narrative attention is given to aligning the characters of Joshua and Moses: “Just as YHWH had commanded his servant Moses, so Moses commanded Joshua, and so Joshua did; he left nothing undone from all that YHWH commanded Moses” (11:15; all translations are mine). Despite Joshua’s central role, the overwhelming message of the book is that the conquest is God’s victory. Joshua’s obedience enables him to be God’s rightful leader, but God is the divine warrior and architect of the victory (and sometimes the defeat) of the Hebrews. The book of Joshua contains the narrative of the conquest of Canaan (Josh. 1–12), the division of the land into the territories belonging to the twelve tribes (Josh. 13–22), and the final speeches of Joshua (Josh. 23–24). In numerous parallels with the book of Exodus, God brings the people into the new land of freedom, a land that has been taken away from the Canaanites.

The Deuteronomistic tone of the book of Joshua is widely recognized. A full discussion of the compositional history of Joshua and the various theories of the Deuteronomistic History (DH) is not undertaken here, though some orientation will be helpful. Because of the theological and linguistic connections between the book of Deuteronomy and the material from Joshua through 2 Kings, it is now commonplace to refer to that collection of books as the Deuteronomistic History (DH). The editor (or editors) of the DH is often referred to as the Deuteronomist. Many theories exist about the origin and development of the DH, but the most widely asserted theory is that there were two editions of this history, one during the Josianic reforms (seventh c. BCE) and one postexile (sixth c. BCE). Though the compositional history of the DH remains an unsettled issue, what is important in this context is that the editor(s) used materials at hand to construct a narrative of the Israelite past to address particular theological, political, and historical issues facing the Israelites. Theologically, the Deuteronomist privileges obedience, faithfulness, and YHWH-alone worship. The Deuteronomist’s anxiety about foreign religious practices that might cause the Israelites to stray from YHWH is evident in the frequent negative portrayal of foreign women who might seduce Israelites into worship of their gods (e.g., the Jezebel story in 2 Kgs. 9). Like the Hebrew Bible taken as a whole, the book of Joshua is a multivocal work that reflects the diverse interests of the Hebrew and Israelite people over hundreds of years. At times, those 103

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interests do not align neatly. As L. D. Hawk notes, “Abrupt shifts and contradictory assertions create an overall sense of uncertainty and openness” (xviii). These “abrupt shifts” are easily seen in Joshua’s claims of victorious conquest of land (see 10:28–42; 11:12–23; 12:7–24) that are negated in other places (see 15:63; 16:10; 17:11–12; 19:47). The “openness” that Hawk describes, the fact that the book of Joshua does not speak with one unified voice but reflects the editors’ ongoing attempts to provide the Israelites with a usable history, is a feature of the text that should be especially important to readers interested in gender issues. The editors of Joshua shaped and reshaped inherited stories to address issues of crucial importance to their communities. The composition of the book itself models for feminist readers a process of interpretation wherein inheritors of the tradition are invited to respond to what is usable in the book of Joshua for their own modern communities.

Hermeneutical Questions related to Feminist Criticism The book of Joshua is ripe for feminist consideration. Some questions, among many, that relate to the feminist analysis of texts are

these: How are the female and male characters portrayed? What are the assumptions of femininity and masculinity embedded in the characterizations? How is God portrayed, and how does that articulation of authority relate to the construction of systems of power? Who is empowered by this text, and whose interests are not served? How does the text construct relationships (between individuals, peoples, and nations) of power, subordination and domination, inferiority and superiority, marginalization and privilege? How is otherness defined, and where are the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion? Where does the text invite the reader to come to specific conclusions and judgments, especially as they relate to gender roles? As the questions above illustrate, feminist criticism is interested not only in female characters, but also in the overall structures of power, domination, and privilege that are created and maintained by texts. Feminist analysis casts light on the particular ways texts create and sustain structures of power and cultures of violence in which women—and indeed any who are marginalized—are disempowered. In this way, feminist criticism has much in common with ideological and postcolonial criticisms, though these approaches to texts do not always overlap.

Comment Be Strong and Resolute! (Josh. 1) That the reader enters a particular ideological and theological world in Joshua is evident from the first verses of chapter 1 (1:6–9), which introduce the voice of the Deuteronomistic editor. A favorite refrain of the Deuteronomist, “Be strong and resolute,” reflects the theology and ideals of the editor. Strength, strict obedience, fearlessness, and decisiveness are privileged in this text. This is not a voice that invites or tolerates hesitation, doubts, or misgivings about the editor’s theological agenda. Correspondingly, the introduction of Joshua as the new leader is accompanied by a clear indication of the consequences of resisting Joshua. God says to Joshua, “No one will be able to stand against you all the days of your life” (1:5). This introduction to the book makes clear

what is at stake for the recipient of the text. One is either with Joshua or against him in the mind of the narrator, and God will not abide opposition to Joshua’s leadership. The threatening tone of these words warns the readers against resistance to the editor’s theological and ideological assertions. With the editor’s endorsement of Joshua as God’s chosen leader, Joshua makes his first speech. Significantly, he quickly separates the warriors from the women, children, and animals: “Let your wives, children, and livestock remain in the land that Moses gave you on this side of the Jordan; but all of your warriors will cross over in fighting companies before your kin” (1:14). The rest of the book addresses the warriors among the tribes; therefore, Joshua’s primary audience is male. Rhetorically, women readers are not addressed by the text that follows.

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The Spies and Rahab the Canaanite Prostitute (Josh. 2) Even before Joshua’s character is fully developed, the reader is introduced to Rahab, a Canaanite who has a starring role in the success of the Jericho conquest. On a mission from Joshua to investigate the state of affairs in Jericho, Hebrew spies first visit a Canaanite prostitute. She bravely defies an order from her own king to produce the spies and hides them instead. Then she plots the escape of the spies and deftly orchestrates the confusion of the Jericho pursuers, despite significant danger for herself if she is caught. The spies seem witless and helpless compared to her. She does all this because she, prophetically, recognizes that God has already given the land to the Hebrews: “I know that YHWH has given the land to you, because dread of you has fallen upon us, and all the inhabitants of the land are melting before you” (2:9). She continues with a lengthy speech that passes every Deuteronomistic test in theology and evidences a deep and improbable familiarity with Hebrew history and tradition. So eloquent is this speech that the spies even use Rahab’s words when they report to Joshua on their return (2:24). Rahab, a Canaanite, provides the Hebrews with confidence that their first and most important victory has already been accomplished by God. Because of her bravery, prophetic knowledge, and confidence, Rahab’s family is spared in the conquest of Jericho, and she and her family live among the Hebrews in the land. Rahab’s starring role in Joshua is ironic and intriguing, because the Deuteronomist is normally opposed to the presence of foreign women among the Israelites and uses prostitution as a metaphor for worshiping gods other than YHWH (see Deut. 31:16). In the Rahab story, however, the Deuteronomistic editor preserved a story of a foreign prostitute who is a successful military strategist, easily recognizes and chooses to side with the Hebrew people, acts bravely to save her family from harm, and speaks with Deuteronomistic theological clarity that the spies themselves do not evidence. Moreover, the instruction regarding the conquest in Deuteronomy 7:2 does not provide for including figures like Rahab and her family, or any Canaanites, among the Hebrews: “You must utterly destroy them, make no covenant

with them, show them no compassion.” For an editor committed to strict obedience of the law, this seems a strange inclusion in the narrative. Why did the Deuteronomist retain a story that positively portrays a foreign prostitute, a symbol of faithlessness? Why was Rahab not edited out of the text? There are certainly multiple plausible readings of the character of Rahab, due to the text’s ambiguous portrayal of her. Musa Dube offers one provocative and important interpretation of Rahab. As Dube notes, many scholars have noticed how Rahab’s speech closely mimics the Deuteronomist’s language and theology. According to Dube, Rahab’s story is included in the book of Joshua because she serves the interests of the creators of the text. Though she has an unusually long speech for a woman in the Bible, let alone a Canaanite prostitute, Rahab embodies the ideals of a colonizer. She has been invaded already, just as her body has been invaded by the patriarchal society in which she lives, and she speaks the language of a colonizer. Her speech affirms the correctness of the Hebrews’ actions and erases doubt from the mind of the reader about the acceptability of these acts of conquest. According to Rahab (or her creator), even the conquered recognize the validity of the actions of God and the colonizers (the Hebrews). In fact, it is precisely her role as a prostitute that makes Rahab as a character so valuable to the Deuteronomist. If we assume that the Deuteronomist wrote Rahab’s speech, on a literary level the Deuteronomist takes advantage of Rahab’s position as a prostitute and engages her in an exchange in which the commodity is not sex but ideologically loaded words. The editor puts words in Rahab’s mouth in the form of a lengthy six-verse speech, treating her as an object to fulfill his ideological desires by making her repeat his theological language. He makes her play the role of his fantasy Canaanite, one who sees the conquest of her own land and people as right and good, according to her conqueror’s theological assumptions. As compensation, Rahab earns her rescue and that of her family. Letting her live, in fact, allows the Deuteronomist to play another desirable role, as the benevolent and merciful conqueror who makes exceptions for those who affirm the justice and inevitably of the conquest.

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The Conquest of the Land (Josh. 3–12) Readers are given a good clue as to the direction of the narrative when the captain of YHWH’s army comes to Joshua with a sword in his hand (5:13). He tells Joshua, “Remove your sandals from your feet, for the place where you stand is holy” (5:15). Moses’ sign of God’s presence was a burning bush; Joshua’s is a captain of an army with drawn sword. This depiction of God the divine warrior is an important one for feminist readers on a number of levels. On whose behalf does God conquer? Who is conquered and why? How are the conquered given voice in the text? Who controls this narrative? Whose perspective is not included? For many, the conquest of the promised land is a story of ultimate liberation, the fitting conclusion to the exodus narrative in which God intervenes to save an oppressed people and bring them to a land flowing with milk and honey. The slave spiritual “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho” memorializes this interpretation of the story and evidences the power of this narrative to shape the theological imagination of a suffering people, who are ultimately confident in the liberating power of God. Moreover, this interpretation aligns with the tone of Joshua as a whole, which celebrates with enthusiastic optimism the power of God to act on behalf of the oppressed and marginalized Israelites and bring them to a place of freedom. Without negating the liberating influence of this story, counterinterpretations of the conquest narrative have emerged that make problematic readings of the story as solely one of liberation. Robert Allen Warrior, reading from a Native American perspective, articulates the central problem for those who have experienced conquest: “As long as people believe in the Yahweh of deliverance, the world will not be safe from Yahweh the conqueror” (Warrior, 294). The book of Joshua inextricably links deliverance and conquest. In order to celebrate the strength of the conquering and delivering God of Joshua, the narrative erases evidence of Canaanite loss and pain. Warrior does not deny that the text is a liberation story, but recommends asking whose liberation story this is, a question that necessarily keeps the Canaanites in mind. Warrior’s comments clarify what is at stake for modern readers of the book of Joshua. If we ignore the worldview of the text, and the way that worldview is upheld by excluding

other perspectives, we run the risk of maintaining structures of erasure that exist in the text and our modern world. Joshua evades more than the Canaanite perspective, however. Textual opportunities for the reader to acknowledge or feel discomfort about the conquest or sympathize with the Canaanites are not abundant. Because of the editor’s theological priority on strength and obedience, expressions of confusion, struggle, or dismay about the conquest and its ultimate justice are overshadowed by calls for strength and decisiveness. In some instances, in fact, it seems as if the editors anticipated the reader’s potential chagrin at so much destruction and discomfort at being in the role of the conqueror. In 10:24–27, Joshua instructs his officers (and also the readers) on how they should envision themselves as conquering warriors who embrace their victory and their power over the Canaanites, given to them by God. At the conclusion of a significant battle in which five Canaanite kings are captured, Joshua says to his army officers, “Come near and place your feet on the necks of these kings” (10:24). When they do so, he says, “Do not be frightened or dismayed; be firm and resolute. For this is what YHWH will do to all the enemies against whom you fight” (10:25). It is especially interesting that Joshua asks the officers symbolically to perform the conquest of the kings who have already been captured. Much of the conquest of the land remains to be accomplished at this point in the narrative, and in fact the land is not completely conquered even at the end of the book. This performance does not prepare the officers militarily to conquer, however. In fact, a repeated assertion of the book of Joshua is reiterated in this passage; ultimately the Israelite victory is in YHWH’s hands and will not be accomplished through the army’s military skill: “For this is what YHWH will do” (10:25). The symbolic performance of standing on the necks of the kings addresses another area of preparation for war, the self-perception of the warrior. Does Joshua sense some discomfort among the officers at adopting the stance of the victorious warrior that he addresses through this rehearsal of warrior behavior? The motivation for this performance is unclear, but literarily it is potent instruction to the officers (and the readers) about how they should see themselves and God. Joshua asks the warriors

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physically to rehearse his ideological, theological, and gender instruction. Through this embodied performance, Joshua (the warrior and the book) constructs an ideal Israelite and an ideal follower of YHWH. What is most important to Joshua is that the Hebrews attitudinally inhabit, in their actions, thoughts, and demeanor, the warrior culture, which is both militarily and theologically constructed. In fact, failure to demonstrate the appropriate military confidence in conquest is a theological failure as well. The Hebrews must not simply be obedient and win the battles; they must be YHWH’s conquering warriors.

Division of Property (Josh. 13–22) These chapters of Joshua contain the continued efforts to drive out the remaining Canaanites and divide the land among the tribes. These chapters reflect the bureaucratic work of conquest: negotiating, maintaining, allotting, and defining boundaries. Considering this context, it is perhaps not surprising that another sort of property transfer is described in Joshua 15 (see also the parallel story in Judg. 1:11–15), that of a father trading a daughter in a beneficial land acquisition. What seems at the beginning to be a story of a woman circumscribed by her patriarchal location also contains elements that offer a surprising countervoice to female repression. Though the story is brief and textually problematic, Achsah’s few verses stand out in a book that is almost entirely about the actions of male warriors. The story begins when Achsah’s father, Caleb, declares that he will give his daughter in marriage to anyone who conquers Debir. So far, this is a story that reflects the patriarchal power of men over women. Othniel is the victor; true to his word, Caleb delivers his daughter to Othniel as a reward for military prowess. Like the land around her, Achsah is a piece of property awarded to the military victor. The story develops, however. Othniel and/or Achsah decide to ask Caleb for more land. The question is who induces whom to ask Caleb for the additional property (15:18). Many translations favor Achsah as the subject of the action, translating the Hebrew verb as “she incited him,” but some translators choose an alternate manuscript tradition, yielding “he incited her.” The translator’s role here is paramount in the characterization of Achsah and Othniel. What

difference does it make for Achsah to incite Othniel or for Othniel to incite Achsah? This is a textual issue that reflects a history of confusion about and interest in the gender dynamics of this story. Textual problems notwithstanding, it is Achsah who gets on her donkey, travels (apparently alone) to see her father, and crafts the language of the request. It is Achsah who successfully accomplishes the goal of acquiring more land. Othniel has no more than a bit part in this negotiation. Achsah’s surprising assertiveness is evident from her first words to her father, expressed in the Hebrew imperative form: “Give me a present” (15:19). The translations of her next words differ. The NRSV renders her words in verse 19, “Give me a present; since you have set me in the land of the Negeb, give me springs of water as well.” The Jewish Publication Society’s Tanakh provides a different translation: “Give me a present, for you have given me away as Negeb-land, so give me springs of water.” Does Achsah complain about being in the Negeb or being traded like a piece of unwatered, unfertile territory, a piece of Negeb-land? These translations should actually be read side by side, as both are possibilities. Achsah’s shrewd words linguistically connect the unfavorable land she has been given to her own diminished value in this patriarchal world. In the end, Achsah remains a traded piece of property in this text. She does not remain silent and passive, however. She acquires more land from her father and gives voice to her condition in a way that is unusual and noteworthy in the patriarchal world of the Bible (akin to Num. 27).

The Call to Choose (Josh. 23–24) Beginnings and endings of narratives are always important. Joshua 1 begins with the assurance of God’s victory and a call to obedience and strength. Chapter 24 closes the book with a rehearsal of the history of the Israelites and God’s overwhelming efforts to secure their future. Speaking for God, Joshua says, “I have given you a land for which you did not labor and cities which you did not build, and you are dwelling in them; you are eating of vineyards and olive groves which you did not plant” (24:13). Joshua provides these examples of God’s provision for the Israelites as evidence that they should choose to worship YHWH

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alone. Again, readers must ask, Whom does the text support? How does the text generate and affirm assumptions of justified violence, and at whose expense? These kinds of questions will help readers become more skilled at reading for the missing or overlooked voices of the conquered and disempowered, even as they hear the voices in the text that celebrate God’s faithfulness to the Israelites. Significantly, the book of Joshua ends with a resounding call for choice: “Choose this day whom you will serve” (24:15). Joshua announces his choice clearly: “I and my household will serve YHWH” (24:15). In the book of Joshua, the god Joshua serves mirrors Deuteronomistic theology and practice and the principles of the warrior culture that the book of Joshua both reflects and creates. Feminist readers should embrace Joshua’s call to choice, however, as a theological opportunity. Choice involves moral and ethical reflection, consideration of questions unasked in the text itself, and communal conversation about the limits and possibilities of particular interpretive trajectories. Feminist readers must contend with Joshua’s troubling representation of conquest, imperialism, and violence, even as they affirm the potential for empowering interpretations of Joshua. The questions raised by this book related to gender, power, and interpretive practice offer the

possibility for rich conversation, and that is no small gift. Bibliography

Dube, Musa W. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2000. Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. “Reading Rahab.” In Tehillah le-Moshe: Biblical and Judaic Studies in Honor of Moshe Greenberg, edited by Mordechai Cogan, Barry L. Eichler, and Jeffrey H. Tigay, 57–67. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997. Hawk, L. Daniel. Joshua. Berit Olam: Studies in Hebrew Narrative and Poetry. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2000. Stone, Ken. “What Happens When Achsah Gets Off Her Ass? Queer Reading and Judges 1:11–15.” In Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qur’an as Literature and Culture, edited by Roberta Sterman Sabbath, 409–20. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Warrior, Robert Allen. “A Native American Perspective: Canaanites, Cowboys, and Indians.” In Voices from the Margin: Interpreting the Bible in the Third World, edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah, 287–95. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1991.

Rahab and Her Interpreters Amy H. C. Robertson

The character Rahab, celebrated for her role in bringing about the conquest of the land by the Israelites, claims marginal status in the world of the Hebrew Bible in three different senses: she is a woman, she is a non-Israelite, and she is a prostitute. As we might expect, the very aspects of Rahab’s biography that make her an “outsider” are the subject of significant attention from biblical interpreters, both Jewish and Christian. She becomes one of many women whose place in the history of biblical interpretation is arguably more significant than her role in the biblical story itself. Rahab is introduced in the Hebrew Bible in Joshua 2, where she is described as a Canaanite prostitute—a zonah—who works at the perimeter of the city of Jericho, which the Israelites

have been ordained to capture. When Joshua sends Israelite spies to look over the land, she not only takes them in and hides them, but, when the king of Jericho comes looking for them, she gives him misinformation, so as to give the spies more time to escape. She tells the spies that she has heard the fantastic tales that have preceded them, naming in particular the incident at the Sea of Reeds (Exod. 14–15), and having heard all these things, she declares that the God of Israel must be the one true God. Fully believing that the spies will be successful in their mission in Jericho as well, she offers her aid to the spies on the condition she and her family will be spared in the conquest. The spies agree, and she proceeds to lower them out her window, advising them which route to take so

Rahab hides Joshua’s spies on the roof while their pursuers, tricked by Rahab, leave through the city gate in Rahab, an engraving by Otto Elliger and Joseph Mulder (1659/60–1718), from Historie des Ouden en Nieuwen Testaments by David Martin (Amsterdam, 1700). The rope by which the spies will escape dangles from the window.

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that they may safely escape the king. The spies instruct her to mark her home by hanging a crimson cord out the window when they return to take the city, and tell her that they will spare all her family who are gathered in her home at that time. In Joshua 6, when Jericho is seized, Rahab and her household are named as the only persons spared. Rahab is remembered in the New Testament at least two (more likely, three) times. The first and most ambiguous of these is in Matthew 1:5, where someone named Rachav is named as the wife of Salmon and the mother of Boaz—and thus part of the lineage of Jesus. There is some debate about whether this first reference actually has Rahab the harlot in mind, because elsewhere in the New Testament she is referred to as Raav rather than Rachav. But since the other women listed in that genealogy—Ruth, Tamar, and the “wife of Uriah,” that is, Bathsheba—are also women from the Hebrew Bible who are known for their unlikely relationships with powerful men, it seems likely that the biblical author had Rahab in mind. The second New Testament reference is clearer.“Rahab the harlot” is remembered in Hebrews 11:31, where her survival is credited to her faith. The third reference is in James 2:25, where she is praised for her actions. In the trajectory of Jewish interpretation, Rahab’s occupation as a harlot and her identity as a non-Israelite are often treated in one fell swoop. That is, her occupation is associated with her fellowship among the Canaanite rather than the Israelite community, and after her encounter with Joshua, she is said to have a conversion experience wherein she simultaneously abandons her occupation and the Canaanite religion. Some traditions relate that she marries Joshua and that the two begin a line of descendants that variously includes kings, prophets, and priests: King David, Huldah, Jeremiah, Hilkiah, and Ezekiel among them (Ginzberg, 1093n65; 843; 844n12; 1070n10). Insofar as she joins the Israelite community as a proselyte and then becomes an ancestor to one or more of its most central characters, she is not unlike Ruth, who begins a line of descendants that includes King David. In contrast to the story of Ruth, however, Jewish interpreters highlight the religious element to Rahab’s conversion narrative: based on her own statement that she has heard about the things the Lord has done for the Israelites and her proclamation that

“the Lord your God is the only God in heaven above and on earth below” (Josh. 2:11b), she is said to be a better convert than even Jethro and Naaman (Deut. Rab. 2:26). Indeed, her connection to the God of Israel seems so strong that Josephus considers her a prophetess: he reports that she was “instructed by signs from God” and that this is how she knew about the coming Israelite victory (Ant., 5.2.8). How else would a Canaanite harlot have known about the exodus if not through her own prophetic abilities? In the aforementioned line of interpretation, Rahab’s occupation is eclipsed somewhat by her religion; she is a pious convert, and once she becomes a proselyte, she immediately changes her lifestyle. Other interpreters, both Jewish and Christian, also imagined her as a convert not only in terms of religion but in terms of lifestyle, but they were not satisfied to dismiss her past profession. Instead, they saw it as an important part of her story that puts the miracle of her conversion into more stark relief (Ginzberg, 844n12). These interpreters saw her knowledge of the Israelite history not as prophetic, but as directly related to her sinful occupation. Since she had had intimate relations with every prince and ruler in the area, she did not need to be a prophet: she was well-informed of goings-on (Bronner, 149). In contrast, Josephus, perhaps following Targum Onqelos on Joshua 2:1, connects the word for harlot (zonah) to the verb “to feed” (zon) and suggests in Ant., 5.1.2 that she was an innkeeper, running something more akin to a bed and breakfast than a brothel. If Josephus believes Rahab to have been an innkeeper, not a prostitute, it follows that he has a different explanation as to how she receives her information. Whereas Rahab’s name meaning “wide” or “broad” can be understood rather crudely in the sense of her occupation, Origen—and many other Christian interpreters with him—repurpose it as a foreshadowing of the church (Lyons, 39). He suggests that Rahab complained that her home was too narrow to offer the spies a hiding place, and that when they replied and said, “Enlarge your tent,” she found a way to enlarge it. This is seen as an allegory for the widening of the covenant or an opening of the doors of heaven to welcome the Gentiles (Origen, Homilies on Joshua, 3.5). Furthermore, many Christian interpreters have noted that her family was to be saved only if they were within the walls of her home at the time of the conquest, driving home the point that, while the doors of the

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church may be open to all, there is no salvation outside the church (Kritzinger, 26–27). Similarly, Jerome compares Rahab’s home to Noah’s ark, a sanctuary amid God-ordained destruction (De Exodo in Vigilia Paschae, 1.20). Her character traits are also considered at length—and, generally speaking, greatly lauded—in both the Jewish and Christian traditions. Midrash Mishle counts her among the twenty-two women of valor, and Megillah 15a numbers her among the quartet of the most beautiful women in Israelite history. Fourthcentury Christian interpreters identify several personality traits for which Rahab should be commended: she is hospitable, merciful, faithful, and repentant (Gregory the Nazianzen, Select Orations, 7:40.19; Ambrose, Epistles, 10.63.105; Chrysostom, Homilies 14.27). Her lie to the king of Jericho brings mixed reviews from Christian interpreters: Cassian believes that lying for a good cause is the most virtuous of the many things she did (Collatio, 17.17, PL XLIX: 1063), and the Greek church fathers all thought it was perfectly appropriate for her to lie. In fact, Chry­ sos­tom praised her wisdom in how carefully she crafted the lie of partial truths and misinformation, so as to persuade the king that it was true (Stander, 46). At least one Christian interpreter, Augustine, disagrees sharply, saying that the outcome of her lie does not make it excusable. Rather, she is forgiven on account of her other virtuous deeds (Contra Mendacium, 32). Christian interpreters as early as the midsecond century saw another important allegory in the story of Rahab: the crimson cord as the sign of (and vehicle toward) salvation. The identification of the crimson cord with the saving power of the blood of Christ is widespread in Christian interpretation, witnessed in the writings of Origen, Justin Martyr, Clement, Jerome, and Augustine, among others (Lyons, 38). Though the comparison seems apt enough on its own, an anomaly in the LXX paves the way for it even more strongly. In the MT, Joshua 2:12, Rahab asks for a “sign” that the spies will spare her life if she helps them. Later, in Joshua 2:18, the spies tell her to hang “this thread of crimson cord” from her window; it will function as a sign to them, but it is not named as such in the MT. In the LXX, however, the two references are combined, and Joshua 2:18 is rendered “this sign of crimson cord,” further motivating an allegorical reading; it is a sign not only of where Rahab’s home is, but also of the

salvation to come through the blood of Christ (Hanson, 56). Though the relative importance of works and faith becomes a more pressing issue for Christians than it is for Jews, generally speaking, both Rahab’s faith and her works are variously highlighted in both traditions. Her faith is highlighted in Hebrews 11:31 and among those Jewish interpreters who favorably compare her conversion to those of Naaman and Jethro, while her works are highlighted in the New Testament in James 2:25 and also in Mekhilta of R. Ismael (Yitro 1), where she prays, “Master of the Universe, just as I have sinned with three things, bring about my forgiveness with three things: a rope, a window, and a wall.” That is, she sees godly acts as balancing ungodly ones. Rahab’s marginal status not only makes her an interesting focal point for the history of interpretation but is also important to the plot of the biblical story: her courageous actions would have been unlikely—if not impossible— if she were more fully integrated into her community. Her occupation may have allowed her access to information about the coming of the Israelites in the first place, and her home at the very border of the city—in the city walls, in fact—provides a perfect sanctuary for the spies to see the city without risking too much. At least as important as these more practical points, though, Rahab clearly has very little reason to feel a vested interest in the city of Jericho as it is. She is tolerated there but is far enough outside of mainstream Canaanite society to be able to envision something else for herself. Perhaps this vision—and the sense that she has little to lose by bringing about change—helped move her to risk what she had, in order to see what else could be. Bibliography

Bronner, Leila Leah. From Eve to Esther: Rabbinic Reconstructions of Biblical Women. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994. Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. Hanson, A. T. “Rahab the Harlot in Early Christian Tradition.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 1 (1978): 53–60. Kritzinger, J. P. K. “Rahab, Illa Meretrix.” Acta Patristica et Byzantina 17 (2006): 22–36.

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Lyons, William. “Rahab in Rehab: Christian Interpretation of the Madame from Jericho.” In Women in the Biblical World: A Survey of Old and New Testament Perspectives, edited by Elizabeth A. McCabe,

31–42. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2009. Stander, H. F. “The Greek Church and Rahab.” Acta Patristica et Byzantina 17 (2006): 37–49.

Judges Susanne Scholz

Introduction The book of Judges, the seventh book in the Hebrew Bible, contains many stories that report various kinds of war crimes, acts of ethnic cleansing, and sexual violence, as well as statements of political chauvinism and explicit preferences for authoritarian rule. The extremism of the promoted positions makes it a ready catalyst for discussions on ideology, culture, and politics. Yet since the emergence of the s­cientific-empiricist epistemology in the sixteenth century CE such considerations have not played a major role, due to the quest for historical origins, authorship, and linguistic composition. Only with the development of biblical feminist scholarship in the 1970s did scholars begin to scrutinize the book of Judges for its portrayal of women as leaders (e.g., Deborah and Jael in Judg. 4–5), women as victims of murder (e.g., Jephthah’s daughter by her father in Judg. 11), and women as rape and murder victims and victim-survivors (e.g., the unnamed woman in Judg. 19 and the women of Jabesh-gilead and Shiloh in Judg. 21). In early feminist readings, women-centered perspectives prevailed. More recently, they have given way to investigations about the interplay of gender, sexuality, masculinity, and ethno-religious discourse in the book of Judges. The narrated events are placed into the era of the so-called “judges,” the imagined premonarchical era in ancient Israel’s history of the eleventh century BCE. This is the moment when the Israelites arrived in Canaan, the land in which other peoples already lived. Importantly, none of the stories or characters can be reliably identified as historical. Initially, the narratives

were transmitted orally and written down only during the Babylonian exile of the sixth century BCE, perhaps to instruct exilic and postexilic Israelites about their political, cultural, and religious heritage in a foreign country, Babylon. Especially in the early part of the twentieth century CE, historical critics debated the historicity of the events mentioned in the book of Judges. Scholars concluded that the literature is part of a much larger composition developed by the so-called Deuteronomistic Historian(s) during the seventh or sixth century BCE. Hebrew Bible scholar Martin Noth coined this notion in an influential book entitled The Deuteronomistic History, originally written in German as Überlieferungsgeschichtliche Studien and first published in 1943. The book of Judges, or in Hebrew sho­pe­ tim, means literally “the ones who judge” or “the judges.” The noun appears in Judges 2:16 for the first time and refers to those appointed by YHWH to liberate the people of Israel from political oppression. Each judge is to deliver the Israelites from the “plunderers” who oppress them (2:14). The appointment of each judge follows a circular pattern described in Judges 2:11–23. First, the Israelites turn away from YHWH and begin worshiping other gods. Then, second, as punishment, YHWH hands them over to a dominating political power that, in turn, oppresses the Israelites. Third, YHWH appoints a judge militarily to deliver the Israelites from the oppression. But, repeatedly and, fourth, after some rest, the Israelites return to worshiping other gods, and the whole cycle begins again. A series of judges is the result, 113

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and the book of Judges tells their stories. This neat pattern, however, appears in a less orderly fashion in the actual stories about the judges. Except for one, all judges are male. There are six major judges, so named because there are extensive narratives about them. They are Ehud (3:11–29), Deborah (Judg. 4–5), Gideon (Judg. 6–8), Abimelech (Judg. 9), Jephthah (11:1– 12:7), and Samson (Judg. 13–16). Mentioned with little detail, the seven minor judges are Othniel (3:9–11), Shamgar (3:31), Tola and Jair (10:1–5), Ibzan, Elon, and Abdon (12:8–15). The book of Judges has been outlined in different ways, but there is general agreement about the basic literary structure of the book. A prologue, composed of two introductions, begins the book. The first introduction (1:1– 2:5), probably added by subsequent editors, presents various narrative fragments on the initial settlement phase of the Israelite tribes in Canaan. The second introduction (2:6–3:6) outlines a doctrinal explanation for Israel’s difficulties in settling the land and the people’s repeated need for judges. The central section of the book (3:7–16:31) contains the stories of the thirteen judges of Israel. The final section (Judg. 17–21), often called “Two Appendices” (a title that effectively marginalizes one of the most significant tales in the Hebrew Bible), consists of two conclusions: a story about the establishment of a worship center by a male Levite, first in Ephraim and then at Dan (17:1–18:31), and the gruesome tale of the gang rape and dismemberment of an unnamed woman (19:1–29), and the murder, rape, and abduction of the women of Jabesh-gilead and Shiloh (Judg. 20–21). Hermeneutical challenges proliferate, and they characterize today’s interpretative context for feminist exegetes. Three of them stand out. First, a focus on “women” needs to connect with other social categories. Undoubtedly, an almost exclusive focus on women made initial sense after two thousand years of exclusively androcentric interpretation. Hence, some feminist interpretations, including some early ones, highlight the women in Judges because, in their views, biblical writers included women characters merely to illustrate the deteriorating relationship between Israel and YHWH. Yet these interpretative approaches to the women in Judges leave unquestioned the prevalent ethnocentric ideology and, in fact, assume it. In other words, the emphasis on women often reinforced a sociopolitically and religious-culturally

authoritarian and hierarchical ideology and sometimes even endorsed it. Some more recent feminist interpretations, aware of this limitation, interrogate relationships between gender and other social categories. For instance, they include ethnocentric assumptions prevalent in the book of Judges. Second, another hermeneutical challenge to contemporary feminist biblical readings pertains to notions of masculinity and the portrayal of male characters. Warmongering attitudes and practices depicted in the twenty-one chapters of the book of Judges provide ample illustration for biblical teachings about male behavior that are destructive, violent, and harmful. Rarely have interpreters questioned these portrayals about “heroic” men in Judges; instead, they have approved of them as militarily necessary, religiously appropriate, and sociopolitically desirable. To expose such romanticized ideas about the male characters in Judges, the field of masculinity studies has helped greatly in deconstructing these notions about masculinity as socially and politically harmful. Third, yet another hermeneutical development defines the contemporary context of feminist biblical interpretations. It pertains to the emergence of queer biblical hermeneutics. Feminist interpreters have begun to examine the interrelated constructions of sex, gender, and sexuality in the book of Judges, going far beyond the early feminist interest in women characters only. That Judges includes explicit stories on sex has long been recognized. As Deryn Guest observes, “[f]or over a century, commentators have recognized the ribald, often coarse sexual language and imagery that pervades the text” (Guest, 189). She suggests that queer readers and not only heterosexual white male commentators are best situated to examine the various levels of biblical meanings and how they affect contemporary readers. She also offers a queer interpretation of three narratives: the “erotic encounter” between Ehud and Eglon (3:12–30), the story of Deborah and Jael based on a lesbian-identified hermeneutics (Judg. 4–5), and the threatened male rape and woman trafficking (19:22–30). Her approach illustrates that queer readings need to employ “strategies of resistance and operate from a hermeneutic of hetero-suspicion in order to counter the general erasure of women’s interests and friendships and the particular suppression of female homoerotic relationships” (Guest, 178).

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Her approach also demonstrates that it is not enough to reject these texts. Their “queerer elements” have to be reclaimed, and such reclamation requires the readerly imagination to fill textual gaps, omissions, and ambiguities. Such resistant and innovative hermeneutical work

dismantles heterosexual assumptions so that interpreters do not perpetuate harmful views about women, men, gender, and sexuality, but contribute to liberating perspectives on the stories of Judges.

Comment Macho-like Destruction or Peaceful Settlement among the Nations? Two Introductions (Judg. 1:1–3:6) The book of Judges begins with two introductions that depict early life of the Israelites among the Canaanites. It presents both violent encounters with the local population and the cooperative sharing of the land, the latter in stark contrast to the military battles reported in the book of Joshua. Yet, as in Joshua, male leadership also dominates the introductory chapters of Judges. For instance, a reference to the death of Joshua, originally mentioned in Joshua 24:29, is here repeated twice (Judg. 1:1; 2:8), as if to connect both introductions as legitimate continuations of the previous biblical book. The two introductions in Judges 1:1–3:6, probably added later to the main stories of Judges 3–16 during different editorial phases of the book, emphasize that the Israelite occupation of Canaan was not smooth and simple. Macholike destruction and peaceful settlement went hand in hand, bringing the Israelites into permanent contact with other religious traditions and ways of life. The fear of the “other” is deeply embedded in these stories of Canaan’s settlement by the Israelites. Failure to Conquer the “Other”? Living with the Locals and Giving Real Estate to a Woman (Judg. 1:1–2:5) Not really an “introduction” in the classic sense of the word, the initial part of the book of Judges seems to contradict the book of Joshua. Not only does it start with the repeated announcement of Joshua’s death (1:1) with which the book of Joshua left off (Josh. 24:29), and which is mentioned a second time in 2:8; the first chapter of Judges also contradicts the report of the just-completed conquest of Canaan. Not all places and peoples seemed to have been subdued, because in this report the

Israelites do not uniformly murder and kill the local populations. Here they settle next to them and live with them. Yet the cooperation is limited, as the Israelites, after growing stronger, enslave the Canaanites for labor (e.g., 1:28). In a few cases the local people even push the Israelites back into the hill country, as in the case with the Amorites, who do not allow the Danites to settle with them in the plain (1:34). In short, the report of successful conquest in the book of Joshua is not confirmed in Judges 1:1–2:5, which portrays a more complicated picture of the Israelite settlement process. Yet the Israelite settlement of Canaan is violent, whether it appears as a brutal conquest narrative in the book of Joshua or as a mixed settlement process in the book of Judges. In either case, the general notion holds true that “[t]he identity of Israel, united as one people threatened by the Other, is constructed through acts of violence” (Kim, 179). In the book of Judges, the settlement process is theologically justified in the second verse of the book: “YHWH said, ‘Judah shall go up. I hereby give the land into his hand.’” Ten thousand are killed, the Canaanites and Perizzites are defeated, and one king’s thumbs and big toes are cut off. The Judahites set Jerusalem on fire and defeat the people in the Negev and the population of Hebron. It is slaughter totale in the first ten verses. Readers need to remember that this is not a historical report of actual events, and Western notions of nationalism ought not to be projected onto this literature, although biblical scholars have often rationalized the colonialization of other peoples and territories with the Bible’s stories of conquest, occupation, and murder of the Canaanites (Kim, 169–71). In Judges 1:1–2:5, the report of violence against other peoples is briefly interrupted with a tale about Achsah, the daughter of Caleb (1:11–15). This story is also told in Joshua 15:13–19, and Achsah is mentioned yet another

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time within the male-dominated genealogy of 1 Chronicles 2:49. The few verses report that her father, Caleb, will give Achsah as a marriage prize to the man who conquers the city of Debir. Othniel, a nephew of Caleb and the son of Kenaz, Caleb’s younger brother, conquers the city, and so Achsah becomes his wife; then, “when she came to him, she urged him to ask her father for a field” (1:14). Yet it is she who does the asking in 1:15: “She said to him [Caleb]: ‘Give me a present; since you have set me in the land of the Negeb, give me also Gulloth-mayim.’” Her father complies and gives her the land with the water sources. The scholarly discussion often centers on whether it is upon the initiative of Achsah or Othniel that she asks her father for the land (1:14b) because the Septuagint and Vulgate differ from the Hebrew text. In the Greek and Latin translations “he urged her” to ask her father. Yet it is always the woman who makes the request. Feminist interpretations stress that she does not manipulate or beguile her father but “goes about her business unhesitatingly” and “knows what is important in her world.” In fact, her action erodes “the earlier masculine image of a prize woman as a passive, decorative bangle” (Klein, in Brenner 1999, 23). Achsah knows that her land needs water and, like the daughters of Zelophehad (Num. 27:1–11; par. Josh. 17:3–6), she makes sure to get the additional resources. It is also important to realize that Achsah is the daughter of a Kenizzite marrying a Kenizzite. In Genesis 15:18–19 the Kenizzites are listed among the foreign peoples, and in Genesis 36:11 the Kenizzites are explicitly named as the descendants of Edom. Are Caleb, Achsah, and Othniel, who is the first judge of Israel (3:9–11), immigrants who do what Israel could not do? Or does the emphasis on their ethnic identities illustrate the validity of more recent theories according to which “the Israelites were not outsiders to Canaan at all” but “in fact Canaanites” (Kim, 172)? The notion of insiders and outsiders, Israelites and “others,” produced a tradition that established identity through the negation of the Other, whether it pertained to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, or religion. This kind of identity construction justifies acts of violence against the Other, even when a few of the “others” are eventually included, such as Achsah, whose real-estate claim is highlighted here but often ignored in the androcentric history of

interpretation. In short, the story of Achsah and her Kenizzite family demonstrates that “others” are accepted only if they adapt to the sociopolitical and cultural-religious goals of the Israelites. The second introduction repeats this point as if to dispel any lingering confusion on this matter. Religiously Inclusive Practice as Evilness? Additional Demarcations of Israelite Identity in Canaan (Judg. 2:6–3:6) The second introduction in the book of Judges, also going back to the time of Joshua, depicts a faithful Israel that worships God exclusively. After the death and burial of Joshua (2:8) the following two generations continue this practice. The trouble begins when “another generation grew up after them, who did not know YHWH or the work that God had done for Israel” (2:10), a faint reference to the Egyptian pharaoh who did not know of Joseph anymore (Exod. 1:8). Now the Israelites forgo their religious tradition and follow Canaanite gods, worshiping Baal and the Astartes (2:13). This passage, traditionally attributed to the Deuteronomistic writers, explains that religious diversity leads to political oppression. God’s anger about the Israelite abandonment of YHWHalone worship brings Israel’s eventual loss of their governing power. Only the appearance of a series of judges liberates the Israelites from political disenfranchisement. Yet they continue to “lust” for other gods, a terminology that evokes the so-called marriage metaphor in Hosea 2, Jeremiah 2, and Ezekiel 16 and 23, and again and again they lose political sovereignty. The second introduction also proclaims that the other peoples had remained in the land as a test for Israel “whether or not they would take care to walk in the way of YHWH as their ancestors did” (2:22). The repeated failure of the Israelites and their need for judge after judge demonstrates the narrative’s religiously exclusive attitude combined with views favoring hierarchical and macho-like behavior. The notion is reinforced that identity demands the exclusion of the Other, especially when they are the religious others. What is taught is the negation of those who do not do as “we” do. And in case one of “our” own moves to the other side, they must be punished for their boundary transgression. There is no compromise or middle ground. Israel’s religious identity formation requires absolute conformity to the traditions of the ancestors, as successfully practiced by

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Joshua and his contemporaries. In short, both introductions ensure that this basic message is repeated so that anybody who reads or hears it obeys it and sees the errors of the generations depicted in the book of Judges.

Male Saviors, Sexual Violence, and Killings of Women and Men in the Name of YHWH and Other Gods: The Main Section (Judg. 3:7–16:31) The main body of the book of Judges, Judges 3–16, focuses on the fate of the various judges in their efforts to liberate the Israelites from political oppression. The repeated lapses from exclusively worshiping God bring the Israelites into the hands of powerful kings, so the story goes, and exclusive loyalty and obedience to the one god is required for Israel to live in peace and harmony. When this ideology is broken, only male saviors (with one exception) can bring Israel out of their misery. Here we also find child killing, sexual violence, and numerous killings of women and men in the name of YHWH and other gods. A hermeneutics of suspicion creates some room to break free from this ideology that promotes religiously exclusive, macho-like, and empire-friendly attitudes and practices. Gay Hate Crime or Justified Act of Liberation? The Story of Judge Ehud and King Eglon (Judg. 3:12–30) Ehud, “a social bandit” (Niditch, 55), is more traditionally recognized as an important “judge” who saves the Israelites from Moabite oppression. However, his characterization as a Benjaminite and a left-handed warrior and the repeated references to his “hand” encourage some interpreters to view the entire episode as a “deliberatively scripted figurative rape scene” (Guest, 170). It tells of Ehud and the king of Moab, Eglon, entangling in a homoerotic and sexually violent encounter that ends in the bloody murder of the king. Sometimes interpreters point to the link in the narrative between sexual-erotic allusions, on the one hand, and aggressive-combative references, on the other hand. To them, the short blade in verse 16 is a phallic image, and the reference to the king’s body size in verse 17 is a feminizing attribute; these combine in a vaginal image when the sword disappears in the belly fat of the king in verse 22, especially since the noun for belly means “womb” in the original

Hebrew text. In other words, Eglon performs in the position of a woman who is penetrated and passive. He is feminized and hence not so subtly ridiculed. The sexual insinuations also include the location of the sexually murderous encounter, which is ambiguously described and thus variously translated. Some believe that verse 23 refers to a balcony or a cool, upstairs room. Others suggest the location must be imagined as a royal toilet room, a locked, private space where Eglon went alone. There the king stands with his pants down, and Ehud performs in this “male-male sexual innuendo” (Guest, 173), killing the king in the end. The ethnic-racist humor is part of this maleon-male sexually violent depiction. The Israelite audience, the addressee of the narrative, knows who the “bad boys” are: the Moabites. They are feminized, sexualized, dehumanized, and hence discredited as foreigners, the others, who deserve contempt, ridicule, sexual violence, and even murder. Nobody wants to be on the Moabite side, because the Moabites are the oppressors of Israel. In short, the sexualized representation of the Moabite king goes hand in hand with the ethnic denigration of the entire nation, taking the penetrated role of a woman in verse 30, when this time not only Ehud’s but all of Israel’s “hand” subdues Moab. And again, ignoring the sexually violent imagery, interpreters have sided readily with the victorious Israelites. When Judges 3:12–30 is read this way, the story of Ehud the judge turns into a highly uncomfortable and shocking “text of terror for gay-identified readers” (Guest, 176). The narrative exonerates quickly the assailant and murderer, as well as the conquering Israelites who killed ten thousand Moabite males, “all strong, able-bodied men,” and then the Israelites lived in peace for the next eighty years (3:30). The male-on-male rape story culminates in the assassination of the oppressive king. It also plays with feminizing metaphors, inviting the warmongering killing of the enemy in the readers’ minds, even though initially it is God who “strengthened King Eglon of Moab against Israel” (3:12). But perhaps only a later editor, who attempted to justify the murder, added this argument to the story. Or is the imagined revenge of a people against its former oppressor acceptable after all, especially when it relies on images of hate crimes?

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Woman Power against the Heroic Oppressor? The Story of Deborah, the Judge and Prophet, and Jael, the Wife (Judg. 4–5) When feminist scholars began to scrutinize the Bible for prominent women characters, they soon discovered the tale of Deborah in Judges 4–5. She is introduced as a prophet and a judge (4:4) who is either the wife of a man called Lappidoth or, if the phrase is translated literally, “a woman of fire,” a reference to her character. Her superior leadership of Israel, her authoritative advice to the military commander, Barak, and her guidance of ten thousand warriors make for a hero who is remembered for her public success, rather than for her children or wifely duties. She tells Barak what God wants him to do in defense against the Canaanite king, Jabin of Hazor, and his military (4:4–6). Meanwhile the military commander insists that she accompany him (4:8), and she agrees. Is he afraid to go alone, fearing the Canaanite military and unsure about the outcome, or does he distrust her word and want to be certain she stands behind it? She does not question him, but simply agrees, and also informs him that a woman, not he, a man, will defeat the commander of King Jabin’s army, Sisera. Does Deborah put down the macho-military man, or does she, the prophet, tell the Israelite commander what will happen in the war, or both? When Deborah tells Barak to start the battle (4:14), he and his ten thousand soldiers defeat the enemy army, just as the prophet had said they would (4:15–16). Traditional gender roles are reversed in this narrative. The reversal challenges androcentric expectations when the goal is to defeat the oppressor’s army. Yet the focus is not only on gender; there are also clues about ethnicity. This narrative too plays with the particular ethnicity of the Kenites. The question is whether it depicts them as the Other who betrays or simply uses the Israelites when their survival is at stake. In 4:11, Heber the Kenite, the husband of Jael, is mentioned. He “separated from the other Kenites,” and so later, when Sisera, the military leader of the Canaanites, runs for his life and comes to the tent of Heber’s wife, he assumes he is with allies “for there was peace between King Jabin of Hazor and the clan of Heber the Kenite” (4:17). The Kenites appeared previously in the story about Achsah (1:16), where they had assimilated with the Israelites. In other biblical texts

they appear among conquered peoples (Gen. 15:19) or even as enemies (1 Sam. 27:10). Here in Judges 4 one Kenite couple exhibits their loyalties to Israel (4:18). But perhaps it is Jael’s quick assessment that, in order to survive under a defeated Canaanite king, she has to trick Sisera into her tent, give him a drink, and offer him rest on the bed (4:19). She kills him when he least suspects it. Does he sink between her knees while rejuvenating in other ways as well (5:27)? In any case, his dead body proves to the approaching Israelite commander, Barak, that the Kenite woman is indeed on the side of Israel. Then she makes sure that he sees for himself. She invites him into the tent, “and there was Sisera lying dead, with the tent peg in his temple” (4:22). A “woman warrior, disguised as a would-be lover or mother,” really a “guerrilla warrior,” brought an end to Canaanite domination (Niditch, 67). The scene, again linking violence and sexuality (seen in Judg. 3), is celebrated at length in the ancient poem of Judges 5, probably one of the oldest poems in the Hebrew Bible. In this explicitly heterosexual plot, women’s roles appear as leaders (5:7, 12, 15), seductive killers (5:24), mothers (5:28), wise women (5:29), and “spoils of war” reduced to their reproductive organs (5:30: “a womb, two wombs”). For sure, none of the women speak with each other, support each other, or even meet the other women. One of them, the king’s mother, even assumes the rape of the enemy women by her son and his soldiers (5:30). All women approve of or commit violent acts to help their men to become victorious. They serve a patriarchal agenda and do not seek its subversion. Biblical scholar Deryn Guest is profoundly disturbed about this “heteropatriarchal concept of woman” and wants readers to “question [the] heterosexual assumption and undertake a new analysis of the relationships and status of women in the Bible” (Guest, 179–80). It requires that readers interrupt the sociopolitical gender status quo, heterosexist norms, and the apparently natural order of things, and creatively reimagine the women in Judges and the Bible in general. As a minimum, Guest’s lesbian hermeneutic assumes a willingness to expose the heterocentric dynamic of Judges 4–5 so that women’s and men’s full potential as human beings with manifold, transgressive, and queering lives become imaginable when they read the book of Judges.

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Real Men Kill: The Stories of Gideon and Abimelech (Judg. 6–9) Issues of masculinity permeate the stories of Gideon, the judge, whose name later changes to Jerubbaal (6:32), and Abimelech, one of his seventy sons (8:31). The extensive story of the father begins with a paradigmatic characterization of Israel’s oppression by the Midianites as divine punishment for Israel’s apostasy (6:1–10). A full-blown call of Gideon places the protagonist in the limelight of God’s rescue mission (6:11–27), which recalls Abraham’s encounter with God (Gen. 18) and especially Moses’ call (Exod. 3). Like Moses, Gideon speaks with God, asking for further clarification (6:13), resisting the call to action (6:15), receiving God’s assurance (6:16), and requesting a sign (6:17–18). Then, after an offering of meat and unleavened cakes, Gideon sees the angel of YHWH “face to face” (6:22), just like Abraham (Gen. 12:7; 18:1–2) and Moses (Exod. 33:11). Gideon then receives the divine charge to destroy Canaanite places of worship, especially the altars of Baal and Astarte, standing emblematically for the “other” in biblical formulations of identity. Gideon obeys his orders and begins his relentless battles against the Midianites, the Amalekites, “and the people of the east” (6:33). A “mighty warrior” (6:12), Gideon stands in direct contact with God (e.g., 6:39; 7:9–14), who gives Gideon signs to go into battle (6:40) and to let God do the miracle of military victory (7:1–8). In this narrative, then, the Deity nurtures and endorses an aggressive, warriorlike masculinity that eliminates the Other in battle. Gideon’s macho-like religiosity blends the sword with God and the man (7:20), and other men follow such a man (7:24; 8:1–3). They kill male leaders of the enemy without a second thought (7:25), while the mighty warrior battles on, threatening and eventually killing the male leaders of the towns through which he passes (8:4–17). This is indeed a real man’s job, and so Gideon’s son, Jether, is still too young, not yet strong or “man” enough to kill the two kings Zebah and Zalmunna (8:20). They admit to having killed Gideon’s maternal brothers (8:19), and so, without further ado and after the kings challenge Gideon to “come and kill us; for as the man is, so is his strength” (8:21), he kills them. Yet he rejects the Israelite request to become their king, because “YHWH will rule over you” (8:23). Macho masculinity interchanges with macho divinity in this horrendous tale.

Later, Gideon forgets his own theological commitment when he begins practicing Canaanite religion, which Judges 8:27 promptly classifies as a snare or lure to Gideon and his family. The religious practice is tersely characterized: “Gideon made an ephod of it, and put it in his town, in Ophrah; and all Israel prostituted themselves to it there, and it became a snare to Gideon and to his family” (8:27; see also 8:33). This reference recalls the so-called marriage metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, which use pornographic and sexually violent imagery to reject this kind of religious practice. This narrative, however, does not dwell on what the prophets condemn as apostasy. The next sentence explains merely that “the land had rest forty years in the days of Gideon” (8:28). Finally, the strong man is resting from war and killing. He marries many women and has many children, including a son of a concubine from Shechem; that son’s name is Abimelech (8:31). Like Gideon, Abimelech battles against other peoples, but he also is an internally embattled character, struggling against his mother’s low class. As a concubine, she is not a full wife of Gideon and is at best of secondary status in the harem. In fact, at the end of Abimelech’s life, his mother is even called a “slave woman” (9:18). Yet the matrilineal tracing of Abimelech’s origins stands out in the Hebrew Bible, as does his demise when “one woman of Thebez” executes him (9:53; see also 2 Sam. 11:21). The narrative challenges his masculinity, perhaps in order to promote only the sons of full-wife mothers, while Abimelech is the son of an enslaved woman, from the class-stratified bottom of Israel. As Abimelech himself recognizes, he is nonheroically killed by a woman (9:54). Whereas his father was a mighty warrior for YHWH, this son is a failure who not only is killed by a woman but even kills women in the enemy towns (9:49, 51). He tries to keep intact his real-man status by asking a young man to kill him, so that he does not die of the wounds perpetrated by the woman. But regardless, he is remembered as a failure (2 Sam. 11:21). A real man does not need help from a boy. The Deity too does not approve of failing macho-men. God makes him pay “for the crime he committed against his father in killing his seventy brothers” (9:56). In other words, the message is that real men do not go against their brothers. Yet Abimelech, bothered so deeply by his mother’s class status,

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ignores this central lesson about manliness: a real man does not kill his brothers; and if he does, he is like a woman, like an inferior other, despised, penetrated, and killed in a dishonorable, unmanly fashion (see also Sisera in Judg. 4:21 and Saul in 1 Sam. 31:4). He is not only slain by a woman. The killing involves “a kind of spatial gender reversal, which might even be said to ‘queer’ the scene of death” (Stone, 79). The woman, taking on the traditional role of the male aggressor, stands above Abimelech, who, as the passive and sword-penetrated male, looks at her from below. He must die of what all real men fear: the act of being unmanned, robbed of his male strength, status, and power. A Dutiful Daughter for the Preservation of Male Honor? The Tale of Jephthah’s Daughter (Judg. 11) The scandal of a father killing his daughter did not make the frontlines of biblical commentaries until feminist scholars brought Judges 11:29–40 out of the exegetical shadows in the early 1980s. In contrast, the tale in Genesis 22 of Abraham’s readying himself to slaughter his son, but being prevented from complying with the divine command, captured the Jewish and Christian imagination for centuries. The son was saved, and androcentric interpreters did not worry much about a slaughtered daughter. When some of them did, they made sure to focus on Jephthah and to keep God blamefree. They often stressed that the narrative of Genesis 22 indicated the abolishment of child sacrifice among the Israelites, in contrast to the surrounding peoples. Yet the fate of the nameless daughter remained on the margins of their theological and exegetical horizon. This changed only when feminist interpreters placed the daughter at the center of attention and expressed regret for her father’s thoughtlessness and foolishness. They have also asked readers to stay with the daughter’s lamentable fate and to mourn over it, like the daughters of Israel (11:40). Early feminists in particular expressed outrage about Jephthah’s recognition among famous men and his reportedly peaceful death (12:7). They wanted his daughter not to be forgotten and her story to be remembered (Trible, 93–118). Later feminist exegetes called for a resistant reading that would expose the ideology of male supremacy in the text. Accordingly, they

emphasized the literary strategies, such as the narrator’s point of view, word selection, omissions, and repetitions that keep Jephthah in the center of the narrative, marginalizing and silencing the daughter. They showed that every literary move of Judges 11 excuses Jephthah’s murder, makes the dilemma of his position palpable, and requires his daughter’s acquiescence. In short, the ideological construction of the narrative understates the father’s responsibility at the expense of the daughter. This is the case even for the story’s postscript, which mentions the annual mourning for the daughter among Israelite women (11:40). It too is a powerful literary strategy trying to soften the daughter’s horrible death with a reference to a ritual in her memory. Contemporary feminist readers do not buy into this ideology of obfuscation. Rather than mourning the daughter, they expose and resist the narrative’s androcentric ideology. Many feminist interpreters maintain that the daughter’s compliance with her father’s vow must be critiqued and resisted (11:36–37). They characterize the daughter as a dutiful daughter who seeks to please her father and accepts his predicament as her unquestionable and unchangeable fate (11:36). She does not cry, object, or resist. She merely asks to spend two months with her friends in the mountains (11:37) and then silently, so it seems, succumbs to her death by her father’s hands (11:39). Of course, her acquiescence must be understood as an ideological strategy teaching daughters to submit to their father’s commands, to be obedient regardless of the consequences, and to subordinate themselves to the androcentric order. Hence feminist interpreters recommend outrage over this father’s murderous behavior as a prerequisite to any approach to this story. To them, the early feminist advice of mourning the death of Jephthah’s daughter is insufficient. Perhaps a retelling of the narrative is needed in which the daughter runs away from her cowardly father. In such a retelling, the father has to be portrayed as an idolater who rather keeps his vow than protects his daughter. Is his quest for power and status related to his humble origins and early experience of rejection (11:1–3)? As the rabbis often explained, God never wanted or demanded of Jephthah to kill his daughter; it is his gravely mistaken belief in the need for a vow that makes him murder his daughter (Valler, in Brenner 1999, 55–58).

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Out-of-Control Israelite Masculinity, Ethnic Hatred, and Philistine-Israelite S/M Delight? The Story of Samson and His Philistine Women (Judg. 13–16) In the Samson cycle, issues of masculinity, queer gender practice, and possibly sexual violence abound, enmeshed with ethnic hatred against the Philistines. Wildly popular in art, music, and even children’s Bibles, Samson is an action hero whose virility needs to be controlled, as it controls him. Women thus lead to his eventual demise. Yet at the story’s beginning his mother plays a prominent role (13:1–25). She receives the announcement from a visiting messenger about the birth and life path of her son. It is also she who understands the implications of the message, while her husband, Manoah, is portrayed “as outside the loop” (Niditch, 145). He even questions his wife, although he receives less information from the angel than she does. The instruction of the angel to listen to his wife does not help much either (13:13). A male sense of superiority to women pervades this nuclear family. Some feminist interpreters see Ms. Manoah as empowered in this story, because she knows the details about Samson’s future. Yet, again, a literary pattern that limits a woman’s significance to motherhood and childcare promotes androcentric gender bias. After this brief story, the emphasis is on Samson’s masculinity. He takes one woman after another, is assertive, aggressive, and single-minded about his desires, and even ­ involves his parents to help him close his first deal (14:1–15:20). Patterns of masculinity and ethnocentrism intertwine. When Samson goes down to Timnah and falls in love with a Philistine woman, he tells his mother and father. Initially they object, reminding him that she is “a woman from the Philistines, the uncircumcised” (14:3), but he insists: “Take her for me, because she is right in my eyes” (14:3, my trans.), and so they comply. The macho-man, Samson, knows no ethnic boundaries and takes women from anywhere, but the parental objection indicates that the engagement with the Other is shortsighted and not the way to go. The entire section of Samson wanting to marry the Philistine woman centers on men. Pronouns in the third-person singular masculine abound (14:4–9), and the voice of the woman is absent. She does not speak, presumably agrees

to marry him, and later simply obeys the men of her tribe (14:15–17). The exchange is only between the men: Samson and the Philistine men, who eventually trick Samson (14:18) and anger him into killing thirty of them (14:19). When they come after him in revenge, threatening the people of Judah, Samson ends up killing another one thousand men (15:15). Apparently God is on his side and provides water to Samson (15:19). In short, Samson’s masculinity is relentless, violent, and divinely endorsed; he kills the ethnic enemy without further thought and without any hesitation. After a brief intermezzo with another Philistine woman, perhaps a prostitute (16:1–3), the cycle presents the most famous story of Judges 13–16: Samson’s encounter with Delilah (16:4–31). To the long list of androcentric interpreters, the woman in the Valley of Sorek (16:4) has always stood for the quintessential femme fatale, the woman bringing down a successful man with her seductive irresistibility. Cultural appropriations are endlessly fascinated, wondering about Delilah loving Samson, her betrayal for money, or her life as a prostitute who feels no guilt about his fate. Androcentric commentators depict her as deceiving a powerful but trusting male, so even today Delilah is one of the paradigmatic “evil” women, the most famous of whom is, of course, Eve (Yee). Yet the story of Samson and Delilah also invites other possibilities in which Delilah does not turn out to be deceptive. Some feminist scholars stress her independence (Smith, in Brenner 1999, 108–14), as she takes care of herself, accepts Samson’s overtures, and later rejects him to improve her financial situation. The narrative describes in a stylistically repetitive manner how Delilah asks Samson three times “how [he] could be bound” (16:6, 10, 13), how three times the Philistines try to overwhelm him (16:9, 12, 14), and how each time Samson defeats them (16:9, 12, 14). The fourth time Delilah uses a different strategy, saying: “How can you say, ‘I love you,’ when your heart is not with me? You have mocked me three times now and have not told me what makes your strength so great” (16:15). She then reportedly nags and pesters him day after day until he “was tired to death” (16:16). Eventually, he tells her “his whole secret” (16:17; literally “his whole heart”): “A razor has never come upon my head; for I have been a nazirite

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to God from my mother’s womb. If my head were shaved, then my strength would leave me; I would become weak, and be like anyone else” (16:17). Delilah informs the Philistines that this time Samson told her the truth. When he falls asleep “between” her “knees” (16:19), she initiates the shaving of his hair. The Philistines come and attack Samson, blind and shackle him, and put him in prison, but his hair begins to grow back—a hint at what is to come in the second part of the narrative (16:23–31). The linguistic ambiguities make some interpreters see a “pattern of domination” in Judges 16:4–31 that defines the story as “a tale of bondage and degradation,” as an S/M role-play scenario (Rowlett, 106). Artistic adaptations fortify this interpretation and often present the characters’ gender as fluid and mutable. For instance, in early musical productions, men played the female roles, and even when the feminine roles were played by women, they were usually enacted with drama and exaggeration, as if the Samson and Delilah were cross-dressers or gender impersonators. Thus, when the narrative is read with an S/M role-play in mind, Delilah becomes a dominatrix, and Samson submits freely to her sex games of dominance and submission. Repeatedly he allows her to bind him with various ropes, always successfully terminating the game when her methods of domination begin to overwhelm him. After he wins three times, he gets bored, “delves into an act of deeper submission,” and plays at the edge of lifethreatening danger (Rowlett, 110). In the final game Samson loses because Delilah leaves the dangerous play. She also disappears from the story (16:20ff.). At this point God steps into the “cat-and-mouse game” (Rowlett, 115), abandoning Samson initially and putting him into the violent hands of the Philistines (16:20ff.). Then God reappears (16:28) and enables Samson to go beyond his limit; at that moment Samson kills the Philistines and himself in the temple. Read accordingly, Samson is a man who deliberately seeks out violence, sexual or not. His display of masculinity communicates that he feels sexually and ethnically superior. He is also fascinated with the lure of the “other” and addicted to mixing sex with danger. Samson is not a fool for love, as commentators sometimes suggest, but he is into classic bondage games. He risks his life several times and purposefully kills himself and the ethnic others, the Philistines, in order to find redemption, satisfaction,

and closure. His virility and masculine aggression seek destruction rather than coexistence, and his attitude finds approval. His male family members bury him in the family plot, and the last verse affirms that “he had judged Israel twenty years” (16:31). Indeed, feminist interpreters have moved Samson, the hero, far beyond the man so admired in the Christian and Jewish traditions. There is yet another interpretative possibility, admittedly a hidden and rarely proposed option, but one to be considered in the narrative’s linguistic context of veiled allusions to violence and sex. Could it be that Delilah and the Philistine men were ready to rape Samson? The infinitive of the Hebrew verb,‘inna, in verses 5, 6, and 19 is key, although most interpreters translate it as “to afflict,” “to weaken,” “to make helpless,” “to humble,” or “to subdue.” The one term that commentators do not use is “to rape,” perhaps because they believe it is impossible for a woman to rape a man or because they assert that this verb does not signify sexual violence. Yet the exegetical possibility exists. It is a rhetorical game, a connotative possibility, in which the text plays on the verb’s ambiguous meaning, ranging from “humiliate” to “force sexually.” The possibility of indirect sexual references is also present in 16:25 and 16:27, where Samson is forced to “play” or “perform” for the Philistines while imprisoned (Niditch, 167). The narrative does, however, not directly portray Samson as being raped, perhaps because it would not only put into doubt but utterly destroy his masculine appeal in a heterosexist and phallocentric paradigm that expects men, and especially Samson, to be in charge, not to be like a woman, and to act as the penetrator. Social stereotypes about masculinity emphasize physical strength, size, initiative, male agency, and aggression as superior male characteristics. Thus one only whispers about male rape; better yet, one should not even mention it. Should it then surprise that most interpreters see Samson as the long-haired and strongwilled hero battling the Philistines to the bitter end? The narrative places the question squarely before its readers: Do you admire Samson’s masculinity? Do you assess his relationship with the Philistine woman, Delilah, as kinky and queer, or do you see a possible undercurrent in the linguistic allusions in Judges 16 that turn Samson into a raped man? The answer shapes how readers view Samson’s ethnic hatred

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for the Philistines that he so freely displays. In any case, it is clear that sociopolitical prejudices relate directly to one another in this narrative. Heterosexist notions of masculinity go hand in hand with racist, ethnophobic, and geopolitical domination. The Samson cycle exemplifies the ongoing validity of this dynamic.

Places of Worship, Gang Rape, Genocide, and Wife-Stealing: Two Conclusions Two conclusions complete the book of Judges. They are packed with provocative narratives that enhance discussions about identity, gender, masculinity, and violence. About Mother Love, Idols, and Conquest of the Peaceful: The Stories about Dan (Judg. 17:1–18:31) The first conclusion in the book of Judges begins abruptly, with no apparent connection to what came before. A first scene reports that a man, Micah, has stolen money from his mother, which he remorsefully returns to her (17:1–6). In response, his mother blesses him and pays for the making of two worship artifacts (17:4). The four-times-repeated phrase, “In those days, there was no king in Israel. A man would do what was right in his eyes” (17:6, my trans.; see also 18:1; 19:1; 21:25), underscores that this is indeed “a wicked age” that includes “cultic chaos” (Yee, 149). It also relates the chaos to a son’s theft of his mother’s money whose return begins the troubles in Israel, or at least in the tribe of Dan. Is the origin of Israel’s chaos to be sought in a mother-son relationship? A second scene (17:7–13) describes how a Levite priest arrives at Micah’s house and settles there. Invited to serve as Micah’s “father,” the priest becomes instead like his son. The relationship does not work out, and a third scene (18:1–12) shows that the Levite supports the spies (18:6). They continue northward and meet the people of Laish, who are “quiet and unsuspecting” (18:7). In the next scene (18:13–26), they threaten Micah, take with them the worship artifacts and the Levite priest, and then in the last scene (18:27–31) conquer Laish, kill the inhabitants, and destroy the town (18:27). They rename the town and place the artifacts into the shrine there (18:29). Is this Deuteronomistic propaganda against northern Israel that attempts to justify the appropriateness of the Assyrian destruction (Yee, 151)?

This narrative is filled with scheming, warring, and murdering Israelite men who scrupulously capture and kill other people. In fact, the people of Laish are reportedly “quiet and unsuspecting, lacking nothing on earth, and possessing wealth” (18:7); they are unable to defend themselves against the conquering Danites (18:27). In this story the Other is portrayed in positive terms, whereas the Israelite warriors appear sneaky, ready to steal what they like, and eager to murder to get the land they want. Still, as part of the larger anticonquest ideology found in Genesis to Kings (Kim, 175), Judges 17–18 criticizes meekly the dispossession, depopulation, and annihilation of an entire town with the refrain: “In those days, there was no king in Israel.” After all, the story promotes a strongman ideology as the solution to Israel’s needs for territory. Kings rarely end conquest, oppression, and murder, as evidenced in the books of Samuel and Kings. But life under anarchic political conditions is bad too, as the book of Judges tries to show. Hence, the second conclusion depicts what happens when no political authority holds men in check. Gang Rape in Peacetime and More Rape in Wartime: The Stories of Women and Men in the “Appendix” (Judg. 19:1–21:25) In older commentaries Judges 19–21 is often ignored because these chapters appear at the book’s end, part of the “appendix” from Judges 17–21. The first story in Judges 19 contains one of the most brutal, sexually violent, and murderous texts in the entire Hebrew Bible. Feminist biblical scholars have always regarded this tale as a horror story that reinforces androcentric chauvinism and male assertions of superiority, on the one hand, and women’s experiences of sexual violence, murder, and victimization, on the other (Trible, 65–92). Feminists usually read this tale from the perspective of the concubine and are united that Judges 19 is “the most horrible story of the Hebrew Bible” (Bal, in Brenner 1993, 209). Not a historical report, this literary creation depicts “the rejection, gangrape, murder and dismemberment of a young woman whose body is subsequently used as writing” (Bal, in Brenner 1993, 209). Even nonfeminist interpreters agree with this assessment. For example, Andrew HockSoon Ng uncovers the sexist discourse in Judges 19 and correlates the biblical story with Gothic horror literature that emerged in Britain

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at the end of the eighteenth century as a reaction to rationalism. Similar to Gothic literature, which plays with the possible destruction of male dominance, only to reassert its social validity, the biblical tale criticizes, exposes, and challenges the patriarchal system that simultaneously keeps assertive women, such as the concubine escaping her husband, in their places. Ng shows that the biblical story should be read against the status quo of androcentric hierarchies, as a tale that develops resistance in the readers to such societal habits and customs. Read accordingly, the gruesome treatment of the concubine indicts the androcentric system and exposes “the entrenched sinfulness of the men” (Ng, 201), even though in the end the narrative affirms androcentric power. The story connects an individual woman’s sexual violence with the severe violence against both women and men on the collective level. It emphasizes the need to interrogate structures of societal domination and not to limit sexual violence to an individualized problem, as if it were unrelated to society in general. It is important to link the peacetime rape and murder of the unnamed woman in Judges 19 with the wartime rapes and murders in Judges 20–21 because of the general feminist insight that war intensifies peacetime gender roles. When androcentric gender roles prevail in peace times, the gender injustice worsens and leads to mass rapes in times of war. When this insight is applied to Judges 19–21, the peacetime rape of the concubine has to be linked with the wartime rape of the young women. The three chapters emerge as a literary unit that relates gross peacetime misogyny, rape, and even murder to wartime rape of whole groups of women.

Gang-Rape, Murder, and Dismemberment in Times of Peace (Judg. 19). In Judges 19, an unnamed woman, identified as pilegesh, a Hebrew term of unclear social status and often translated as “concubine” but sometimes also as “secondary wife,” runs away from her husband, a Levite. She returns to her father’s house. After some unspecified time passes, the man travels to her in an attempt to get her back. He stays and drinks with the father for several days, but eventually he and the woman leave. When night falls, they are invited to stay with an old man in Gibeah, the town of the Benjaminites. During the night, a male town mob

wants the Levite to step outside so that they may “know him.” The German Luther translation of 1984 indicates the ambiguous meaning of the Hebrew verb, yada‘, by translating it as: “that we can fall all over him” (my trans. of the original German). This is a demand for rape that occurs also in a parallel story (Gen. 19). The men in the house refuse but also offer their two women—the concubine and the host’s daughter (19:24). Eventually the Levite pushes his concubine to the outside. There she is gangraped by the mob for the duration of the night. At dawn, the men let her go, and she manages to reach the doorstep where she collapses. When the Levite opens the door in the morning, he talks to her but there is no answer. He then puts her on his donkey and returns home, where he cuts her into twelve pieces, “limb by limb,” and sends “her throughout all the territory of Israel” (19:29) with the following message: “Has such a thing ever happened since the day that the Israelites came up from the land of Egypt until this day? Consider it, take counsel, and speak out” (19:30). Literary observations provide clues for the interpretation of this story. One relates to 19:2, where it is unclear why the unnamed woman leaves the Levite man. At stake is the meaning of the Hebrew verb zanah. Androcentric commentators often translate this verb as “to play the whore or harlot” and explain that the unnamed woman prostituted herself. Sometimes interpreters reject this translation, because they find it unlikely that a prostitute would run back to her father’s house. Yet other commentators prefer the modified text of the Septuagint, which is based on a different consonantal spelling of the verb. Instead of zanah, the Greek translation assumes a different verb with almost identical Hebrew consonants: zanakh, a verb that depicts the woman’s emotional attitude. The verse then reads: “But his concubine became angry with him, and she went away from him to her father’s house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there some four months.” Even then, it is unclear why the woman became angry, and some feminist interpreters surmise that perhaps the Levite abused her and she could not stand the conditions of her life any longer and ran away (Reis, 129). Another linguistic observation consists of the repetitive phrase, “father of the woman,” which appears six times in the short section of 19:3–9. Why so often? Pamela Tamarkin Reis maintains that the father’s inadequate response

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illustrates the utter and total disintegration of ancient Israelite values and commitment levels to each other, which reaches down to family members (Reis, 126). The repetition underscores that a daughter cannot expect her father’s protection anymore (Reis, 132), and so the narrative denigrates him and not the daughter. The text stresses that he is the “father, father, father, father, father, father, but he does not act like a father” (Reis, 133). Even her father fails her, and she is on her own. Yet the narrative, pointing to this social disintegration, sides with the daughter, who remains, however, unnamed. Other interpreters, relying on a queer approach to Judges 19, tackle the phallocentric order assumed in the narrative. One of them is Michael Carden, who wonders why the host refuses to send out his male guest and instead offers his daughter and the concubine. To him, the answer lies in the hermeneutical conviction that the narrative presents a lesson about compulsory heterosexuality that constructs all sexuality in a phallocentric way. In such a system, even sexual violence reinforces a rapist’s heterosexuality, because men affirm their male heterosexuality by penetrating others, male or female. However, if a man is penetrated, whether voluntarily or forced, his sexuality is cast into doubt. This dynamic explains why in Judges 19 the host refuses to send out his male guest and instead offers his daughter and the concubine. A woman’s status is low in the phallocentric order, whereas raped men lose their heterosexual status and become like women. In a phallocentric society nothing is worse than that (Carden, 90). Thus the host’s refusal protects this order in which the rape of men is worse than the rape of women. At the same time, in a phallocentric order, men engage each other in power struggles over who lies on top and who penetrates whom. Women are the objects of men in the male heterosexual effort to win over the other men. The Levite man is thus the intended target of the mob’s violence, even when it is directed against his concubine. They violate him through his concubine and emasculate him, or, as Michael Carden states, they “queer” the Levite (Carden, 92). Interpreted accordingly, Judges 19 is a tale about homophobic and xenophobic violence (Carden, 91). Sexual violence against women is accidental in the battle for the requisite of phallocentric domination: unquestioned heterosexuality. Hence, in this narrative all males

are “sodomites,” whether they are misogynists or rapists, because ultimately they value men only (Carden, 93). Other interpreters do not focus on linguistic or hermeneutical observations and instead create textual meanings based on their social locations. One of them comes from the self-described queer Asian Pacific American exegete, Patrick S. Cheng, who stresses the correlation between the sexual and geographic multiplicities of the concubine and queer Asian Pacific Americans. Cheng’s hermeneutical strategy creates a sympathetic comparison of biblical and contemporary contexts that classify both the concubine and queer Asian Pacific Americans as “radical outsiders” from mainstream positions in the biblical text and contemporary Western or Eastern societies (Cheng, 119). The concubine is an outsider on two accounts: her sexuality and her geography. The woman’s outsider status, based on her sexuality, comes to the fore in the story when she runs away from her husband. At this moment she transgresses the rules of male-dominated society, as presented in the story. Her transgression is punished, and so the woman becomes a victim of gang rape, mutilation, and even murder. Yet she is also an outsider on the basis of her geography when she moves from the south to the north, which contributes to the narrative’s geographical tensions. Cheng finds similar tensions in the lived experiences of queer Asian Pacific Americans when he writes, “Like the unnamed concubine, queer Asian Pacific Americans are radical outsiders in terms of both our sexualities and our geographies” (Cheng, 122). Both share additional characteristics. They are called by many different names, which he calls “a multiplicity of naming.” It indicates their powerlessness, because a lack of a name disempowers individuals and groups. It is also a sign of radical otherness, because the larger group does not know the “other” and therefore does not have a unique category for it. Other similarities consist in the form of “multiple silencing,” “multiple oppression,” and “multiple fragmentation” (Cheng, 124–28). Readers need to recognize these multiplicities because they preserve “the complexity and multidimensionality of scriptural texts,” and they prevent a singular, “onedimensional” meaning. Cheng also hopes that the recognition of multiplicities emboldens queer Asian Pacific Americans to celebrate their

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diverse life experiences as they “paradoxically . . . result in the preservation of wholeness and integrity” (Cheng, 129). According to Cheng, the concubine becomes a model character for queer Asian Pacific Americans, helping them to celebrate the paradoxical connections of difference, integrity, and wholeness. In short, the story’s pervasive misogyny is grounded in a phallocentric order, the notion of compulsory heterosexuality, and other forms of discriminatory practices, all of which lead to further sexual violence. In other words, the rape and murder of the unnamed woman do not end with Judges 19 but merely set the stage for the entire cycle from chapter 19 to chapter 21. After the horror story of peacetime rape, the remaining chapters report on more rape, this time during war.

Genocide and More Rape in Times of War (Judg. 20–21).When the other tribes realize what happened in Gibeah, they gather in Mizpah and ask the Levite: “Tell us, how did this criminal act come about?” (20:3). Identified as “the husband of the woman,” the Levite gives an answer that crucially modifies the events leading to the woman’s murder. He does not mention that the male Benjaminites first asked for him and that it was the Levite himself who pushed the woman to the outside. His summary omits the threat of rape directed at him and his own participation in the concubine’s death when he led her to the outside where the mob gang-raped her the entire night (19:25). The Israelites listen to his report and then decide to request that the Benjaminites release the “wicked sons” of Gibeah. The Benjaminites refuse, and an inter-Israelite battle ensues in which the Benjaminites kill twenty-two thousand Israelites. The defeated Israelites mourn the loss and pray to God, who tells them to fight again. The following day they advance against the Benjaminites, but again they lose, and eighteen thousand Israelites are dead. After burnt offerings and other sacrifices, they receive divine encouragement to battle again. On the third day they devise a military strategy tricking the Benjaminites into defeat. Initially, they kill 25,100 Benjaminites, and when they move into the city of Gibeah, they kill all inhabitants and animals. Only six hundred Benjaminite warriors escape and flee into the wilderness. After an unspecified time, the Israelites realize that Israel has lost one tribe. They also

remember that several male Benjaminites survived and that the Israelites have vowed not to marry their daughters to the Benjaminites (21:7). They come up with a solution. In Mizpah, they had also promised that whoever did not come up to YHWH at Mizpah (21:5) shall be killed. Since the men from Jabesh-gilead had not been in Mizpah (21:8–9), the Israelites send twenty thousand warriors to kill them, “every male and every woman that has lain with a male” (21:11). They also capture four hundred unmarried young women “who had never slept with a man” (21:12) and bring them back to the Israelite camp in Shiloh. Afterwards, the Israelites make peace with the remaining six hundred male Benjaminites and hand over the captured four hundred women. Since two hundred male Benjaminites still lack a woman, the Israelite elders devise yet another plan, which involves the abduction of two hundred “daughters of Shiloh.” The two hundred male Benjaminites follow the advice of the Israelites (21:20–21). They abduct two hundred women, return with them to their land, rebuild their towns, and live there (21:23). The narrative does not report any resistance from the women of Jabesh-gilead or Shiloh, who never speak. Alice Bach notices the silence in the text and in the history of interpretation, stating: “Male and female commentators alike seem to identify deeply with the portrait of female victimization expressed in the narratives of violence to one woman, but silence greets the genocidal brutalization of the women of Shiloh” (Bach, 16). The story piles horror upon horror; so some interpreters explain that the story is a reminder of what happens when there is no king in Israel. To them, this is “promonarchic propaganda” that concludes the book of Judges with the statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel; a man did what was right in his eyes” (21:25, my trans.; see also 17:6; 18:1; 19:1). It is thus incumbent upon readers to read between the lines, look for the unsaid, and imagine the women of Shiloh as speaking out. Only then will readers not keep the women in silence, refuse to participate in the gynocide, and acknowledge the rape of the daughters of Shiloh. The women’s fate of rape and forced marriage should not be mollified and excused by political necessity. This story depicts sexual violence in war as sanctioned by the Divinity and executed by male Israelites. Alice Bach puts

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it bluntly when she exclaims that this tale is “the perfect psychological backdrop” for men “giving vent to their contempt for women” (Bach, 7, 9–10). In short, the narratives of Judges 19–21 demonstrate that misogyny, rape, and war are interrelated structures of oppression. In such structures women are objects, to be used and even abused, murdered and cut into pieces, trafficked and forced to marriage. They are there for the taking, objects of men, there to fulfill male needs. The problem for readers is what to do with these stories. Shall we be complicit and accept assumptions of phallocentric superiority, or shall we come to recognize the links of misogyny, rape, and established hierarchies of sociopolitical and economic life? In the metaphoric language of biblical prose, Judges 19–21 illustrates the misogyny during so-called peacetime and the prevalence of rape during war. The narratives remind readers of the pervasive and persisting problems in androcentric society that include misogyny, gang rape, murder, and war.

Conclusion The book of Judges provides rich ground for explorations into the constructions of masculinity and femininity, the semiotics of “othering” in regard to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and religion, the articulation of sexual violence and violence against children (especially daughters), the negotiation of authoritarian governance structures in the political and theological imaginary, and the omnipresence of warmongering military manhood as a path to power and status religiously and historically legitimized. Contemporary feminist interpretations take into account these interrelated dynamics and uncover their connections with structures of domination prevalent in the text and in the world. The book of Judges emerges neither as a history book nor as literature, but as an ideological construction practiced and lived even today. Bibliography

Bach, Alice. “Re-reading the Body Politic: Women and Violence in Judges 21.” Biblical Interpretation 6, no. 1 (1998): 1–19.

Brenner, Athalya. A Feminist Companion to Judges. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993. ———. Judges: A Feminist Companion to the Bible. 2nd series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Carden, Michael. “Homophobia and Rape in Sodom and Gibeah: A Response to Ken Stone.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 82 (1999): 83–96. Cheng, Patrick S. “Multiplicity and Judges 19: Constructing a Queer Asian Pacific American Biblical Hermeneutic.” Semeia 90–91 (2002): 119–33. Guest, Deryn. “Judges.” In Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest et al., 167–89. London: SCM, 2006. Kim, Uriah Y. “Postcolonial Criticism: Who Is the Other in the Book of Judges?” In Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies, edited by Gale Yee, 161–82. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Ng, Andrew Hock-Soon. “Revisiting Judges 19: A Gothic Perspective.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 32, no. 2 (2007): 199–215. Niditch, Susan. Judges: A Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Reis, Pamela Tamarkin. “The Levite’s Concubine: New Light on a Dark Story.” Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 20, no. 1 (2006): 125–46. Rowlett, Lori. “Violent Femmes and S/M: Queering Samson and Delilah.” In Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible, edited by Ken Stone, 106–15. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 334. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2001. Stone, Ken. “How a Woman Unmans a King: Gender Reversal and the Woman of Thebez in Judges 9.” In From the Margins, vol. 1,Women of the Hebrew Bible and Their Afterlives, edited by Peter S. Hawkins and Lesleigh Cushing Stahlberg, 71–85. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009. Trible, Phyllis. Texts of Terror: LiteraryFeminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984. Yee, Gale, ed., Judges and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Deborah, Jael, and Their Interpreters Anne W. Stewart

The vivid account of Deborah, Jael, and the demise of Sisera in Judges 4–5 is striking for the details it provides and the details it omits. It highlights Deborah as a wise and influential leader, a prophet, a poet, a judge, and a military commander whose advice her male comrades seek. As Israel faces a daunting battle with a potent enemy, Deborah foretells that God “will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman” (4:9). From this statement, it is unclear if Deborah knows exactly how or at whose hand Sisera will die. Yet soon the narrative highlights another woman, Jael wife of Heber the Kenite, who welcomes Sisera, the vanquished warrior, into her tent after the battle. After covering him with a rug and offering him milk, she drives a tent peg through his head with a hammer. The text leaves entirely to the reader’s inference any conclusions about Jael’s actions and motivations. Did Jael violate standards of hospitality or serve as God’s arm of justice? Was she simply trying to protect herself against the approaching Israelite army, hot on Sisera’s heels, and perhaps ready to claim her as a spoil of war? The rich interpretive tradition of this text illumines many of the narrative gaps and moral ambiguities in the tale. As Pseudo-Philo relates the story of Judges 4–5 in Biblical Antiquities, an expansionary retelling of the biblical story likely written in the first century CE, he makes every effort to highlight the important role that Deborah plays as leader of Israel. Pseudo-Philo even portrays Deborah as a counterpart to Moses, sent directly by God to call Israel back to the law. In this version of the story, an angel appears to the Israelites and proclaims that a woman will rule over and enlighten them for forty years (Biblical Antiquities [L.A.B.] 30:3), the same length of time that Moses led them through the wilderness. Deborah’s capacity as a prophet is also expanded; she possesses the ability to read the stars and determine when the stars’ alignment would be favorable to Israel in battle. Barely any mention is made of Barak; Deborah is the one who directs the forces. Pseudo-Philo also

develops the character of Jael, not only as a faithful and victorious woman, but also as an alluring temptress. He describes her as very beautiful in appearance and having a bed with rose petals scattered upon it (L.A.B. 31:3). She also adorns herself before going out to meet Sisera and laces his milk with wine, vowing to God that she will kill him if God gives her a sign that she acts with God’s blessing. According to Pseudo-Philo, both Deborah and Jael receive and are able to interpret divine communication. They are women made powerful by God’s prerogative—even to the point of overshadowing or prevailing against the men in the story. In Jewish Antiquities, the Jewish historian Josephus is a bit more circumspect than PseudoPhilo in his retelling of the story, yet Josephus also lends his own interpretation to the text. In this version, Deborah agrees to accompany Barak to battle but offers a stinging rebuke, saying, “You resign to a woman a rank that God has bestowed on you! But I do not decline it” (Ant., 5.203). Even as her words imply that Barak has inappropriately ceded authority to a woman, Deborah also proves worthy of her position. Josephus states that Barak and the Israelites were panicked at the sight of Sisera’s massive troops and wanted to surrender. But Deborah forbade this and ordered them to go to battle, promising that God would bring victory. Within the rabbinic tradition, Deborah’s leadership receives a mixed reception. Some interpreters herald Deborah as one of the prophets and a discerning judge. One interpretation suggests that her title ’eshet lappidot— which can be translated as “wife of Lappidoth” or “woman of fire”—indicates that Deborah made candles with thick wicks for her husband to take to the sanctuary to keep it lit with fire (b. Megillah 14a). Other interpretations, however, depict her in more negative light, suggesting that she was boastful in calling herself “mother of Israel” and too proud in standing haughtily over a man. For this reason, the Holy Spirit departed from her and left her speechless

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(b. Pesahim 66b). One of the main problems for the rabbis was how a woman could hold such a position of leadership. According to one tradition, the reason that Deborah judged under a palm tree was so that she would not violate modesty laws, which prohibited a female from being alone in a room with a man who

was not her husband, a situation she could have encountered as a judge (b. Megillah 14a). Jael also receives mixed favor from the rabbis. While they accentuate her beauty and seductive nature, even suggesting that she slept with Sisera—as many as seven times!—before killing him (b. Yevamot 103a–b), they also insist

Deborah holds court at the city gate in Deborah, an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), which was published in The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version (London: Cassell, 1866).

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that she must have derived no pleasure from sleeping with such an evil man, and they praise her for toppling one of Israel’s great enemies. In fact, the Talmud cites the case of Jael as evidence that an act that transgresses the law, but is carried out with good intentions, is as righteous as an act that obeys the law, yet with ulterior motives (b. Nazir 23b). For this reason, Jael, “most blessed of women” (Judg. 5:24), is as praiseworthy as the matriarchs of Israel. Early Christian interpreters, reading the story of Judges 4–5 allegorically, praise Jael as symbolic of the church, the bride of Christ, or even as Christ himself. A third-century-CE text, “The Harmony of the Fathers,” suggests that Jael’s victory with a wooden weapon foreshadows Christ’s victory over death on a wooden cross. Ambrose, bishop of Milan in the fourth century, states that, just as Jael was guided by Deborah the prophet, so too the Gentile church is guided by prophecy to gain final victory over the enemy; just as she triumphed against Sisera with milk and weapons, so the church triumphs over the enemy with wisdom and spiritual arms (Ambrose viii:47–49). According to the medieval text Speculum Humanae Salvationis (ca. 1360), Jael, who overcame Sisera, prefigures Mary, who overcame the devil (Gunn, 57). On the other hand, however, Puritan preacher John Gibbon (1629–1718) likened Jael to sin itself: “When sin, like Jael, invites thee into her tent, with the lure and decoy of a lordly treatment, think of the nail and hammer which fastened Sisera dead to the ground” (Gunn, 73–74). Similarly, a nineteenth-century poem by John Leicester Warren, drawing subtle allusions to the interpretation of Eve, likened Jael to the deceptive serpent in Eden: “She stood, the mothersnake, before her tent,  /  She feigned a piteous dew in her false eyes. . . . Then he slept—she rose, / Slid like a snake across the tent—struck twice— / And stung him dead” (Gunn, 77). Deborah—and Jael, to some extent—has often been at the center of disputes about the ability of women to hold positions of leadership in the church and the political sphere. Although many suggested that Deborah’s leadership as a woman was an exception that proves the rule, Ambrose argued that Deborah’s story was told in order to encourage future women that they too could lead, as any man. He exhorted his audience of widows that they need not feel disadvantaged because of their gender, for Deborah proved that “widows have no need of

the help of a man, inasmuch as she, not at all restrained by the weakness of her sex, undertook to perform the duties of a man, and did even more than she had undertaken” (Ambrose viii:44). Deborah, he argues, was a woman who governed the people, led armies, selected generals, and triumphed in war. He concludes: “It is not sex, but valour which makes strong” (Ambrose viii:44). In The Gallery of Heroick Women (1652), French Jesuit Pierre Le Moyne also praised Deborah for her power and authority, as well as her “sweetnesse” and efficacy. To his contemporaries who suggested that women were not capable of governing, he replied: “These Politicians are no Evangelists. . . . The example of Debora is a famous and Prophetical proof against their Doctrine” (Gunn, 62). Le Moyne was not the only one who found Deborah to have a combination of masculine authority and feminine charm. In the nineteenth century, Christian temperance leader Clara Lucas Balfour extolled Deborah in Women of Scripture (1847) as an example for contemporary women to be commanding and intelligent without sacrificing “womanly qualities,” such as tenderness and piety (Gunn, 64). For these authors, Deborah epitomizes an ideal of womanhood that exudes confidence and authority while maintaining certain softer, more feminine attributes. Jewish poet Grace Aguilar (1816–47) extolled Deborah for her “meekness and humility,” yet she cited Deborah to quite ambitious aims: social and religious reform. Although Deborah was a wife, Aguilar observed, she was “a prophetess in her own person, wholly and entirely distinct from her husband,” a point that makes impossible the idea “that her position as a wife forbade her rising above mere conjugal and household duties” (Aguilar, 220). Yet Deborah’s work cannot be modeled by her female descendants, for “woman can no longer occupy a position of such trust and wisdom in Israel” (Aguilar, 224). Yet “with the history of Deborah in their hands, the young daughters of Israel need little other defence or argument, to convince their adversaries that they require no other creed, nor even a denial of the Oral Law, to teach them their proper position” (Aguilar, 225). Aguilar reasoned that in Deborah’s day women must have been treated with equal esteem as men, and while she lamented that this was no longer the case, she urged her compatriots to take courage and dedicate themselves

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to serving God in whatever station they found themselves, fully aware that God sanctioned such behavior in the Bible. Similarly, suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton thought that Deborah should be more of an inspiration to women: “We never hear sermons pointing women to the heroic virtues of Deborah as worthy of their imitation. Nothing is said in the pulpit to rouse them from the apathy of ages, to inspire them to do and dare great things, to intellectual and spiritual achievements, in real communion with the Great Spirit of the Universe” (Stanton, 19–20). Stanton did not laud Deborah’s meekness, but her authority, ambition, and wisdom. Deborah and Jael have also provided much inspiration to artists through the centuries. Artwork featuring Jael tends to depict her either as a victorious woman, violently administering Sisera his just deserts, or as a seductive temptress, stealthily maiming the sleeping warrior. English painter James Northcote, for example, portrays a long-locked maiden with a sharp

stake leaning over a peaceful, handsome Sisera (Jael and Sisera, 1787). On the other hand, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Jael and Sisera (1620) evidences a demure Jael who is neither a seductive figure nor a violent murderer. She acts with a quiet determination reflective of moral superiority. Gentileschi’s depiction is reminiscent of medieval Christian sculpture and illuminated manuscripts, which alluded to Jael as a prefiguration of the Virgin Mary (Bohn). While the moral complexities of Jael’s act result in a diversity of images, Deborah is more often depicted as a confident, commanding hero, though at least one image portrays her as a working mother, with two children in tow as she gives orders (Mariel Wilhoite, Heroes of the Bible, 1940, cited in Gunn, 67). Finally, the dramatic story of Judges 4–5 has also been captured through music. One famous rendition is George Frideric Handel’s Deborah, an oratorio based on the libretto by Samuel Humphreys (1733). This version remains fairly close to the biblical text, though it assumes that

Jael and Sisera, a 1787 painting by James Northcote (1746–1831), depicts a beautiful young woman preparing to murder the sleeping army commander Sisera with a hammer and a sharp stake.

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Deborah and Jael knew one another personally, which is not clear from the Judges account. The two women emerge as unquestionable heroes who conquer the foe in praise of their God. In Ildebrando Pizzetti’s opera Debora e Jaele (1922), however, the two women are much more ambiguous characters. Not only is it clear that Deborah and Jael know one other, but Jael meets Sisera before he goes into battle with the Israelites. In fact, there is a romantic spark between the two that, though Jael resists it at first, later prompts her to profess her love to him and to harbor him in the tent when he returns in defeat. She offers him milk out of compassion, but while he sleeps in her tent, Jael exits and confronts Deborah, who demands that she kill the enemy. The two exchange opposing opinions on the nature of divine justice. Jael vows to protect Sisera and argues that he is worthy of mercy from the Israelites, reasoning that God allowed him to flee the battle. Deborah, on the other hand, insists that God gave Sisera into Jael’s hands in order to requite justice. As the Israelite soldiers surround the tent and prepare to ambush, Jael enters alone and drives the tent peg into the head of her lover, an act more of mercy than of justice. Judges 4–5 offers ample fodder for the interpretive tradition, and the diversity of interpretations underscores the ambiguity of the biblical text. Yet one of the most prominent themes throughout interpretations of many periods

is an aspect of the text that is quite clear: the female protagonists are powerful, dynamic characters who cannot be lightly brushed aside. They have been sources of inspiration to those who wish to advance the cause of women’s equality and leadership, but even those who do not approve of their actions or positions must reckon with the force of their character. Bibliography

Aguilar, Grace. The Women of Israel, vol. 1. New York: Appleton & Co., 1851. Ambrose. “Concerning Widows.” In Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers: Second Series, edited by P. Schaff and H. Wace, 10: 389–407. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994. Bohn, Babette. “Death, Dispassion, and the Female Hero.” In The Artemesia Files, edited by Mieke Bal, 107–27. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Gunn, David. Judges. Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005. Leneman, Helen. “Re-visioning a Biblical Story through Libretto and Music: Debora e Jaele by Ildebrando Pizzetti,” Biblical Interpretation 15 (2007): 428–63. Stanton, Elizabeth Cady. The Woman’s Bible: A Classic Feminist Perspective. New York: European Publishing, 1895–98. Repr. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2002.

Jephthah’s Daughter and Her Interpreters Anne W. Stewart

The story of Jephthah’s daughter is one of the most troubling accounts in Judges. Before marching into battle, Jephthah vows to God, “If you will give the Ammonites into my hand, then the one that comes out of the doors of my house to meet me, when I return victorious from the Ammonites, shall be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering” (Judg. 11:30– 31, my trans.). Unfortunately, Jephthah’s daughter is the first to appear upon his return, and he must sacrifice his only child. Such a prospect is repugnant to modern ears, but within the history of interpretation, commentators have assessed differently the character of Jephthah and his daughter, as well as the consequences and the ethical import of their acts. While some interpreters produced various explanations for their behavior or refused entirely to excuse the notion of human sacrifice, others lauded the daughter as an exemplar of faithfulness. The early Jewish interpreters Josephus and Pseudo-Philo both wrestle with the notion of Jephthah’s culpability in sacrificing his daughter. In Josephus’s rendition of the story in Jewish Antiquities, Jephthah places blame on his daughter for the consequences of his vow, chiding her for rushing out in haste to greet him. Josephus, who aims in this text to present the Jews in a favorable light to his Greco-Roman audience, insists that the sacrifice was “neither sanctioned by the law nor well-pleasing to God” (Ant. 5.265), thus making clear to his readers that even though Jephthah did offer his daughter as a burnt offering, Jews do not endorse human sacrifice. Pseudo-Philo likewise finds the sacrifice to be inappropriate, though in his interpretation Jephthah shoulders full blame for his rash vow. In Biblical Antiquities, an expansionary retelling of the biblical story from Adam to David, Pseudo-Philo explains this instance of child sacrifice as divine punishment for Jephthah’s foolishness. The text makes clear that Jephthah’s vow greatly angered God, for it opened the possibility of an inappropriate sacrifice. God

reasons, “if a dog should meet Jephthah first, will the dog be offered to me?” (L.A.B. 39:11). Jephthah’s vow not only endangered his daughter but also offended the Deity. Consequently, God ordains that Jephthah’s daughter will be the one to emerge first upon Jephthah’s return as a punishment for Jephthah’s foolishness. Although in one sense Jephthah’s daughter is the hapless victim of her father’s stupidity, Pseudo-Philo also envisions her as a heroine of noble character. Jephthah’s daughter utters much more dialogue than in the biblical text or in Josephus’s rendition. Pseudo-Philo imagines an extended conversation between Jephthah and his daughter, here named Seila, meaning “the one asked for” or “requested.” Seila urges her father to proceed with the sacrifice in order to fulfill his vow, and she compares herself to Isaac, the patriarch nearly sacrificed by Abraham in obedience to divine command (see Gen. 22). She offers herself willingly, fearing that otherwise her sacrifice would not be acceptable and her death in vain. Pseudo-Philo depicts Seila as a faithful and articulate woman, and indeed God affirms that Seila, whom he considers wiser than her father and more perceptive than all of the sages of Israel, remains precious in his sight. In a final dramatic speech, Seila further laments her fate, describing the underworld as her bridal chamber and detailing the wedding garments that will remain unworn. As she bewails her virginity, Seila calls on creation itself to weep with her, and thus the mountains and rocks become grieving witnesses of her tragic death. Pseudo-Philo’s version of the story is much more expansive than Josephus’s, but both writers attempt to account for the problem of human sacrifice in the story. While Josephus emphasizes that God is not pleased by human sacrifice, Pseudo-Philo implicitly raises the more vexing problem of God’s failure to intercede. Pseudo-Philo’s presentation may in fact raise more disturbing issues than it solves. Rabbinic commentators continue to wrestle with the notion of human sacrifice. They are 133

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particularly troubled that Jephthah’s actions contradicted the law. Some interpreters view the sacrifice as punishment for Jephthah’s acts, whether his foolish vow, as Pseudo-Philo, or Jephthah’s slaughter of thousands of Ephraimites (see Judg. 12:4–6). Another stream of interpretation ponders why no one with knowledge of the law interceded to prevent Jephthah from offering an inappropriate sacrifice. One

interpretation portrays Jephthah’s daughter as more knowledgeable about the law than her father or even Torah scholars, for she explains to her father that the law speaks only of animal, not human, sacrifices and cites biblical examples of those who did not fulfill vows to God by human sacrifice. In this interpretation, Jephthah’s daughter uses the period before her sacrifice to visit various Torah scholars in the

Jephthah’s daughter leads young women in music and dancing in Jephthah’s Daughter, an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832– 1883), which was published in The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version (London: Cassell, 1866).

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hope of having the vow annulled, though her appeal falls on deaf ears because all failed to remember the relevant law (Exod. Rab. 15.4; Ginzberg, 876). Like Pseudo-Philo’s version, these interpretations suggest that God sent Jephthah’s daughter to greet him as a punishment for his acts. However, they also emphasize that the law prohibits human sacrifice, and thus the intent of the punishment is to teach Jephthah how dangerous his vow was, for it left open the possibility of losing his daughter and transgressing the law. Jephthah, however, is too foolish to realize that he need not sacrifice his daughter. In the final analysis, then, Jephthah, not God, is fully culpable for his daughter’s death. Another interpretation holds that Jephthah’s daughter perished needlessly, caught between the egotism of her father and the high priest, the one able to annul the vow. In this explanation,

Phineas, enamored with his position as the high priest, refused to humiliate himself by visiting Jephthah, whom he considered to be of inferior intelligence, and Jephthah, citing his supreme position as chief, refused to humiliate himself by visiting the high priest. Both men were punished for their culpability in the death of Jephthah’s daughter—Jephthah by a gruesome death and Phineas by losing his priestly position (Gen. Rab. 60.3). Each of these interpretations gives a slightly different explanation of the circumstances surrounding Jephthah’s vow and his daughter’s death, but all of them assume that Jephthah did fulfill the vow, even if unnecessarily so, and that his daughter did indeed die. Beginning in the Middle Ages, however, several Jewish commentators propose an alternative end to the story of Jephthah’s daughter, suggesting that Jephthah did not actually sacrifice his daughter

Jephthah’s daughter celebrates her father’s return from victory over the Ammonites in Jephthah’s Daughter, an engraving by Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld (1794–1872), from Die Bibel in Bildern (Leipzig, 1860).

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but consecrated her to God. For example, David Kimhi (1160–1235) explains an alternative reading of the Hebrew text. Instead of “the one that comes out . . . will be the Lord’s, and I will offer it up as a burnt offering” (my trans.), Kimh>i translates the conjunction differently, reading it “will be the Lord’s or I will offer it up as a burnt offering.” In this interpretation, Jephthah implies that if the first object to appear is an appropriate sacrifice, he would give it as a burnt offering. If it is not an appropriate sacrifice, however, he would dedicate it to God. This reading allows Kimhi to argue that because Jephthah’s daughter was not an appropriate sacrifice, Jephthah consecrated her to a celibate life of divine service. Kimhi said that Jephthah’s daughter “secluded herself as do the ascetics enclosed in the cells,” much like monastic nuns of Kimhi’s day (Berman, 230). This theme appears in several medieval artistic renditions of the biblical text. Even though rabbinic commentators since the Middle Ages promote an alternative interpretation, disavowing the death of Jephthah’s daughter, this trend does not appear in Christian interpretations until the fourteenth century. Yet the Christians are often just as troubled by the nature of Jephthah’s vow. John Chrysostom explains the act as a kind of divine preventative medicine, suggesting that God permitted Jephthah to sacrifice his daughter so as to deter future generations from doing likewise. The tale thus illustrates God’s “providence and clemency,” suggests Chrysostom, and indeed “after this sacrifice, no one vowed such a vow unto God” (Chrysostom, 434). Ambrose of Milan (d. 397) likewise considered Jephthah’s vow to be a cautionary example. In his book The Duties of the Clergy he cites this episode to assert that at times it can be contrary to the clergy’s duty to fulfill an oath, for Jephthah would have done better “to make no promise at all, than to fulfill it in the death of his daughter” (Thompson, 119). In Questions on the Heptateuch Augustine (354–430) offers both a literal and a typological reading of Judges 11. Observing that the Latin translation of Jephthah’s vow reads that whoever (quicumque)—not whatever—first comes out will be the Lord’s, Augustine suggests that even as he uttered the vow, Jephthah intended to sacrifice a human being—if not his daughter, then perhaps his wife! While Augustine entertains the possibility that Jephthah’s vow might be excused if it were a divine command or had

prophetic significance, he determines that neither was true in this case. Augustine also offers a typological interpretation of the story, likening Jephthah to Christ, and his wife and daughter to the church. Augustine argues that when Jephthah vowed to offer a sacrifice, he prefigured Jesus, who vowed to hand over the kingdom to God (cf. 1 Cor. 15:24). The kingdom, Augustine explains, is the church, symbolized here by Jephthah’s wife and his daughter, offered as a burnt offering to God (Thompson, 126). Furthermore, Quodvultdeus, a young friend of Augustine who later became bishop of Carthage, said that Jephthah’s daughter was a type of Christ, likening her retreat to the mountains to Christ’s ascent to the Mount of Olives, where he prayed before his crucifixion (Thompson, 133). Both of these commentators paint Jephthah’s daughter in exemplary terms, going beyond even Pseudo-Philo or the rabbinic commentators who emphasize her wisdom and piety. Even though early Christian commentators apparently are not aware of the nonsacrificial interpretations of their Jewish counterparts, some do cite Jephthah’s daughter as a model for young nuns. For example, Paschasius Radbertus, the mid-ninth-century abbot of Corbie, invokes the example of Jephthah’s daughter in order to urge young women to comply with their parents’ vows to commit them to the cloister, for “not only did she not flee, she exhorted her father to perform what he promised to God. So too should you, beloved girls, fulfill in yourselves the happy vows of your parents” (Thompson, 135). Peter Abelard (d. 1142) also exalts Jephthah’s daughter as a model in a poem written for nuns to recite. Building on Pseudo-Philo’s interpretation, Abelard presents a sympathetic portrait of the woman, whom he too calls Seila. In Abelard’s poem, the spirit with which Seila embraces her sacrificial death is a model for monastic women who devote themselves to God, a sacrifice that Abelard views as akin to death. In Abelard’s retelling, Seila encourages her father to carry out the sacrifice, even as the maidens of Jerusalem hint at Jephthah’s insanity for making such a vow in the first place. Seila’s friends describe her thus: “Girl more to be marveled at than mourned—how rare to find a man as brave as she!” (Baumgarten, 186). Jephthah’s daughter is also a character in numerous poems, novels, plays, and musical

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compositions. Charles Segard’s play La Fille de Jephthé (1909) heightens the tragedy of the tale. In this version, the maiden’s death is precipitated when she does not receive a message of warning, and the play ends as her lover stabs himself to death after witnessing the maiden die in flames (Sypherd, 98). The British Romantic poet Lord Byron composes a short yet poignant rendition of the tale in 1814 as a lyric to be set to music, portraying Jephthah’s daughter as a willing victim of sacrifice, a cheerful martyr whose actions win freedom for her father and her country. Jephthah’s daughter eschews sympathy and with strong voice advances her memory as a cause for pride. In her parting words, Jephthah’s daughter proclaims, “Forget not, I smiled as I died!” (Vogel, 32). Judges reports that it was a yearly custom in Israel to remember the death of Jephthah’s daughter (Judg. 11:40), and indeed her memory lives on in the history of interpretation. In fact, her voice has only grown with time, as various interpreters have imagined her sagacity, eloquence, and faithfulness. As figured in the interpretive tradition, Jephthah’s daughter is more heroine than victim. Perceptive and prudent, she claims with strength and honor her place among the faithful.

Bibliography

Baumgarten, Elisheva. “‘Remember That Glorious Girl’: Jephthah’s Daughter in Medieval Jewish Culture.” Jewish Quarterly Review 97, no. 2 (2007): 180–209. Berman, Joshua. “Medieval Monasticism and the Evolution of Jewish Interpretation to the Story of Jephthah’s Daughter.” Jewish Quarterly Review 95, no. 2 (2005): 228–56. Chrysostom, John. “Homily XIV.” In The Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, edited by Philip Schaff, 9:431–38. 1889. Repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1995. Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003. Sypherd, W. Jephthah and His Daughter: A Study in Comparative Literature. Newark: University of Delaware, 1948. Thompson, John. Writing the Wrongs: Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Vogel, Dan. “Lord Byron’s Midrashic Lyrics, Part I: Saul and Others.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 37, no. 1 (2009): 24–34.

Delilah and Her Interpreters Josey bRIDGES Snyder

The story of Delilah has captured the imaginations of the religious and nonreligious alike for centuries. She is the irresistible woman, a femme fatale, the woman who brought down the strongest man alive. But who was this irresistible woman, and why did she betray the man who loved her? Was she an Israelite or a Philistine? A prostitute, an independently wealthy woman, or a young girl ready to be wed? Did she love Samson, or was she only looking out for herself? What about her was so desirable that Samson would divulge his secret? What happened to Delilah after she delivered her lover into Philistine hands? The biblical text is surprisingly sparse on such details. And yet these are the very details readers of the story have sought—and, in their

absence, supplied—from the earliest interpreters to those of the modern day. Delilah is introduced in Judges 16:4, and her entire story is contained within the next sixteen verses. The third of Samson’s women, she is the only one to be named. Yet we know little else about her. That she lives in the valley of Sorek does not positively identify her as either Israelite or Philistine. Moreover, that she is identified without reference to father or husband does not necessarily relegate her to the status of prostitute. What we do know is that Philistine leaders approach her and offer her money to discover the source of Samson’s strength (16:5). We also know that she does not give up easily, since she inquires of Samson four times over several days before discovering his secret (16:6–17). And, of

Delilah cuts the sleeping Samson’s hair while his enemies wait at the door in Samson and Delilah, a woodcut by Virgil Solis (1514–1562). This illustration was published in Summaria uber die gantze Biblia, by Veit Dietrich, Philipp Melanchton, and Johannes Brenz (Frankfurt am Main, 1562).

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course, we know that Samson loves her (16:4). To speak of Delilah beyond these sparse details, we must read between the lines—and beyond them, into the history of interpretation. Perhaps it is Samson’s propensity to be attracted to Philistine women (14:1) and prostitutes (16:1) that results in Delilah being identified as such. For whatever reason, the label is firmly attached to Delilah as early as the first century CE, when Jewish interpreters Josephus and Pseudo-Philo both describe Delilah as a Philistine prostitute. When Josephus narrates the story in Jewish Antiquities, he has Samson proclaim (after his first wife’s betrayal), “Nothing is more deceitful than a woman” (Ant. 5.294), thus setting the stage for the reader to distrust Delilah from the moment she enters the scene. Simply being a woman makes her untrustworthy. And, of course, she lives up to that expectation. For Pseudo-Philo in Biblical Antiquities, the primary problem with Delilah is her status as a foreigner. That she is also a prostitute is almost a side point, as if such sexual immorality were simply expected of foreign women. In Pseudo-Philo’s retelling, God speaks, becoming a narrator of sorts, and condemns Samson for “mingling with the daughters of the Philistines” and thus “afflicting his seed.” Moreover, because Samson allows his eyes to lead him astray, God proclaims that he will be blinded. So, while Delilah does betray Samson, her act of betrayal is presented as part of God’s plan. Also according to Pseudo-Philo, Delilah becomes Samson’s wife, though this twist is perhaps intended to salvage Samson’s character more than that of Delilah (L.A.B. 43:5–6). The Babylonian Talmud—more interested in expounding what the text says than what it does not—makes no claim as to Delilah’s nationality or profession. Instead, it offers commentary on the appropriateness of Delilah’s name. Using a play on words, the Talmud suggests that, even if Delilah were not her name, she would be called Delilah because “she weakened” (Heb. dildelah) Samson. How did she weaken Samson? She weakened his strength (16:19), his heart (16:18), and his actions (16:20). Also, in wondering how Delilah convinced Samson to reveal his secret, the rabbis question what is meant by the phrase “she nagged him” (16:16) and offer, as explanation, that “at the time of consummation, she detached herself from him” (b. Sotah 9b). Here, the rabbis make explicit

something that is at most implicit in the biblical text, which never directly mentions sexual relations between Samson and Delilah. For the most part, early Christian exegetes follow in the footsteps of Jewish interpreters when expounding Delilah’s story. Like Josephus and Pseudo-Philo, Ambrose (ca. 333–97) labels Delilah a foreigner and a prostitute. Moreover, he too locates her danger primarily in her foreign status. Seeking a moral to the story, Ambrose concludes that “men should avoid marriage with those outside the faith, lest, instead of love of one’s spouse, there be treachery” (Letter to Vigilius 35.34). However, contrary to the Talmud’s explanation that Delilah uses sex to urge Samson to reveal his secret, Ambrose deduces that “she gained his confidence by her tears” (Letter to Vigilius 35.29). Here Ambrose is likely conflating Delilah’s story with that of the Timnite woman, who does persuade Samson through tears (14:16–17). Finally, Ambrose blames Delilah’s deception on her “love of money,” thus warning his clergy audience to avoid the lure of wealth (Duties of the Clergy 2.26.131). For many Christian interpreters, the demonization of Delilah corresponds to the lifting up of Samson as a saint. These interpreters build their characterization of Samson on a New Testament passage that lists Samson as a man of great faith alongside men like David, Samuel, and the prophets (Heb. 11:32). However, they carry their praise even higher than the author of Hebrews by claiming Samson as a figure of Christ. Caesarius of Arles (ca. 470–543), for example, sees Christ prefigured in Samson’s death. When he describes Samson’s final act in the Philistine temple, Caesarius remarks: “Notice here an image of the cross. Samson extends his hands spread out to the two columns as to the two beams of the cross” (Sermon 118.6). Interpreting Samson as a figure of Christ cannot but affect one’s depiction of Delilah. For Caesarius, Delilah (again, a prostitute) becomes “the church which committed fornication with idols before knowing one God” (Sermon 118.3). Following this trend, Renaissance commentaries compare Delilah’s temptation of Samson to Satan’s temptation of Christ and her betrayal to that of Judas (Krouse, 76). Thomas de Vio Cajetan (1469–1534), on the other hand, finds some sympathy for this biblical character in his commentary on Judges 16. First, unlike any other interpreter discussed thus

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far, he suggests Delilah was actually a Hebrew, not a Philistine. Since the text does not explicitly name Delilah as a foreigner, Cajetan argues, we should not assume that she is. Even more, Cajetan suggests that Delilah never intended for Samson to be wounded or killed. Instead, he proposes that the Philistines convinced her to accept their bribe, in part, by suggesting that Samson would only be weakened, and not injured in any way (Opera Omina II 62f.). Turning to literary portrayals of Delilah, we find an array of imaginative depictions that bring her character to life. Even more than the Jewish and Christian exegetes discussed thus far, poets, novelists, and filmmakers have taken advantage of the gaps in the biblical text to tell Delilah’s story in new and creative ways. The range of interpretations is illustrated well by a comparison of Camille Saint-Saëns’s 1877 opera Samson et Dalila and Felix Salten’s 1928 novel, translated and published in English in 1931 as Samson and Delilah: A Novel. In both, Delilah dies with Samson in the final scene, but the circumstances surrounding and leading up to that death are vastly different. For Salten (best known as the author of Bambi), Delilah is a young and innocent girl— albeit still a Philistine—who has never before known a man. Having come to believe in Samson’s god, Delilah refuses to betray him, even at the urging of her mother and sister. Though she does ask Samson about the source of his strength, she never intends to reveal his secret. Instead, it is Delilah’s younger sister who learns Samson’s secret by eavesdropping and subsequently steals his strength by cutting his hair. When Samson is captured, Delilah stays by his side and vows to die with him—a vow she fulfills—loyal to Samson and his god until the end. For Saint-Saëns, Delilah (a Philistine and priestess of Dagon) is not at all loyal to Samson but hates him and plots his downfall from the beginning. Moreover, when the high priest offers her money for delivering Samson into his hands, she refuses the reward, claiming that she is motivated by vengeance alone. Though Samson is warned to avoid this evil woman and seems to understand love of her as a direct rejection of his deity, he eventually succumbs to her seduction as if helpless to refuse. Indeed, her words are so sweet and the music so beautiful, even the audience—who knows her plan of betrayal—may begin to suspect her love for him is true (see Exum, 178). Yet at the opera’s end

Delilah’s treachery is revealed when she appears in the temple to mock the captured Samson for having fallen for her wiles. Another artistic rendition, Milton’s Samson Agonistes (1671), offers a complicated characterization of Delilah that is neither as positive as Salten’s nor as negative as that of Saint-Saëns. Concerned with her motive for the betrayal, Milton’s poem imagines Delilah’s attempt to defend her actions to a blinded Samson after his capture. Claiming penitence, she offers a wide variety of excuses from the weakness of the female sex (lines 773–74), to the desire to keep him always by her side (line 794), to loyalty to her god and country (lines 850–61). Specifically denying that she betrayed him for money (line 849), Delilah swears she was promised he would not be harmed (lines 800–802) and begs him to forgive her (line 909). Finally, she offers to procure Samson’s freedom and care for him as a way to redeem herself for the betrayal that caused his demise (lines 920–25). The amount of space Milton devotes to possible defenses for Delilah certainly takes steps toward redeeming her character. But in the end Milton’s Delilah is revealed as the traitor she always was. When Samson, having lost all trust in her smooth words, refuses her excuses and offer of aid, Delilah changes her tone completely and boasts of how her people, the Philistines, will celebrate her patriotism. Thus, even though the poem’s final analysis rejects Delilah as “a manifest Serpent” (line 997), we are left with the realization that not all would judge her as such. Moreover, unless we share Samson’s severe distrust of Delilah, we may also be left with a degree of sympathy for her, or at least for the struggle she apparently felt over the decision to betray him. One more literary construction of Delilah, Cecil B. DeMille’s 1949 Hollywood movie Samson and Delilah, adds a new twist by suggesting that Delilah was the younger sister of Samson’s first wife, the Philistine woman of Timnah. Jealous of his affections for her older sister, Delilah strives obsessively to win his love and obtain him as a husband. When Samson rejects her, she becomes angry and vows in a jealous rage: “If it takes all my life, I’ll make him curse the day he was born.” Yet Delilah clearly never stops loving Samson, but only lashes out at him in jealousy. Even when she has seduced him and learned his secret, Delilah’s first thought is that they run away together to Egypt, where they will no longer

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be “Danite and Philistine,” but “only Samson and Delilah.” Only after her jealousy is ignited again and she fears losing him to a Hebrew woman, does Delilah betray him into Philistine hands. Yet, when she learns he has been blinded, her jealous hatred melts. In the end, DeMille’s Delilah reveals her undying loyalty to Samson by returning to him in his hour of need and choosing to die by his side in the temple. In the interpretations we have examined— with the possible exception of Milton’s poem (and even here only if we are willing to read against the poem’s final evaluation)—Delilah is either written off as a treacherous woman or rehabilitated by showing that she, at least in the end, proves her loyalty to Samson. Are these our only options? Can we redeem Delilah without imagining that she regretted her deeds? Perhaps, especially if we are willing to read from the Philistine perspective (see Smith, 109). As the Delilah of Milton’s poem suggests, the Philistines would have praised her behavior, in much the same way that the Hebrews lauded Jael for delivering Sisera into their hands. We may even find parallels with Rahab, who betrayed her people into Israelite hands for personal gain. We began our investigation of Delilah with the realization that the biblical text leaves many questions unanswered. These gaps are not flaws, but opportunities. Moreover, the myriad ways interpreters have answered these questions should not limit, but only expand, the interpretive possibilities of this well-known story. As we begin to construct our own versions of Delilah,

we should heed Smith’s call and return first to the text (Smith, 115), attending equally to what the text says and to what it has left unsaid. Instead of looking for the one best way to tell the story, we should attend to the boundaries of possible meanings. The voices of Delilah are many, and they all deserve a chance to speak. Bibliography

Exum, J. Cheryl. “Why, Why, Why Delilah?” In Plotted, Shot, and Painted: Cultural Representations of Biblical Women, 175–237. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 215. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Gunn, David M. Judges. Blackwell Bible Commentaries. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Krouse, F. Michael. Milton’s Samson and the Christian Tradition. Princeton: Archon Books, 1963. Leneman, Helen. “Portrayals of Power in the Stories of Delilah and Bathsheba: Seduction in Song.” In Culture, Entertainment, and the Bible, edited by George Aichele, 139–55. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 309. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Smith, Carol. “Delilah: A Suitable Case for (Feminist) Treatment?” In Judges: A Feminist Companion to the Bible (Second Series), edited by Athalya Brenner, 93–116. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999.

Ruth Eunny P. Lee

Introduction Ruth occupies a unique place in the biblical canons in that it is the only book to be named after a foreign woman. Its title and Moabite heroine immediately raise questions of gender, ethnicity, and otherness. These thorny issues, however, are taken up subtly and are sometimes even obscured, in a story that on the surface reads like an idyll. Literary and ideological sensitivity therefore are necessary to appreciate more fully the complex dimensions of the text, some of which are in tension with one other.

Content, Structure, and Composition Often heralded as a model short story, Ruth has been crafted to move compellingly through various scenes before reaching a climax and denouement. It opens with a crisis—famine, displacement, barrenness, and death—that will be resolved in the end. At the center of this drama stands Naomi, who has been stripped of everything that gives her life meaning and security. And it takes the loyalty and resourcefulness of another woman, her daughter-in-law Ruth, to reconnect Naomi to her kinsman Boaz and reintegrate her within her community. Remarkably, this ancient story dwells extensively on women’s experience and women’s voices, so much so that some commentators have seriously entertained the possibility of female authorship. While that cannot be proven, the prominent presence of women invites readers to probe the ways in which it subverts, even as it serves, the concerns of patriarchal discourse. It demonstrates the possibility of recovering the

feminine, without idealizing the past or whitewashing its patriarchal tendencies. The narrative is structured symmetrically in four chapters that highlight the themes of loss and restoration. The first chapter, consisting of three scenes (family history of loss, 1:1–5; female negotiation of kinship ties, 1:6–18; Naomi’s lament before the women of Bethlehem, 1:19–22), is balanced by the three scenes of the final chapter (male negotiation of kinship ties, 4:1–12; celebration by women of Naomi’s restoration, 4:13–17; family history of fecundity, 4:18–22). Likewise, the middle chapters mirror one another (deliberation between Ruth and Naomi about means of survival, 2:1–3 and 3:1–5; encounter between Ruth and Boaz, 2:4– 17 and 3:6–15; Ruth’s report to Naomi, 2:18–23 and 3:16–18). The movement from emptiness to fullness is further underscored by a purposeful repetition of words and images that advances or rounds out important themes (see commentary).

Date and Purpose Scholars continue to debate the date of composition, with proposals ranging from the time of David and Solomon to the postexilic era. Arguments revolve around the language of the text, customs assumed in the story, literary parallels and their provenance, as well as its ideological or theological orientation. These criteria, subject to underlying assumptions and biases, have not produced a consensus. The combination of standard and late biblical Hebrew linguistic features suggests a transitional period in the language,

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allowing for a relatively broad window between the late preexilic to the early postexilic era. Some who date the book to a postexilic setting regard it as a protest against the exclusionary policies of Ezra and Nehemiah and the forced dissolution of foreign marriages (Ezra 9–10; Neh. 13). The inclusion of Ruth, in the line of David no less, was meant to subvert the establishment’s constrictive interpretation of who constitutes Israel. Others, who date the book earlier, posit that it originally functioned as an apologia for the Davidic dynasty. The depiction of David’s ancestors as models of piety and good conduct was a way to defend his pedigree (despite the Moabite lineage) and his right to the throne. The book, however, does not have an overtly polemical or propagandistic tone, and to tie it narrowly to a specific political agenda during a specific historical context runs the risk of obscuring its multiple layers of meaning—social, political, religious, as well as aesthetic. Ruth is a masterful literary composition, meant both to delight and to provide a model of faithfulness. It witnesses not only to divine hesed (covenantal faithfulness) but especially to human acts of hesed that are transgressive. That is, they defy convention and cross cultural boundaries and go beyond the requirements of Torah to ensure the preservation of a family, and by extension, the flourishing of a nation. In doing so, the book commends an inclusive attitude toward outsiders, challenging both personal and communal constructions of identity and otherness. Indeed, regardless of how the book is dated, it functions as an important counterpoint to those biblical texts that are not so hospitably disposed to the other. Neither is Ruth entirely innocent of the xenophobia that overtly characterizes texts such as those from Ezra and Nehemiah. But it treats this perennial issue in a way that highlights the possibility of mutual transformation by the presence of a stranger in “our” midst.

Canonical Context The Hebrew Bible places Ruth in the Writings (third section of the canon), among the five festal scrolls. Ruth is read publicly in synagogues during the feast of Weeks (Shavuot), which celebrates the harvest season, a prominent motif in the scroll. The feast also commemorates the giving of Torah to Moses, and this association too is appropriate for a story that features characters that model obedience to Torah by their extraordinary deeds of hesed. According to rabbinic tradition, this is the book’s primary theme, an assessment seconded by many. In Christian Bibles, the book is located between Judges and 1 Samuel (following the sequence of the Septuagint and Vulgate), as a kind of transition between the era when “there was no king in Israel” (Judg. 21:25) and the emergence of the Davidic monarchy. The connections to Israel’s larger historical narrative are made explicit in the book itself. The opening verse sets the narrative in the time of the judges, marked by warfare and increasing violence as the tribes of Israel vied to establish themselves in the land. In its final chapters, the book of Judges depicts a terrible escalation of violence in the brutal rape and dismemberment of a ­Levite’s concubine and the near annihilation of an entire tribe, saved only through further sexual violence against women. Next to these disturbing tales of moral disintegration, Ruth offers an alternative vision of a caring community. The book then ends with a genealogy of Israel’s preeminent king (4:17, 18–22; cf. references to Ephrathah/Bethlehem/Judah in 1:2 and 4:11, another Davidic connection). In this canonical context, the relationship between the tale of a Judean family—both its male and female members—and Israel’s larger story becomes more pronounced.

Comment Naomi’s Homecoming (Ruth 1:1–22) Prologue: Journey to Moab (Ruth 1:1–5) The opening verses briefly recount the migration of a Judean family to Moab. Moab holds the possibility of life when Bethlehem (literally, “house of bread”) has been depleted

by famine. But leaving home is often fraught with risk. In Genesis 12:10ff. and Genesis 26:1ff. (the two other OT texts that contain the exact phrase “there was a famine in the land”), sojourning into foreign lands endangers the safety of Israel’s matriarchs (Sarah and Rebekah, respectively) and the continuity of the

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family. Here in Ruth too, the journey to Moab threatens the very survival of a family, as all the men quickly succumb to death. Only Naomi remains. The narrative immediately focuses on how the tragedy impacts the woman, allowing her to emerge as its central subject. Whereas the family members are initially identified by their relationship to the patriarchal head of the household (1:2), they are all gradually identified with respect to Naomi (1:3, 5). But the primary characterization of her at the end of the prologue is as a woman bereft, “left without” her husband and her sons. In addition to famine and displacement, the trauma of widowhood has befallen her, all the more devastating for her because of the lack of male offspring. Indeed, the special protection afforded to widows in biblical law attests to Naomi’s extreme vulnerability. She is not entirely alone, however. Her sons had married Moabite women, Ruth and Orpah. Apparently childless over the course of ten years, these unions provide no solace for Naomi, nor any hope for the family’s continuation. Hence, as the story moves forward in earnest, with no blood ties to hold them together, Naomi and her Moabite daughters-in-law must decide how best to secure a future for themselves, whether together or apart. Although the narrative does not elaborate on the significance of Moab/Moabites, the repetitive, almost redundant, naming of Moab/ Moabites (1:1–2, 6, 22; cf. 2:2, 6, 21; 4:5, 10) is fraught with background. The most memorable narratives concerning Moab are marked by scandal and animosity. Genesis 19:30–38 traces the nation’s origins to incest and duplicity, making Moabite women particularly dangerous, possessing the power to seduce Israelite men away from YHWH (cf. Num. 25:1–3; 1 Kgs. 11:1, 7, 33). Because of this ancient hostility (see also Num. 22–24; Judg. 3), Deuteronomy 23:3–6 forbids Moabites from entering Israel’s religious assembly, even to the tenth generation, and this prohibition later provides the rationale for the excommunication of foreign wives in Ezra and Nehemiah. But the Hebrew Bible is not univocal about Moab, which occupies an ambiguous place in Israel’s genealogical imagination. Despite the pejorative tone of Genesis 19, Moabites are nevertheless regarded as kin (offspring of Lot). Deuteronomy 2:1–25 remembers a peaceful procession through Moabite territory,

acknowledging that these distant relatives also possessed a promised land. The biblical evidence suggests that there was regular exchange between the two peoples, including intermarriage (cf. 1 Chr. 4:22; 8:8–10), with counterefforts to preserve ethnic and religious distinctiveness. Moab thus represents the familiar “other.” And often in the OT, danger lies not in the foreign “other” but in those close enough to pose the threat of assimilation. In Numbers 21 through Joshua 3, Israelites encamp for an extended period in the plains of Moab, overcoming various obstacles and relearning their heritage until they are finally ready to enter Canaan. Moab is thus a theologically evocative space, the boundary to the promised land. It represents the liminal, where strenuous cultural negotiations and identity (re)construction take place. Homeward (Ruth 1:6–18) Naomi too must work out a new identity and destiny. Hearing of YHWH’s provision of food, she sets out for her native land, initially accompanied by her daughters-in-law. But somewhere between Moab and Judah, they find themselves at a crossroad. The narrative slows down and shifts to dialogue, to give voice to what is at stake for the women, as each decides where home is. The key verb in this section is shuv (variously translated as “return, turn/go/ bring back”), which reinforces both the idea of separation and the idea of return. It marks nothing less than a change in social orientation. There is also an unusual concentration of kinship terminology (“mother’s house,” “husband’s house,” “daughters,” “sons,” “husbands,” “daughters-in-law,” “sister-in-law”), as well as references to two peoples (“your people,” “her people,” “my people”). Naomi employs these terms in her attempts to sever her ties with her daughters-in-law. She does so, first, by invoking YHWH’s blessing on Ruth and Orpah, which she firmly locates in their “mother’s house” (cf. Gen. 24:28; Song 3:4; 8:2) and ultimately in the house of a new husband. The two have acted faithfully (hesed) with her family, but she now entrusts them to YHWH’s care. When this fails to persuade them, she shifts from the mode of blessing to that of lament, insisting that, with her, there is only bitterness. Her tortuous speech moves from one hypothetical condition to another, in which she allows herself the fantasy of becoming

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a wife and mother again (a desirable and fertile woman), only to despair of the impossibility of it all. For Naomi, a woman’s hope lies only in the security provided by a patriarchal household that includes husbands and sons. The notion of offspring that may grow up to become husbands for her daughters-in-law is reminiscent of levirate marriage, the custom designed to protect widows within the family, as well as to ensure the preservation of the deceased husband’s name (see Deut. 25:5–10; Gen. 38). Naomi will eventually be redeemed by something of a levirate marriage. Her bitter protestations here, however, stand as a subtle critique of a social reality that makes women so dependent on men. Orpah yields to Naomi, but Ruth “clings” to her. The Hebrew verb expresses the deepest commitment, not unlike a man’s union with his wife, for which he must leave his father and mother (Gen. 2:24). Rather than forsaking Naomi, Ruth takes leave of her family of origin (cf. 2:11), even if that means venturing to unknown places and an unknown people. Indeed, her first words as an independent character—a solemn declaration of loyalty—define her in terms of solidarity with another woman. The unconventional bond between two women is all the more striking because they are motherin-law and daughter-in-law, a relationship often filled with tension and rivalry. Given the frequent negative interpretation of Orpah as one who turned her back, it is important to note that the narrative nowhere passes judgment on the woman who honors her own cultural roots and silently makes her exit. Her place in the story is secondary, designed to highlight Ruth’s extraordinary loyalty. Yet some women have found inspiration in Orpah’s independence and refusal to live self-sacrificially for her mother-in-law. This readerly response points to the danger of upholding Ruth’s loyalty uncritically as a universal role model. Naomi’s “Arrival” (Ruth 1:19–22) The appearance of Naomi and Ruth causes a commotion in Bethlehem. The women’s query—“Is this Naomi?”—expresses both delight and dismay. It is provoked, in part, by the poverty of her homecoming. Unlike other heroes, biblical and otherwise, who return home as a multitude (Jacob, for example, in Gen. 32–33), Naomi is accompanied only by an

unknown woman. The Moabite signifies Naomi’s estrangement from her land and people. The question also gives Naomi the opportunity to vent her despair. In poetic language that recalls Job’s indictment against God (esp. Job 27:2), she laments YHWH’s harsh and unjust treatment of her. Her use of the epithet “Shaddai” (traditionally translated as “Almighty”) is poignant in its irony, because outside of Job, it occurs predominantly in the ancestral narratives and is associated with the God of blessing and fecundity. The charge that God is responsible for her calamities amounts to a widow’s cry for redress, and the rest of the narrative will be occupied with its steady resolution. For now, Naomi disavows her name (meaning “pleasant” or “sweet”) and identifies herself as Mara (“bitter”). And with Ruth (meaning “saturation,” “refreshment,” or “fullness”) resolutely standing by her, she pronounces herself utterly “empty.” Why this silence about Ruth? Following the conventions of Hebrew narrative, readers are given minimal access to Naomi’s inner thoughts. Indeed, even after Ruth’s stirring vow of loyalty, the narrative simply reports that Naomi “said no more to her” (1:18). The pregnant silence allows for a range of interpretive possibilities, but one has to wonder whether the Israelite woman would have preferred to put Ruth and anything Moabite far behind her.

Gleaning for Survival (Ruth 2:1–23) Coping with Emptiness (Ruth 2:1–3) Ruth soon proves to be invaluable for Naomi. Chapter 2 begins by introducing Boaz and establishing his family connections with Naomi. Moreover, he is “a prominent rich man,” with the resources to provide the protective care his kinswoman needs. But the family ties become redemptive for Naomi only through Ruth’s initiative and industry. With her despondent mother-in-law offering no help, Ruth sets out to find someone who will allow her to glean in his field. Israelite law required landowners to practice a form of charity in which those with no land of their own—aliens, widows, and orphans—were permitted to gather the grain left by the harvesters (Lev. 19:9–10; 23:22; Deut. 24:19–22). Desperate to feed herself and her mother-in-law, Ruth resorts to this difficult work. “As it happened,” she providentially comes upon Boaz’s field.

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Encounter with Boaz (Ruth 2:4–17) A character’s first words are revealing, and Boaz appears on the scene pronouncing blessing. His next words express interest in the newcomer, probing the stranger’s possible connections to the community: Whose servant is she? Of what family and what people? From the foreman’s viewpoint, the most significant aspect of Ruth’s identity is her ethnicity. But he acknowledges that she is not entirely an outsider, adding that she had “returned with Naomi” from Moab. The narrative has already repeatedly underscored Boaz’s kinship with Naomi. So it is not surprising that Boaz next speaks directly to Ruth, addressing her as “my daughter,” much like Naomi. His demeanor, however, is markedly different. His first words (“do not go,” 2:8) reverse Naomi’s (“go, turn back,” 1:8; cf. 2:2). He urges her to “keep/stay close” (2:8, 21, 23) to his servants, just as Ruth “kept close” (NRSV “clung,” 1:14) to a resistant Naomi. The ensuing dialogue sets in motion a mutual transformation in their understanding of self and other. Ruth does not look for a way to “pass” as an Israelite; she acknowledges her ethnic difference. Yet this acknowledgment is embedded in a question of her own: “Why have I found favor in your sight, that you should take notice [nkr] of me, when I am a foreigner [nokriyyah]?” (2:10). The words “to take notice” and “foreigner” come from the same Hebrew root. Indeed, the former may itself mean “to recognize/acknowledge” or “to treat/act as a stranger,” depending on the conjugation. This contrary semantic development reflects the varied reactions one may have to what stands out as strange or different. Ruth’s carefully crafted question subtly confronts Boaz with a moral choice: will he regard her as a stranger or as one of his own? What began as an interrogation of Ruth’s identity thus becomes a moment of self-evaluation for Boaz. Ruth issues this implicit challenge while on her knees before the wealthy landowner, an appropriate posture for a destitute foreigner. She is aware of her vulnerable position as an outsider. Boaz too is aware. His insistence that she stay close to his female servants (2:8; cf. 2:21–23), and his warnings to the men not to touch or harm her (2:9; cf. 2:22) attest to the potential harassment she faces. The stories of violence in Judges 19–21 are a tragic reminder of what may happen when unruly men are set

loose upon defenseless women. Boaz, however, establishes himself as Ruth’s protector. Moreover, he invites her to the table at mealtime and serves her himself. He extends her gleaning privileges far beyond the norm, to ensure that she has a bountiful harvest. And this hospitality is practiced in a public setting, where he, the owner of the field, exercises considerable influence and authority. His words and actions thus function as an important moral witness. Emboldened by Boaz’s generosity, Ruth dares to identify herself as his “servant” (2:13), someone within the protective circle of an Israelite household, albeit on the lowest level of inclusion. She quickly retracts even this deferential term, lest she has overstepped her bounds, but she has begun to imagine herself in a category other than “foreigner,” and asks the same of Boaz. Nor does she shy away from calling Boaz to account for the divine blessing he invokes upon her (2:12). She deftly reminds him that she is in need of his favor. Moreover, the idiom “speak to the heart” (often translated as “speak kindly” or “tenderly”) has multiple nuances, including that of wooing a woman (see Gen. 34:3; Judg. 19:3; Hos. 2:16). Ruth’s language both communicates her gratitude and delicately suggests that she has been won over by him. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, Boaz refrains from identifying himself as Naomi’s kinsman. Ruth must wait until Naomi informs her of the full significance of his kindness. The delay may be a narrative strategy meant to build suspense and heighten delight when a newly animated Naomi excitedly reveals that Boaz is “a relative of ours, one of our nearest kin” (2:20). But perhaps Boaz’s silence also indicates a deep-seated ambivalence concerning the Moabite. When Ruth happens upon the portion of the field that belongs to Naomi’s kinsman and he “recognizes” her, it all seems very promising. But instead of claiming her as family, he tacitly upholds her self-definition as “stranger” and “your servant, though . . . not one of your servants” (2:13). Seeds of Hope (Ruth 2:18–23) This section marks the beginning of Naomi’s movement from emptiness to fullness. When she “sees” the abundance of Ruth’s gleanings, Naomi’s self-perception begins to change. Moreover, the leftovers from a satisfying meal signal to her that Ruth was met with extraordinary kindnesses as she gleaned. Learning

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the identity of the benefactor—Boaz!—finally opens her eyes to the kindness of God still at work in her life. She had formerly identified herself with the dead (1:8); now she places herself among the living (2:20). The critical point is that Boaz is her kinsman-redeemer (go’el, NRSV “nearest kin”), a close relative with the responsibility of protecting the rights of a family and reclaiming what is lost to it (see Lev. 25; Num. 5:5–8; Deut. 19:6–13). His generous provisions give Naomi hope that he may hold the key to their long-term survival.

Ruth’s “Repair” in the Night (Ruth 3:1–18) Desperate Measures (Ruth 3:1–5) With the end of the harvest season, the women can no longer count on Ruth’s daily gleanings, and they remain alone (2:23). Naomi now takes the lead in securing a future for Ruth (and for herself), reciprocating Ruth’s earlier initiative. As in 1:9, finding “security” implies finding a husband, since the women have no protection or standing on their own. Boaz has made no move, so Naomi instructs Ruth to beautify herself and seek him out at the threshing floor, where he has been winnowing grain. It is risky business to send out a young woman alone at night, to a place where men have been laboring hard and possibly drinking hard. Hosea 9:1 associates the place with illicit sexual activity. The sense of danger is compounded when Naomi tells Ruth to keep herself hidden until an opportune moment, then uncover his “feet” (the Hebrew may mean “legs”; the more common word for “feet” is sometimes a euphemism for genitals), lie down next to him, and wait for the man to tell her what to do. The sexual overtones that permeate the chapter (repetitive use of the verbs “to lie down,” “to enter,” “to know”) further underscore Ruth’s sexual vulnerability. The scenario is reminiscent of Hebrew Bible narratives in which women use trickery and sexuality to force a man’s hand, to manipulate those in power to do right by them (see Gen. 19:30–38; 29:21–30; 38:6–26). Rather than condemning such tactics, these narratives memorialize the desperate struggles of women who have few or no other options, who risk everything just to survive. They have a mimetic function, forcing us to see where unjust socioeconomic structures place women in a similar plight today.

Scandal and Valor (Ruth 3:6–15) The atmosphere is marked by secrecy, ambiguity, and danger. Identities are kept hidden; the narrative speaks only of “the man” and “the woman.” But the night becomes a moment of uncovering on multiple levels. The scene repeatedly employs words related to “knowing/not knowing” and “recognizing/not recognizing” (3:2, 3, 4, 11, 14, 18) to suggest the interplay between concealment and disclosure. Ruth moves stealthily toward an unsuspecting Boaz and uncovers him. He is “startled” (3:8). The Hebrew verb, often communicating panic or alarm, suggests that the moment is radically destabilizing. Perhaps he fears what may have happened in the night with the stranger lying beside him. Perhaps he trembles at his exposure. He demands to know who has encroached upon his space. Departing from the measured tone in 2:5, he poses the question to the woman directly and urgently: “Who are you?” Ruth identifies herself by name, the first to do so in the story. Then, instead of awaiting the man’s instructions, she asks him to “spread his cloak” over her (3:9), a metaphor for espousal (cf. Ezek 16:8). She effectively proposes marriage, using the very language that Boaz used earlier to bless her (the Hebrew uses the same word for “cloak” and “wings,” 2:12). She thus suggests that he can make good on his prayer and provide the protective cover that he invoked in YHWH’s name. And as a basis for her daring request, she reminds him that he is a kinsman-redeemer (go’el, 3:9). In response to Boaz’s interrogation of her identity, she confronts him with a neglected dimension of his own identity. Her audacity shocks him into recognition. The resonances with Tamar’s story suggest that Boaz has a moment of epiphany. Judah declares of Tamar, “She is more in the right than I” (Gen. 38:26); Boaz confesses to Ruth, “You are a worthy woman” (3:11). The Hebrew word for “worth” may also indicate “strength,” “valor,” or “wealth” and is used to describe Boaz as a “prominent rich man” (2:1). Boaz thus acknowledges Ruth as a fitting mate (even an ideal wife, cf. Prov. 31:10), equal to him in strength of character. He also commends her latest instance of “loyalty” (hesed, 3:10), understanding that she has chosen him over a husband that appeals to her personally, out of faithfulness to Naomi’s family.

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Boaz will no longer let ethnic or socioeconomic barriers stand in his way. There is, however, a possible complication, another ­kinsman-redeemer with prior rights. But Boaz vows to see to Ruth’s needs, one way or another. He begins by giving her lodging for the night and by ensuring that no one knows of her scandalous visit to the threshing floor. Then he sends her home, once again loaded with plentiful grain. “Emptiness” Revisited (Ruth 3:16–18) Naomi welcomes Ruth back by asking, “How did things go with you, my daughter?” The Hebrew reads literally, “Who are you, my daughter?” Prompted by the awkward formulation, the ancient rabbis deliberate: “Did she then not recognize her? Yes, but she meant, ‘Are you still a virgin or a married woman?’” (Rabinowitz, 84). In other words, Naomi wants to know if anything happened at the threshing floor to change her circumstances. But perhaps the inquiry does in fact convey a persisting lack of recognition. The question echoes Boaz’s panicked interrogation of Ruth in 3:9, and may reflect, however subtly, his hesitations about the foreigner. Ruth appears to catch something of the anxiety. She presents Boaz’s grain, claiming, “He said, ‘Do not go back to your mother-inlaw empty-handed.’” The language of “emptyhanded” recalls Naomi’s lament in 1:21 that YHWH had brought her back from Moab “empty,” while Ruth stood beside her unacknowledged. In these final words of the two women, the narrative, with some irony, allows Ruth to counter that earlier judgment and articulate her own worth.

Redemption and Resolution (Ruth 4:1–22) The Town Gate (Ruth 4:1–12) Just as Naomi predicted (3:18), Boaz moves quickly to settle the matter. The gate represents the legal assembly of the town, where its male citizens determine judicial and economic cases. It is a locus of male power and privilege. But it is also where social justice is to be upheld for the most needy members of society (see Amos 5:12, 15). Boaz ceremoniously gathers the nearer kinsman-redeemer and a quorum of elders to conduct his business. The deliberation initially centers around the redemption of Elimelech’s land, which falls within the duties of the kinsman-redeemer (Lev. 25:25–28). But

Boaz then ties the land redemption with marriage to Ruth, for the preservation of “the dead man’s name upon his inheritance” (cf. Deut. 25:5–9). The legal issues are difficult, and further complicated by scribal disagreement over the Hebrew text in 4:5. The dual responsibility, first suggested by Ruth (3:9), is unprecedented in biblical law, but both Boaz and the men at the gate seem to accept it. More important than the legalities is the skill with which Boaz maneuvers the right outcome for Ruth and Naomi. He goes beyond legal requirements to protect not only Elimelech’s patrimony but also the women’s welfare. Accordingly, the narrative that has belabored the importance of a man’s name memorializes Boaz’s (4:11, 21), while deliberately suppressing that of the nearer kinsman (he is called “So-and-so”; NRSV “friend”). However, as the witnesses at the gate heap their blessings of fecundity and renown upon Boaz, they invoke the names of Israel’s matriarchs, Rachel and Leah, “who together built up the house of Israel,” as well as Tamar, who bore a son to Judah. Building houses is ultimately a divine prerogative (see 2 Sam. 7:5, 11, 27; 1 Kgs. 11:38; Ps. 127:1). Yet Bethlehem’s court of justice cannot but acknowledge the critical agency and partnership of women in the founding of its dynasty. Women’s World (Ruth 4:13–17) The story finds its formal resolution in 4:1– 12, with its male principal actors. This section offers a countertestimony about the significance of that event. It first reports succinctly that YHWH blesses Ruth’s union with Boaz by giving her conception. Throughout the book, God’s name appears predominantly in the speech of God-centered people who invoke blessing on one another. The blessings are worked out as the story progresses, often by the very ones who utter and receive them. Divine providence and human agency are therefore inseparable. Ruth 4:13, the only time the narrative directly reports divine activity, is a reminder that fruitfulness is finally God’s gift (cf. 1:6). Ruth is the bearer of that gift; without her the preceding negotiations fall short of their intended purpose. The narrative then returns to the perspective of the women of Bethlehem, who celebrate YHWH’s blessing upon Naomi. Witnesses to her lament in 1:20–21, they now rejoice in her full restoration, made possible because of the

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“kinsman-redeemer” (NRSV “next-of-kin”) given by God through Ruth. It is no small matter that, at the climax of their blessing, they praise Ruth’s love for her mother-in-law, declaring her to be more valuable than seven sons. But Ruth is absent from the scene (except in the women’s praise). Indeed, it is somewhat troubling that Naomi takes Ruth’s child into her bosom, and her kinswomen declare, “A son has been born to Naomi.” Does this suggest that the Moabite and her child must somehow be naturalized before inclusion in the household? The unusual birth announcement, however, departs from convention in several ways. Neither the biological mother nor the father is in view; it says nothing of the meaning of the newborn’s name. It is crafted, instead, to highlight the primary beneficiary of his birth. The focus on Naomi’s fullness is intended to round out the problem of emptiness set up so poignantly at the start. Despite railing against God’s bitter providence, or perhaps because she courageously did so, Naomi returns center stage and is wholly reintegrated into her community. Finally, despite the marginalization of the Moabite mother, her otherness cannot be expunged. It has been deeply inscribed in the narrative by its propensity to distinguish her by her ancestry. Ruth the Moabite too has been incorporated into Israel, generating an ongoing self-interrogation and transformation of Israel’s self-understanding, all the more pressing because of Ruth’s place in the lineage of Israel’s hero. Indeed, in early Jewish interpretation, David’s dubious origins posed a scandal that had to be addressed exegetically and theologically. In his defense, the rabbis repeatedly appeal to a revision of the law prohibiting Moabites from entering Israel’s assembly (Deut. 23:3): “Moabite [is prohibited], but not Moabitess.” Given the repetitive insistence, the gendered reading should not be dismissed as fanciful rabbinic exegesis. It registers a profound anxiety about Israel’s very identity. The Moabite within Israel represents a destabilizing force that subverts rigid constructions of identity and necessitates an ongoing openness to the other. Genealogy (Ruth 4:18–22) The genealogy, perhaps a later addition, incorporates the women’s story into a chronicle

of patrilineal descent. The official record sees procreation exclusively as a male phenomenon. But at this point in the book, it is impossible to read this steady succession of males without relishing the pivotal role of women. Indeed, it stands as a reminder that any androcentric discourse that erases the agency of women is partial and deficient. Moreover, the genealogy begins with Perez, the son born of Judah’s shameful union with Tamar. It turns out that neither of Obed’s parents has a pure pedigree, but that does not prevent Boaz’s honored seventh position in the genealogy. In the NT, Ruth’s place is valorized by her inclusion in the Matthean genealogy (Matt. 1:1–16), where she is joined by Tamar, Rahab (Josh. 2; 6:22–26), and “the wife of Uriah,” the Hittite (2 Sam. 11). These women of questionable repute and non-Israelite descent prepare the way for the scandal of Jesus’ origins (Mary’s extraordinary conception), and for the gospel’s gracious inclusion of all nations. Bibliography

Brenner, Athalya, ed. A Feminist Companion to Ruth. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993. Lapsley, Jacqueline. “The Word Whispered: Bringing It All Together.” In Whispering the Word: Hearing Women’s Stories in the Old Testament, 89–108. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. Lee, Eunny P. “Ruth the Moabite: Identity, Kinship, and Otherness.” In Engaging the Bible in a Gendered World: An Introduction to Feminist Biblical Interpretation in Honor of Katharine Doob Sakenfeld, edited by Linda Day and Caroline Pressler, 89–101. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006. Pardes, Ilana. “The Book of Ruth: Idyllic Revisionism.” In Countertraditions in the Bible: A Feminist Approach, 98–117. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Rabinowitz, L. Midrash Rabbah: Ruth, Ecclesiastes. London: Soncino Press, 1939. Sakenfeld, Katharine Doob. Ruth. Interpretation Series. Louisville, KY: John Knox, 1999.

1 and 2 Samuel Jo Ann Hackett

Introduction Composition and Literary Structure

Summary of Contents

The books of 1 and 2 Samuel are a gold mine for readers interested in women in ancient Israel. Many of the narratives concern women, more or less centrally. There are stories about royal women involved in events that had major political repercussions throughout Israel, but there are also narratives in which nonroyal women play a significant role: Hannah, the medium at Endor, and the two “wise women” from Israel’s villages. There is also a surprising amount of incidental information about women’s lives, so much that there is simply no room here for every interesting detail. First and Second Samuel are part of a larger work known as the Deuteronomistic History (DH) that traces the history of Israel from the conquest to the exile in the books of Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Samuel, and 1 and 2 Kings. The editors of the Deuteronomistic History used already-existing narratives, adding interpretive material at various points. The extent of Deuteronomistic revising and editing is not consistent in the various books. In Samuel there is very little of the sometimes heavy-handed interpretive comment that one finds in the book of Judges, with its system of divine rewards and punishments, and in 1 and 2 Kings, with their judgments on the reigns of each king. In Samuel the narratives are for the most part allowed to speak for themselves, and editorial activity is most conspicuous in the simple arrangement of originally separate stories into several cycles (e.g., the stories of Saul’s reign, the narratives of David’s rise, and so forth).

The books of Samuel are organized around the careers of Samuel, Saul, and David. They begin with the story of Hannah and her giving birth to Samuel, and Samuel’s early life at the Shiloh sanctuary (1 Sam. 1–3). Then come narratives about the ark, the portable chest that was said to contain the tablets of the law and that represents the invisible presence of YHWH within the community (1 Sam. 4–6). Chapter 7 reports Samuel’s activities as judge in the context of the ever-present conflicts with the Philistines. Israel’s desire for a king is the topic of chapters 8–12 and the occasion for the introduction of their first king, Saul. The story of Saul’s struggle with the Philistines and his loss of his dynasty continues through chapter 15. David is introduced in chapter 16, and in chapter 17 he is reintroduced in the famous Goliath story. At first Saul is pleased to have David as part of his court. The focus of the narrative quickly shifts, however, to the rivalry between the two for the affections of Saul’s family and of Israel as a whole; to Saul’s attempts to kill David; and to David’s flight from Saul, which takes him ultimately into the company of the Philistine enemy (1 Sam. 18–27; 29–30). In chapter 28, when Saul has lost all contact with YHWH but desires to know the outcome of his upcoming battle with the Philistines, he has a medium call up the spirit of Samuel, whose death was reported in chapter 25. As Samuel predicts, Saul loses the battle, in which he and three of his sons die. The book of 1 Samuel ends with a major character’s death, as do

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Genesis, Deuteronomy, and Joshua (the deaths of Joseph, Moses, and Joshua). The book of 2 Samuel begins with David’s reaction to the deaths, particularly Saul’s and Jonathan’s (2  Sam. 1). It moves on to David’s gradual acquisition of the thrones of both Judah and Israel, and of Jerusalem as his capital city (2 Sam. 2–5). In chapter 6 David brings the ark to his new capital, and in chapter 7 he is promised an eternal dynasty. Second Samuel 8–10; 21; and 23:8–39 recount David’s military administration and accomplishments. David’s affair with Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11–12), the wife of one of his soldiers, is a watershed, marking the beginning of a downward spiral for David and his family. Chapter 13 is the story of the rape of David’s daughter Tamar by one of his sons, Amnon, and the consequent killing of Amnon by another son, Absalom. Absalom flees and is brought back on the advice of a “wise woman” (2  Sam. 14) and immediately

begins his attempt to take over the throne from David (2 Sam. 15–19), an attempt that ends in Absalom’s death. Chapter 20 reports another revolt against David’s throne and the intervention of another wise woman. The books of Samuel end with an assortment of pieces. Second Samuel 22 (=Ps. 18) is thought to be a very old poem of thanksgiving, here attributed to David; the beginning of chapter 23 is another lovely poem, generally known as “the last words of David,” about the relationship between YHWH and Israel’s rulers. Chapter 24 begins with the story of David’s census of Israel and Judah, presumably for military draft and taxation purposes, and the plague that resulted because of YHWH’s anger with the census. The final verses in Samuel record David’s purchase of the threshing floor of Araunah, where he erects an altar at the place that will later be the site of the temple of Solomon.

Comment Roles of Women in 1 and 2 Samuel Despite the apparent abundance of information about women in 1 and 2 Samuel, the reader needs to be careful not to assume that the narratives are simply straightforward historical accounts. It is extremely difficult to judge the extent to which the narratives give information about the historical Bathsheba, for instance. Part of the problem is that the persons involved in the narratives are never mentioned in contemporary writings outside the Bible (with the recently discovered exception of the phrase “House of David,” used to identify Judah in a ninth-century Aramaic inscription from Tel Dan). Further, some of the stories in 1 and 2  Samuel are shaped according to traditional storytelling patterns, making it difficult to separate historical facts from the storyteller’s art. In sum, it would be hazardous to use these narratives to try to reconstruct a historical biography of Michal or Abigail. But the stories do show how Israel’s early narratives remembered and represented women and their involvement in this formative period of Israel’s history, and they were remembered in a way that made sense to the ancient audience. Even if one must be cautious in moving from the stories about women to historical

knowledge of their individual lives, that is not to say that 1 and 2 Samuel can tell nothing about how women actually lived. The biblical narratives are full of information about women’s lives. The authors did not specifically intend, so far as we know, to record for posterity the details of women’s lives; rather, they seem to have included these details quite incidentally, with little attempt to make them fit a particular religious or political agenda. Ironically, it is precisely because these details are mentioned just “in passing” that they might be historically reliable. As valuable as this incidental information is, however, its fragmentary nature and the difficulty of confirming it from other sources mean that one should remain cautious in estimating how much one can know about women’s lives in early Israel. With these cautions in mind, one can collect important information about women’s roles scattered throughout the books of Samuel. The following list is not exhaustive but includes the most important of those scattered notices. The intersection between domestic events and public affairs is reflected in the brief account of how a woman who is not named, the wife of Phinehas, gives birth to a child during a battle in which the Philistines defeat Israel’s

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armies (1  Sam. 4:19–22). As was undoubtedly typical, women attend at her childbirth. Their words to her, “Do not be afraid, for you have borne a son,” suggest that bearing a son is more important than bearing a daughter. The woman herself names the child, and the name she chooses, Ichabod (explained in the text as “the glory has departed”), reflects her concern for public, national events: “She said, ‘The glory has departed from Israel, for the ark of God has been captured’” (1 Sam. 4:22). There are also many scattered mentions of women as victims of war, both Israelite women and Amalekite women: women killed in holy war (1  Sam. 15:3); women bereaved by war (1  Sam. 15:33); women and children killed alongside men in a revenge attack (1  Sam. 22:19); women killed as part of a general annihilation to leave no witnesses (1  Sam. 27:9, 11); women as captives recovered and restored (1 Sam. 30). As in most societies, the warriors in Israel all seem to have been male. First Samuel 21:4–5 observes that in order to be eligible to eat holy bread, soldiers are required to have kept themselves from women. First and Second Samuel disclose only a little information about the religious roles of women. According to 1 Samuel 2:22 (cf. Exod. 38:8), there were “women who served at the entrance to the tent of meeting,” the major religious shrine of Israel before the building of the temple. It is not certain what the exact service of these women was. There is no evidence for the suggestion sometimes made that they were cultic prostitutes (see the commentary on Hosea). Although their service was somehow involved in cultic matters, it was apparently not priestly. Probably, like that of the Levites, it was more concerned with physical, day-to-day maintenance of the tent and its apparatus than with blood sacrifice itself, something women are almost never involved with throughout the world (see the discussion in Jay). In the story of Hannah, for instance, all blood sacrifice involves Hannah’s husband, Elkanah, and the priests. Even in 1 Samuel 1:24–25, where Hannah brings the sacrificial animals to Shiloh, the verbs switch to the plural when the actual sacrifice is made (1 Sam. 1:25), presumably to signify that the priests, or Elkanah and the priests, perform the ritual. The sacrifice, of course, is part of the fulfillment of the vow that Hannah had previously made when she asked YHWH to give her a son. That women made

religious vows and incurred obligations is also recognized in the law of Numbers 30:3–16, where the conditions under which a father or husband may and may not annul the vow are stipulated. The involvement of women in religious activities outside the official cult will be discussed below in connection with the medium of Endor. The reader gets other glimpses of women’s world and work. There are references to young women who come out to draw water (1  Sam. 9:11–13); to a nurse who saves Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth when Saul and Jonathan die (2  Sam. 4:4); to women as mourners, when the Israelite women are encouraged to mourn Saul (2 Sam. 1:24); and to women as singers of victory songs, when the Israelite women sing of Saul and David (1  Sam. 18:7; 21:11; 29:5) and when the daughters of the Philistines are imagined as rejoicing over the death of Saul and Jonathan (2  Sam. 1:20). That a man who holds a spindle is a sign of a curse suggests that spinning wool was a woman’s occupation and improper for a man (2  Sam. 3:29). Other occupations filled by women include those of perfumer, cook, and baker (1 Sam. 8:13). These details, as precious as they are, also serve as a measure of how little is known about the lives of women in early Israel.

Issues of Particular Interest to Gender Studies No discussion of women’s lives and the sources of their power in 1 and 2 Samuel can be undertaken without an attempt to describe some of the features of the society the narrative assumes. The books of Samuel describe Israel as a society where power was becoming centralized, inherited, and hierarchical, that is, the kind of society where men tend to dominate positions of public power. Such a society is different from the one described in the book of Judges, where there are only the beginnings of centralized, inherited power. In Judges there is in general a decentralized society more open to “charismatic” leadership. Decentralized charismatic power can lead to a society that is more chaotic and less stable than one with an inherited monarchy, but it is also the kind of society in which women may hold positions of public power more easily or more commonly. It is then not surprising that there is no Deborah or Jael in the books of Samuel.



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Royal women can be an exception to this general rule, sometimes wielding a great deal of power: when no male of the appropriate bloodline is available to rule, a royal woman can fill the position. But in the books of Samuel even the royal women are not rulers, whatever else they may be. All women in a patriarchal society derive much of their power from their family position, and in a royal family in particular this can mean a great deal of jockeying for power: it is desirable to be the chief wife of a king, or the wife who bears the heir (a wife who, if she outlives her husband, will be the queen mother). This kind of lobbying is not obvious in the books of Samuel, but will be immediately afterward in the story of Bathsheba’s involvement in Solomon’s rise to the throne in 1 Kings 1–2. In the social organization represented by 1 and 2 Samuel, the primary forms of authority are passed down from father to son, regardless of the moral qualities of the son. The priesthood, the role of judge, and the monarchy are all represented as hereditary, and male only. Eli’s two sons become priests, even though they are described in derogatory terms (1 Sam. 2:12–17, 22–25, 27–36; 3:10–14). Samuel’s sons seem to inherit his office as judge, in spite of their poor qualifications (1 Sam. 8:1–3). Saul’s loss of the kingship is really a loss of dynasty, in which his son would become king after him, since he personally remains king until he dies (1 Sam. 13:8–15a; 15:1–35). The royal theology expressed in 2 Samuel 7 declares that a son of David will rule after him (2 Sam. 7:12–14a). In most societies, the more hierarchically organized and centralized public power is, the less likely it is that women will hold positions of public power. This analysis holds true within the institutional forms of power depicted in the books of Samuel. Given such a situation, it is not surprising that three stories about women wielding public power in the books of Samuel concern women who are depicted as operating in areas somewhat removed from, and therefore less dependent on, the central monarchical government. Saul appeals to a medium at Endor and assumes her ability to help him when his usual means of contacting YHWH fail (1 Sam. 28). The two stories of “wise women” in Tekoa and Abel of Beth-maacah (2 Sam. 14 and 20) assume the status and authority of these two women. It is impossible to write of gender in the society in question without considering the lives of men as well as those of women. In

particular in 1 and 2 Samuel, David, as a character, is not only part of many important stories about women, but is also intimately connected with several men in his life. The long story of his defeat of the Philistine Goliath (1 Sam. 17) is preceded by one story in which his lyre-playing soothes King Saul’s outbursts (1  Sam. 16) and another in which his own brothers are suspicious of his ambition and arrogance (1  Sam. 17:24–30). Much of the rest of 1 Samuel is a playing out of the relationship between David and Saul, including David’s relations with Saul’s family, especially Michal and Jonathan. In 2  Samuel we read of David’s difficult relationships with his own sons Amnon and Absalom, and their part in the struggle for a successor to David will only finally be played out between two other sons, Adonijah and Solomon (at the beginning of 1 Kings). In sum, the books of Samuel do not describe a great deal of public power for women, although on a local level there is perhaps a hint of power that operates outside the centralized government and religious establishments. Most of the women mentioned are royal women who derive their power not from ruling but from their relationships to ruling men. The centralization of the government and the beginning of centralization of worship in Jerusalem brought with them traditions of inherited male power that meant fewer public positions for women. The stories in the books of Samuel are also notable for their illustrations of relationships between women and men and between men and men.

1 Samuel 1–7 Status, Power, and Children: The Story of Hannah (1 Sam. 1–2) The books of Samuel begin with the story of the birth of a son to a woman previously childless. According to the narrative, Hannah, the favored wife of Elkanah, has no children, because YHWH has “closed her womb.” Hannah is not Elkanah’s only wife. His other wife, Peninnah, has several sons and daughters and torments Hannah because of the differences in their families. This motif occurs elsewhere in biblical narrative: a similar story is told about the sisters Rachel and Leah, both wives of Jacob, in Genesis 29–30. One of the implications of both of these narratives is that children were seen as a solace or even compensation to a woman whose

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relationship with her husband was not good enough to fill her emotional needs. First Samuel 1 goes further, however, and actually suggests that, from a man’s point of view, a woman with a happy marriage need not be distraught about not having any children. Hannah’s situation made her very unhappy, especially at the time of the annual sacrifice, when she would cry and would not eat. Elkanah’s reaction to Hannah’s unhappiness is worth noting: “Hannah, why do you weep? Why do you not eat? Why is your heart sad? Am I not more to you than ten sons?” (1:8). This response, hardly that of a patriarch who can see value in women only as childbearers, implies the possibility of a relationship in which love was more important than childbearing. It should be noted, however, that Elkanah was not himself childless. His society gave him the opportunity, and he was apparently able to afford to have both a wife to love and a wife to make children. Since he had already filled his need for a family to remember and honor him (the only kind of “immortality” known to these narratives), his lack of understanding for Hannah’s unhappiness begins to look less sentimental and more naive or even insensitive. Even more important, however, is the future Hannah would have as a childless woman. Since men were usually considerably older than the young women they married, it is likely Hannah would have outlived Elkanah. At marriage, Hannah would have become part of Elkanah’s family and the responsibility of the men in the family. We do not know whether Elkanah had other male kin who would have supported Hannah upon his death, but if not, and if she herself had no children (particularly sons), she would have become kinless, a fringe member of society; without a son (or son-in-law?) to support her, she would have only a life of extreme poverty to look forward to. Hence the frequent biblical refrain that the good Israelite gives alms to the fatherless and the widow: both are without males in their kin group and so are wards of the society and dependent on its largesse. Hannah, then, while she may have loved her husband, still needed children: for her future support, as we have seen, but also for her position in the society she lived in. A woman’s prestige was based at least partly on her demonstrated ability to produce offspring. It was in such a situation that Peninnah could torment her. The same situation is behind verse 5, where the extent of Hannah’s participation in the

celebration of the sacrifice was determined by the number of her children. Such an attitude is reflected even in the narrator’s choice of words: it was YHWH who closed Hannah’s womb. To the narrator, and presumably his audience, childlessness was not understood as a physical phenomenon, but as a decision of God—and, indeed, in some instances as a punishment from God (see Gen. 20). Hannah seems to agree with this understanding and takes her case directly to YHWH. If it is YHWH who “closed her womb,” only YHWH can give her children. She goes to the sanctuary and vows that if YHWH will give her a son, she will, in effect, give him back to YHWH as a temple servant. This vow is in itself telling: far from wanting a child for emotional comfort, she is offering to forgo the pleasure of having him with her while he is growing up. She needs simply to give birth to a son. At that point her societal position and her future will be secure, even though she would live in the present without him in the household. It is possible to take another view of Hannah’s vow, however, that is perhaps more nuanced. In Israel, one gave the firstfruits of animals and of the harvest to YHWH, probably in hopes of receiving in return the blessing of continued fertility. (See, e.g., Exod. 13:2, 12–15; 23:16, 19a; 34:19–20, 22, 26a; while continued fertility is nowhere explicitly named as a motive, the covenant blessings and curses in Lev. 26 and Deut. 28 supply broader fertility motives for Israel’s ritual system.) If Hannah’s offer to dedicate her firstborn to YHWH can be seen in this light, her motives are more complex. She does not simply desire a secure future, or the societal status and relief from rival-wife torment that bearing a son would bring, but also “offers up” her firstborn to YHWH in hopes of receiving more children in return. The priest Eli operates within the same frame of reference and, after Samuel’s birth and dedication to his temple, habitually blesses Elkanah this way: “May YHWH repay you with children by this woman [Hannah] for the gift [Samuel] that she made to YHWH” (1  Sam. 2:20). And this is what happens: Hannah bears three sons and two daughters (1 Sam. 2:21). Meanwhile Samuel grew up literally “in the presence of YHWH.” Following the story of Samuel’s being taken to Shiloh to live with Eli comes the Song of Hannah (1 Sam. 2:1–10). Most scholars suggest that the insertion of this song into the narrative is



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secondary, since there seems to be little detailed connection between the song and the narrative that surrounds it. Further, it mentions a king, although in the surrounding narrative Israel does not yet have a king. The song does, however, include themes appropriate to Hannah’s story. It is, after all, a hymn of praise for good fortune that is attributed to YHWH. The theme of reversal is particularly appropriate for Hannah’s story as told in the surrounding narrative. Verses 4, 5a, and 8a describe general reversals of fortune with no obvious application in Hannah’s story, but verse 5b reports the overturning of the status quo between a previously childless woman and a woman who had many children (“the barren has borne seven, but she who has many children is forlorn”). Even if this phrase was originally used in the poem as a general illustration, in the poem’s secondary setting in Hannah’s narrative the phrase obviously takes on significance as a reference to Hannah and Peninnah’s relationship. Some of the expressions of praise included in this song may seem odd to us in a poem that purports to be written by a woman: for instance, the use of martial language in verse 1 (“my mouth derides my enemies”), verse 4 (“the bows of the mighty are broken”), verses 9–10 (“for not by might does one prevail. YHWH! His adversaries shall be shattered”). But women in ancient Israel are often credited with singing battle songs (see Exod. 15:20–21; Judg. 5; 11:34; 1 Sam. 18:7; 21:11; 29:5; 2 Sam. 1:20). There is significance to incorporating into a narrative of childbirth a poem that includes language and themes appropriate to a wide range of Israel’s religious life: thanksgiving and praise of holiness, defeat of enemies, wisdom, battle, creation and power over life and death, storm god imagery, YHWH’s relationship to chosen leaders. This juxtaposition has the effect of recognizing, without fanfare, fertility in childbirth as an issue equal in importance to the others and worthy of the attention of YHWH and of Israel’s singers. Fertility and childbirth are mainstream religious issues in this literature and are not treated separately from other pressing matters.

1 Samuel 8–31 David and Saul (1 Sam. 8–16) Much of 1 Samuel is dedicated to the fact that Israel’s first king did not establish the dynasty that offers stability to united Israel and

later the southern kingdom of Judah; rather, David did. Because of the switch from Saul’s family to David’s, it is possible to view David as a usurper, but the narrator is at pains to avoid that interpretation. At the beginning of his story, Saul is clearly the man whose family will make Israel “like other nations” (1 Sam. 8:5). The establishment of a monarchy, as opposed to the earlier charismatic rule by judges, presupposes a dynasty, an office that would be passed down from father to son. It is actually this kind of stability in rule that the Israelites ask Samuel for. There are in fact three entire stories with three different reasons for Saul’s choice as Israel’s king (and the one expected to establish a dynasty): (1) God’s choice of Saul and Samuel’s anointing him, in 10:1, presumably because of Saul’s handsome looks and stature (1 Sam. 9:2); (2) Saul’s choice by lot in 10:21–24; and (3) Saul’s deliverance of Jabesh-Gilead from the Ammonites, demonstrating his prowess in war (1 Sam. 10:27–11:15 [beginning with the episode added to the NRSV from a text of Samuel found at Qumran]). All three stories imply that Saul’s masculinity was an important factor in his choice as king: in the first two his height is mentioned as a “kingly” trait, and in the third his violent dealings with both a yoke of oxen and with the Ammonites cause even skeptical Israelites to praise his choice as king. The scene is soon set, however, for Saul’s attempt to establish a dynasty to fail. When his army becomes tired of waiting for Samuel to offer a burnt sacrifice before the battle begins (as a way of determining YHWH’s approval of the battle and assurance of a victory), Saul offers the sacrifice himself (1  Sam. 13:8–9). Samuel comes immediately afterward and tells Saul that since he offered the sacrifice and did not wait as Samuel had instructed him, YHWH has changed his mind and will not “establish [Saul’s] kingdom over Israel forever.” In fact, YHWH has already found a replacement (which we know to be David, although he is not mentioned here). As if none of this has happened, Saul is again castigated by Samuel in chapter 15 for not destroying absolutely everything the army captured in a battle with the Amalekites. Again, Samuel says that YHWH has found another to take Saul’s place, but this time also says that Saul himself has been rejected as king (1 Sam. 15:26–28). Since Saul does not die for some time and remains king until the day of

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his death, Samuel’s use of “king” here can only mean that YHWH has rejected Saul as the man who would provide the future dynasty. In two very different stories, David insinuates himself into Saul’s entourage, and their stormy relationship begins. In the first story in chapter 16, YHWH commands Samuel to anoint David king despite his lack of stature. Later, this same David is brought to an unsuspecting Saul in order to play the lyre and soothe Saul’s disappointment with his situation. Saul is said to “love” David greatly and to make him his armor-bearer. Then in chapter 17, David’s meeting with Goliath is recounted, and in this story Saul again does not know David, yet he is impressed with the young man. David and Goliath (1 Sam. 17) Up to this point, besides the fact that YHWH has told Samuel to anoint him, David has shown no special qualities that would qualify him to rule Israel as king: it is the battle with Goliath that establishes David as a potential leader for Israel. What may seem to be a story about the powerless young David overcoming the arrogant Philistine warrior can also be read as a deliberate attempt on David’s part to display his masculine traits, despite his youth and unimpressive physique. David’s brother Eliab certainly thinks that David is up to no good (1 Sam. 17:28) and that he should stay at home with the sheep, where he belongs. David brags, however, even in front of Saul, that he has tackled far worse than Goliath while guarding his sheep (a clear metaphor for his future). Furthermore, he is not simply a keen (or lucky) shot with a stone, because after he stuns Goliath, he kills him with his own sword and cuts off his head. This is hardly the act of an eager kid who just wants to see some action in the war but rather a deliberate attempt to display his power to Israel, to Saul (and to us). Again, his fierce killing of Goliath, his public masculinity, is what first proves that YHWH’s choice has been shrewd. David and Jonathan (1 Sam. 18:1–5) Jonathan, Saul’s son and king-in-waiting (or so it would seem), is a pivotal character in David’s replacement of Jonathan’s father as king. Immediately after the Goliath incident, we are told that Jonathan felt he was a soul mate of David’s and loved him as much as his own life (1  Sam. 18:1), just as Saul had immediately loved David in the story in chapter 16 when

David came to him with his lyre. Much has been made of 18:1 as an instance of approved homosexuality among the Israelites, but it is more likely that the narrator’s focus is the statement that Jonathan thought of David as though they were somehow the same. This equivalence is continued in verse 4 when Jonathan gives over to David his royal robe, armor, and weapons, metaphorically “anointing” David the true royal successor. Later, when David and Saul refer to each other as father and son, the text has already prepared the reader for that relationship. David and Saul, Again (1 Sam. 18:6–16) In 1 Samuel 18:7–9, Saul sees the result of his quick elevation of David as head of his army. The people of Israel, represented by the women who sing the victory song as Saul and David return from the battles with the Philistines, have begun to see David as superior to Saul (“Saul has killed his thousands, and David his ten thousands”). From then on, David and Saul have a love-hate relationship that has Saul attempting to kill David as he plays the lyre for him and hoping that he can use David’s ambition to be part of the royal family to get him killed. Each time, David escapes and in fact, as we shall see, does marry into Saul’s family, winning his daughter Michal by bringing Philistine foreskins to Saul (to prove that he has killed them). David moves from metaphorical son to actual member of the royal family as Saul’s son-in-law. Michal (1 Sam. 18:17–30) In the societies of the ancient Near East, a woman’s sexuality was generally under the control of a man in her family. A father controlled his daughter’s sexuality, and a husband his wife’s. The marriage of a young woman was a matter of negotiation and financial arrangements between the groom or a male member of his family and the father or leading male of the bride’s family (see, e.g., Gen. 24; 29; 34). Among royal families, not only financial but also political matters had to be negotiated. For a king of Israel or Judah to marry a princess from a neighboring country implied that the Israelite king and the king of the neighboring country had concluded negotiations that would include not simply the usual bridewealth/dowry arrangements but also, presumably, agreements about friendship between the two countries, nonaggression pacts, and so forth. David’s son and successor Solomon, for example, was



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married to a daughter of Pharaoh (1 Kgs. 9:16– 17) and to many other foreign women (1 Kgs. 11:1–8). Ahab’s marriage to Jezebel, a Phoenician princess, is perhaps the most famous biblical example of a political marriage (1  Kgs. 16:31). Since the narratives in 1 and 2 Samuel cover the emergence of the Israelite monarchy, the story of David’s marriages casts important light on the role of women in securing political power—and also in losing it. David’s marriages offer an intriguing narrative of gender relations and power on a number of levels. When King Saul becomes jealous of David’s success and the love of his people for David, he offers David his elder daughter, Merab, in marriage (1  Sam. 18:17–19). From David’s point of view, marriage to the king’s daughter would bring him close to the center of power. Saul in return negotiates David’s services in his battles against the Philistines, but Saul’s motives are more complex. What he hopes is that David will be killed in the fighting. When David offers a humble disclaimer to be worthy of the alliance, Saul does not withdraw the offer but does impetuously marry Merab to another man. Merab herself has no role in the dealings. The proposed and the actual marriages are negotiated between the men. Next, Saul offers a younger daughter, Michal, to David in exchange for the foreskins of one hundred Philistines (1  Sam. 18:20–29). Saul again hopes that David’s quest for Michal will result in his death at the hands of the Philistines, but David delivers the payment. In this case, it is at least said that Michal loves David; but, as before, the real negotiations over her are out of her hands. Saul sets the price, and David pays. The story of Michal’s relationship with David is a puzzling one. When she first appears in the story, she loves David, is won at a dangerous price, and is married to him. Soon afterward, with her father still obsessed with getting rid of David, Michal helps David to escape her father and lies to her father’s messengers about David’s whereabouts. When she is discovered, she lies again, this time to her father, telling him that David had threatened to kill her if she did not help him escape (1 Sam. 19:17). (One assumes that her story is a cover; no such conversation between David and Michal is reported.) Nothing more is heard of Michal until 1 Samuel 25:44, during a report of David’s next two marriages, when it is said that Saul had at some time in the past given Michal to another man. (Note

that the narrator still calls her “David’s wife” in that passage.) Abigail (1 Sam. 25:1–42) David’s second wife, Abigail, is introduced as the wife of Nabal (1 Sam. 25:3). While she is described as having “good sense,” his very name means “fool” (surely an epithet and a joke within the story; who would name a child Fool?). Unlike Nabal, she understands the gravity of the threat that David and his men represent to their property and their lives and rushes to counteract the bad impression her husband has made on David. The narrator takes care to mention that she goes to meet David secretly, without her husband’s knowledge. When she does tell Nabal what she has done, he is so stricken by this information that he is paralyzed and eventually (and conveniently) dies. Abigail is not only sensible but beautiful and now a wealthy widow, whose land and assets David and his people could surely use (in fact, have been using, hence the problem in the first place). Ahinoam (1 Sam. 25:43–44) The third of David’s marriages, to Ahinoam of Jezreel, is mentioned in a single verse immediately after the Nabal-Abigail story and immediately before the notice that “Saul had given his daughter Michal, David’s wife, to Palti son of Laish” (1  Sam. 25:44). Nothing is known with certainty about Ahinoam’s identity, but it is tantalizing that the only other Ahinoam mentioned in the Hebrew Bible is Saul’s wife (1  Sam. 14:50). The text does not say that the woman David married was Saul’s wife (or, if so, how he managed to obtain her). In a later episode, however, the prophet Nathan delivers an oracle from YHWH to David that includes the following statement: “I anointed you king over Israel, and I rescued you from the hand of Saul; I gave you your master’s house, and your master’s wives into your bosom, and gave you the house of Israel and of Judah” (2 Sam. 12:7–8). If David had managed to obtain one of Saul’s wives, his action could have signaled his desire to displace Saul as king as well. Because the text does not identify Ahinoam more explicitly, these possibilities must remain speculations, however enticing. David and Saul, Yet Again (1 Sam. 24; 26) It is during this period in the relationship between David and Saul that Saul is most

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admiring of David, even as he tries to kill him. Twice, in 1 Samuel 24 and 26, we read of opportunities for David to kill Saul quite easily, opportunities he rejects. Here David refers to Saul as father, and Saul calls David his son, another attempt by the narrator to prepare us for David’s family to rule, without an obvious change in dynasty. But those touching moments do not convince David that Saul has accepted the situation, as Jonathan had once told David he had (1 Sam. 23:17). From this time forward, they are on opposite sides. The Medium at Endor (1 Sam. 28) In 1 Samuel 28 Saul’s kingship and life are at risk in a battle with the Philistines. The story is set up with two notes in verse 3: that Samuel has died and that Saul has expelled the mediums and wizards from the land. It is a sign of Saul’s desperation that, in spite of this attempt at expulsion, he asks his servants to find for him a woman who is a medium. He has been consulting YHWH to attempt to determine the battle’s outcome, as was customary (see, e.g., 1 Sam. 23:1–5), but the usual methods are not eliciting a response (1  Sam. 28:6). When told that there is a woman at Endor who is a medium, he disguises himself to visit her. (Since Saul had expelled the mediums previously, she could hardly be expected to cooperate with him if she recognized him or his apparel.) She does recognize him, but Saul has promised that she will not be punished; she does as he asks and brings up the spirit of Samuel, whom she describes as a god coming up out of the ground (1 Sam. 28:13). What is of interest in this passage is the fact that the medium is female. In nearly all religious systems, there are both central institutions and practices and those that operate on the periphery. In ancient Israel, with its all-male priesthood, the only professional contact women could have had with the central religious hierarchy would have been as temple servants of various kinds, presumably performing the kinds of domestic tasks that would be necessary there as everywhere (see Bird). Women could have performed priestly or quasi-priestly duties only in the peripheral religious culture, as in the set of practices Saul had recently banned in 1 Samuel 28, divination and consultation of spirits (cf. Lev. 20:27 and Ezek. 13:17–23). After Saul’s séance with Samuel, in which his defeat and death are predicted, Saul is distraught and falls to the ground. He

has not eaten, probably in preparation for this séance. The woman and his servants urge him to eat, and he finally agrees. The text says that the medium slaughters the fatted calf she has and bakes cakes and serves Saul and his servants. The Hebrew verb used of her action in slaughtering usually, though not always, means “to slaughter as a sacrifice.” There is, then, some ambiguity about her actions. Although she may simply be preparing an ordinary meal, it is also possible to understand that Saul and his servants participate in an extraordinary sacrificial meal prepared by this female medium as part of her quasi-priestly function in a peripheral, and banned, religious subsystem.

2 Samuel 1–24 The House of David and the House of Saul (2 Sam. 1–5) At the end of 1 Samuel, Saul and three of his sons are killed in battle. Second Samuel begins with David’s reaction to the deaths of Saul and his sons. Despite the enmity between David and Saul, he mourns openly and recites a lovely song about their deaths. Still, the rivalry between David, Saul’s son-in-law, and Ishbosheth, Saul’s remaining son, continues until David is finally crowned king over both Judah and Israel (2 Sam. 2:4 and 5:3). We shall see that the possibility that members of “the house of Saul” have survived and may have a claim to the throne will continue to haunt David. We have also seen that a man’s public display of masculinity is one key to his ability to rule. This may be one reason that, in the midst of the narrative of war, the narrator turns for a few verses to tell us about six sons of David, born to six wives (two of whom are Ahinoam and Abigail; 2 Sam. 3:2–5). (There is a similar passage in 2 Sam. 5:13–16.) In another such episode, which follows immediately in chapter 3, Saul’s remaining son accuses Saul’s general, Abner, of having sex with one of Saul’s secondary wives, while Ishbosheth considered that “inheriting” his father’s women was part of his claim to the kingship. Whether his accusation was true in this instance or not, to betray the king by sleeping with one of his wives was the same as undermining his claim to the throne. Michal, Again (2 Sam. 6) Finally, when Ishbosheth is ready to make peace with David and to accept David as king



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over Israel as well as Judah, David refuses to agree until his wife Michal is taken away from the husband Saul had given her to (“annulling” her marriage to David) and returned to him. What are David’s motives? One obvious explanation for David’s insistence on the return of Michal before he will enter into negotiations with Abner is that Michal was or could easily become a hostage. The story makes clear that she was under Ishbosheth’s power, since he is the one who eventually takes her from her second husband and sends her back to David. If David still cared for Michal, he might have been afraid that Michal would become a victim of his overt attempt to capture the throne of Israel. If this is indeed what the narrative means, then one notices that either Ishbosheth is somewhat stupid, or else his general Abner has him completely cowed (see 2 Sam. 3:11). It is also possible that Michal, as Saul’s daughter, in some way legitimates David’s claim to Saul’s throne, so that it was not necessarily affection that prompted him to worry about her welfare before he accepted Abner’s offer. In line with what we have seen above, however, we can understand that as long as the Saulides have control over any of David’s women, they are in effect challenging David’s masculinity and his claim to be king. Michal’s last major scene is certainly not one of affection between her and David. David’s bringing the ark of the covenant to Jerusalem and housing it there with great ceremony (2 Sam. 6) is usually interpreted as an attempt on his part to help legitimate his rule (and his choice of Jerusalem as capital) by tying himself to the traditions of Israel’s past. It is perhaps this attempt at legitimation that is behind Michal’s anger with David over his performance. David has been dancing clad only in a linen ephod, a garment usually worn by priests. Michal says that her indignation is over his shameless display of his body before even the lowliest women in Israel (2 Sam. 6:20), but when she complains, she pointedly calls him “king of Israel.” His response to her is equally telling: he justifies taking her father’s throne, as if that were the issue, saying that it was YHWH who made him king instead of her father and, in fact, instead of all her father’s house. There is an odd mixture of royal conflict and sexual conflict here. The result of Michal’s outburst (which is either about David’s abundant sensuality or about his occupying a throne that should have remained

in her family) is that she remains childless until the day of her death. It is not said whether Michal is unable to have children, an affliction generally believed to be from YHWH, or whether David simply refuses to impregnate her. But whichever is meant, the punishment resembles Michal’s outburst, in that it is for Michal both a sexual tragedy and a family tragedy, since it means that no children will be born to one of the few surviving offspring of Saul’s house. Bathsheba (2 Sam. 11–12) David’s most famous wife was Bathsheba, also the wife of another man when her story begins (2 Sam. 11). It seems the narrator is portraying David, albeit subtly, as a consummate usurper—of kingdoms and of wives. At the beginning of 2 Samuel 11, we read that David noticed Bathsheba bathing and that she was purifying herself (probably from her menstrual period). The import of this information is that when David and Bathsheba have intercourse, she has just menstruated and so is clearly not pregnant with her absent husband’s child. Bathsheba is pictured as almost entirely passive in this episode; except for her first-person message to David (“I am pregnant,” 2 Sam. 11:5), she is always spoken of in the third person. The only hint that she might have cooperated willingly in her predicament is her initial act of bathing in a place where she could be observed by the king out walking on his roof (not an uncommon place to stroll in the Middle East for the cool evening breeze). Still, the text offers no judgment on her for that. Bathsheba is rarely even called by name here. In the books of Samuel her name occurs only in 2 Samuel 11:3 and 12:24 (where she is also called David’s wife); otherwise she is called Uriah’s wife (typical for a widow; 2 Sam. 11:3, 11, 26; 12:9, 10, 15), the woman (2 Sam. 11:5), or just “she” or “her.” The narrative does not seem to hold her responsible for her actions with David, and the punishment that is meted out, that their child should die, is aimed by YHWH and Nathan at David, not Bathsheba. Her feelings are not ignored completely: it is said that David comforted her in her grief (though it is David’s grief and not Bathsheba’s that the narrator describes at length). Further, she and David have another son, Solomon, to replace the dead child. This rather passive picture of Bathsheba as royal wife will be replaced in 1 Kings 1–2 with a portrait

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of her as a strong and active favorite wife and queen mother. Rape, Revenge, and Revolt: The Story of Tamar (2 Sam. 13) The story of the rape of Tamar by her halfbrother Amnon and the revenge taken against Amnon by Tamar’s full brother Absalom cannot be read apart from some of the details of the palace and family politics that the narrative takes for granted. According to 2 Samuel 3:2, Amnon was David’s first son (by Ahinoam). We know of David’s second son (by Abigail) only that he was called Chileab in 2 Samuel 3:3 and Daniel in 1  Chronicles 3:1; he figures in no narrative. Absalom is David’s third son. His mother, ­Maacah, is royal, the daughter of a Transjordanian king (Talmai, king of Geshur; 2 Sam. 3:3), and Tamar is his full sister (2 Sam. 13:1). Jonadab, Amnon’s adviser in the affair, is himself a member of the family—a nephew of David and so first cousin to the other three (2 Sam. 13:3). It has often been pointed out that this narrative is sprinkled liberally with relational words. Absalom is called David’s son in 13:1, and Tamar is Absalom’s sister. Amnon is also called David’s son (2 Sam. 13:1), and Tamar Amnon’s sister (2 Sam. 13:2). Jonadab’s relation to them all is clearly spelled out in verse 3, and he addresses Amnon as “son of the king” in verse 4. In the same verse Amnon refers to Tamar as “my brother Absalom’s sister.” And so it goes, as the narrator emphasizes the intertwining relationships in this polygamous family. It is Jonadab who puts the idea into Amnon’s head that he can be alone with Tamar with David’s blessing, by pretending to be ill. The narrative report of Jonadab’s advice stops short of suggesting rape, but if his recommendation were in any way innocent, there would be no need for the deception. David apparently goes along with the plot without suspecting anything. Amnon is his eldest son and presumed heir; one would expect David to be anxious for Amnon’s health and well-being. What Amnon has asked Tamar to do, and what she does, is to make heart-shaped dumplings. The very words are, perhaps, meant to be suggestive. The noun for heart (lebab) and a related verb (labab) are used five times here: twice in verse 6, twice in verse 8, and once in verse 10. In verses 6 and 8 the word is used both as a noun, “heart-shaped dumplings,” and as a verb that describes their making. That the word has erotic overtones

is suggested by the use of the verb in Song of Songs 4:9. Verse 12 is a crux for understanding what is at stake in the situation. Tamar says, “No, my brother, do not force me; for such a thing is not done in Israel; do not do anything so vile!” Just exactly what is Tamar protesting against? Amnon has just called her “sister” when he grabs her and urges her to have sex with him willingly. When she begs him not to rape her and says that such a thing is not done in Israel, is it rape she is referring to, or incest? What precisely is it that is “vile”? In verse 13 she goes on to say that he need only speak to “the king,” for he would not withhold Tamar from Amnon. But how is one to read even this declaration? Several possible answers have been suggested. Perhaps the narrative operates as if there were no laws in effect at the time of Amnon and Tamar to prevent brother-sister marriages or, more specifically, to prevent marriages between two persons with the same father (cf. Abraham and Sarah, Gen. 20:12). This interpretation assumes that the narrative does not know, or ignores for this setting, the laws in Leviticus 18:9, 11; 20:17; and Deuteronomy 27:22, which prohibit such unions. Dating the legal material in the Bible is notoriously difficult, and it is certainly possible to make such an argument about this narrative. Another possibility is that such laws were known and were followed as custom for most people, but that the royal family lived by its own rules, although no loophole for the royalty is included in Leviticus or Deuteronomy. The nuances are important, because one would like to know whether Amnon would have been considered guilty of incest as well as of rape. If marriage between brother and sister was forbidden, then Tamar is saying in verse 13 that David would be willing to override even this and allow them to be legally married. If, however, there is no incest implied in the narrative, then Tamar is making a much simpler argument: Why rape me when you can marry me, simply by asking our father? A royal daughter, especially a beautiful one, could be a great asset to David in forging alliances with wealthy or royal potential fathers-in-law, but he would not say no to Amnon, even if it meant giving up such a resource. Whatever the precise meaning of Tamar’s outcry, it is futile. Amnon rapes her and then immediately hates his victim. Amnon’s response is generally described as realistic. In fact, there is



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good evidence that people who force their dominance on others (rapists and sadists, for example) are fighting what they perceive as weakness in themselves and that their victims’ defeat only reminds them of their own weakness and consequently enrages them. Amnon exhibits this exact behavior, and he has Tamar removed from his presence. When Tamar says that sending her away is worse than raping her, she understands that according to Israelite law he now must marry her (see Exod. 22:16; and esp. Deut. 22:28–29; if the narrative assumes similar laws to be in force, he cannot send her away). The reproach that she had said she could not bear (“Where could I carry my shame?”) is now hers. She tears the robe she wears, puts ashes on her head, and cries out, as signs of her grief. Absalom has a suspiciously easy time determining the source of Tamar’s grief, but tells her not to dwell on the episode. Surprisingly, the reason he gives is that Amnon is her brother, as if that removes the horror of it. Perhaps one is to understand that the close relationship makes impossible the kind of blood revenge that Dinah’s brothers exacted from Shechem and all the men of his city in Genesis 34; or perhaps the point is that since Tamar’s brother is the firstborn and heir apparent, care must be taken before her rape can be avenged. David’s lovehate relationships with his own sons mirror that with his “father” Saul. The last that is heard of Tamar, whom Absalom has just called “my sister,” is that she lived out her life “a desolate woman” in her brother Absalom’s house (2 Sam. 13:20). Relational language dominates to the end of this story. David does not punish Amnon (because he was his firstborn son, according to several versions), but Absalom hates Amnon because he raped his sister. Finally, after two years, Amnon goes to a feast at Absalom’s sheep shearing, apparently not suspecting that Absalom harbors such intense feelings still. Absalom has his servants kill Amnon, and then Absalom flees across the Jordan River to his maternal grandfather. He is later allowed to return, and the text reports (2 Sam. 14:27, but cf. 18:18) that Absalom had three sons and one daughter, a beautiful woman whose name was Tamar. The Wise Woman of Tekoa (2 Sam. 14) A textbook example of a woman exercising public power in a village setting comes in the first “wise woman” story in 2 Samuel 14. Joab,

David’s general, calls upon a “wise woman” from Tekoa to speak to David in such a way that he will make a decision about her invented situation without realizing that it will also apply to bringing Absalom back to Jerusalem. (Compare the strategy of the prophet Nathan’s story of the “poor man’s ewe lamb” in 2 Sam. 12.) The text says that Joab put the appropriate words into her mouth, but even so, her position as a wise woman meant that she was a good actor, or a clever speaker, or someone David would listen to because of her position at Tekoa—or all three (see Camp). Wives as the Symbol of Kingship (2 Sam. 15–19) Whatever justification Absalom might have claimed for killing Amnon, such as Amnon’s rape of Tamar, Absalom’s own royal ambitions are not hurt by having Amnon out of the way. Indeed, as soon as Absalom is admitted back into the royal household following his murder of Amnon and subsequent flight to his maternal grandfather, he begins to plot his own rule, even while David is still alive and well (2 Sam. 15:1–12). Because a king’s chief wives and secondary wives were such a symbol of his political connections and authority, a usurper could manifest his displacing of a reigning king by sleeping with members of the king’s harem. From what we have already seen, it is obvious that to claim a king’s harem was tantamount to claiming his throne. The clearest examples of this practice occur in the stories of David’s sons, vying for the throne both before and after his death. Second Samuel 15–19 tells the story of Absalom’s revolt against David and of his temporary success at taking the throne in Jerusalem. David is forced to flee Jerusalem and cross to the eastern side of the Jordan (15:13–16:14; 17:21–22), leaving ten secondary wives behind “to look after the house.” When Absalom and his men then move in to Jerusalem, Absalom is declared king by Hushai. The first thing Absalom is advised to do as the new king is to “go in to [his] father’s [wives]” whom David had left behind; and Absalom does so, before all Israel. The explanation for this act offered in the text is that Absalom will demonstrate to all Israel that he is “odious” to his father, that is, he has upstaged David in his masculine prowess, which is a major qualification for a king. (Note the anticipation of this situation in Nathan’s oracle in

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2 Sam. 12:11; cf. 1 Kgs. 2:13–18, 22–23, where a comparable dynamic is involved.) The Wise Woman of Abel-Maacah (2 Sam. 20) The second story about a wise woman (2 Sam. 20) is more instructive. When Joab is besieging the town of Abel of Beth-maacah and attacking it in order to drive out a rebel who had taken refuge there, a wise woman from within the city calls out to him to speak with her. He does so, a clear indication that she holds a position of authority that Joab would have recognized. She uses clever language, as did the wise woman in chapter 14, and negotiates for the lives of the people in Abel by agreeing to turn over the rebel (or, rather, his head) to Joab. The narrator does not hesitate to paint her as the representative of the people of Abel and as a person they will listen to in matters of war and politics. They agree to her plan, and the attack is called off. Both the woman from Tekoa and the woman from Abel lived in places that were far from the center; they would not have been much affected by the institutional structures of the monarchy; instead, older patterns of authority persisted. Their authority is recognized both by their people (2 Sam. 20) and by national figures (in both stories). They were quick thinkers and good talkers—hence, their designation “wise.”

Conclusion In the summary of the contents of the books of Samuel in the introduction, it was said that the books are organized around the careers of three men: Samuel, Saul, and David. Yet that is a somewhat misleading summation, as the subsequent discussion has made clear. Women play a larger role in the books of Samuel than in most of the rest of the Bible, and they appear in these narratives in the domestic sphere (Hannah, for instance), in the public sphere (the medium of Endor and the two wise women), and in the gray area that is the domestic sphere of a ruling family, where private decisions have public consequences. It has, in fact, been suggested that one of the major themes in the stories of David and his family is precisely the unavoidable link between public and private life within a ruling family. When David stops ruling himself and his family, the succession to the throne is threatened, and in this way all Israel suffers. The same could be said for Saul: he loses control

of himself, and his use of the women in his family to control David backfires. Even the women who sing battle songs are more impressed with David than with their king. Some of the more fascinating narratives about women in Samuel are all the more suggestive because the text offers so little information to help in understanding them. The women who serve at the tent of meeting and the medium of Endor are clearly religious professionals, but in systems that can no longer be fully described. What kind of local power did the wise women have, and what was the relationship between the system that supported them and the central government? Hannah offers her long-awaited son to a kind of religious order and then receives more children. Does the text imply a connection? Was it common among childless women to offer to “repay” the deity if the requested child was granted? It is clearly easier to understand the roles of the men in these stories than those of the women. The men’s stories seem straightforward and typical; the women are not so accessible. As a general rule, less is known about women’s lives in the ancient world than about men’s, and so it is more difficult to fill in whatever gaps may appear. But ironically this situation makes the women’s stories more intriguing and all the more inviting to the interpreter. Bibliography

Ackerman, James S. “Knowing Good and Evil: A Literary Analysis of the Court History in 2 Samuel 9–20 and 1 Kings 1–2.” Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990): 41–60. Bird, Phyllis. “The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus.” In Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, edited by Patrick D. Miller Jr., Paul D. Hanson, and S. Dean McBride, 397–419. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987. Camp, Claudia. “The Wise Women of 2 Samuel: A Role Model for Women in Early Israel?” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 43 (1981): 14–29. Gunn, David M. The Fate of King Saul: An Interpretation of a Biblical Story. Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1980. ———. The Story of King David: Genre and Interpretation. Sheffield: University of Sheffield Press, 1978.



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Hackett, Jo Ann. “In the Days of Jael: Reclaiming the History of Women in Ancient Israel.” In Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, 15–38. Harvard Women’s Studies in Religion Series. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Hiebert, Paula S. “‘Whence Shall Help Come to Me?’ The Biblical Widow.” In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by Peggy L. Day, 125–41. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989. Jay, Nancy. “Sacrifice as Remedy for Having Been Born of Woman.” In Immaculate and

Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality, edited by Clarissa W. Atkinson, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret R. Miles, 283–309. Harvard Women’s Studies in Religion Series. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985. Levenson, Jon D., and Baruch Halpern. “The Political Import of David’s Marriages.” Journal of Biblical Literature 99 (1980): 507–18. McCarter, P. Kyle, Jr. I Samuel. Anchor Bible 8. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1980. ———. II Samuel. Anchor Bible 9. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1984.

1 and 2 Kings Cameron B. R. Howard

Introduction The books of 1 and 2 Kings relate stories of the Israelite and Judean monarchies from the united kingdom under Solomon in the second half of the tenth century BCE until the fall of Judah to the Babylonians in 587 BCE. Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings together constitute the “Former Prophets” in the Hebrew Bible, while Christian canons—including those of Protestant, Catholic, Greek Orthodox, and other Eastern Christian churches—situate Kings between Samuel and Chronicles as part of the “Historical Books.” The division of the single Hebrew book of Kings into two books of more manageable length is a development of the late medieval period and is modeled off of the Septuagint (LXX), which labels the books as 3–4 Kingdoms (or 3–4 Reigns). The LXX, like the Hebrew tradition, places those books directly after the books of Samuel, known in the LXX as 1–2 Kingdoms (or 1–2 Reigns). Indeed, the book of Kings continues the chronology of Samuel; together, Samuel and Kings provide a continuous account of the Israelite monarchy from its inception through its division to the fall of both the northern and southern kingdoms. Despite the continuities of Kings with the books of Samuel, Kings manifests a distinct literary beginning. With the opening of Kings comes a subtle shift in narrative focus. While the primary concern of Kings remains, as in Samuel, monarchic, the narrative opens with an image of an old, ailing King David, whose sons are vying to be his successor. If the book of Samuel in broadest overview recounts the waxing of the ancient Israelite monarchy, then the book of Kings recounts its waning. The “glory

days” of David are over, and the narrative’s critiques of apostasies, immediately identified with Solomon and his foreign wives, continue to intensify as subsequent kings worship gods other than the God of Israel. An account of the destruction of the Jerusalem temple and exile to Babylon ends the books of Kings, but the shadow of that imminent event looms over the books from their earliest chapters. The monarchic history is told with an eye to providing a theological explanation for the causes of the exile. God warns Solomon in very specific terms, for example, that worshiping other gods will cause YHWH to “cut Israel off from the land” and to make the temple a “heap of ruins” (1  Kgs. 9:7–8). In addition to the more ominous turn of the tone of Kings, the pace of the narrative quickens significantly. Samuel lingers on the details of the political, military, and personal exploits of Saul and especially David, while Kings surveys the successive rulers of the northern and southern kingdoms over more than three hundred years. Because it gives an account of events that happened in the past, the book of Kings is broadly “historical.” Compared to Samuel, Kings is manifestly more historiographical, in that it exhibits more obvious strategies of history-telling; the inner lives of its characters often recede into the background, for example, while public, state events receive primary attention. Nonetheless, Kings should not be narrowly construed as pure “history,” in the sense of a consistently factually accurate reconstruction of those events. The narrative still claims knowledge of the dreams of Solomon and the private

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prayers of Elijah alongside accounts of military strategies and regnal years. The author(s) of Kings likely used a variety of sources, including historical records and folktales alike, to assemble a portrait of the monarchic era that provided a compelling narrative and that fit a particular theological vision: namely, that the military defeat of both Israel and Judah was brought on by God as punishment for the apostasies of those kingdoms’ leaders. Scholars have long recognized consistencies in the theological outlooks of Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. The idea that those books form a distinctive literary unit received its most influential articulation in the work of mid-twentieth-century German scholar Martin Noth, who described the Deuteronomistic History (DH) as the work of a single exilicera author explaining the disintegration of Israel and Judah as the result of their royal leadership’s failure to keep the Mosaic covenant. Scholars have since debated how many additional layers of redaction—that is, moments of editorial revision—can be identified in DH. Frank Moore Cross’s notion of a “double redaction” identifies two competing themes within DH: a theme of doom that dwells on the “sin of Jeroboam,” and a theme of assurance centered on God’s promises to David. The first redaction, in Cross’s view, was produced before the exile, during the reign of Josiah, and combines the two themes: apostasy led to the fall of the northern kingdom, but God’s promises were realized in the reformer King Josiah. The second redaction came together during the exile, adding passages that extend the theme of doom toward that event. Scholars since Noth have continued to identify additional layers of redaction, and it is likely that DH underwent several moments of editing from the preexilic era, through the time of the Babylonian exile, and perhaps even into the Persian period (see Römer). Nevertheless, the thematic and theological connections between each book of the Former Prophets remain. In order to understand the authorship of Kings, then, it is first important to acknowledge its continuities with Deuteronomic thought. Regardless of whether Kings shares one specific author with the other books of DH, these texts hold in common a sense of God’s use of the international military landscape to punish Israel and Judah’s religious infidelities. In the view of Kings, the political history of Israel and Judah never can be separated from their religious practices.

The Deuteronomistic perspective prioritizes two religious practices as hallmarks of covenant-keeping: centralized worship of YHWH at the Jerusalem temple, and worship of YHWH alone. Advocacy of centralized worship is often described in Kings through negative examples of sacrificial worship at the “high places,” that is, shrines other than the Jerusalem temple, often on elevated terrain. Those high places were probably used for the worship of YHWH, but they were certainly also used for the worship of other gods. Thus the high places in Kings evoke ideas both of improper (i.e., noncentralized) worship of YHWH and of the worship of deities other than YHWH. Those other deities include both gods and goddesses, the most prominent of whom in Kings are Baal and Asherah. Baal is a Canaanite storm god who is said to be in control of the rain, making the showdown between the prophets of Baal and Elijah during a time of famine (1 Kgs. 18) particularly freighted. In the Ugaritic (i.e., Canaanite) pantheon, the goddess Asherah is the consort of the high god El. Particularly in texts in Kings, the Hebrew Bible tends to refer to “the asherah” as a cultic object, some sort of stick or pole. However, as inscriptions from Kuntillet Ajrud and Khirbet el-Qom attest, YHWH and Asherah were likely worshiped together as high god and consort, just as El and Asherah were paired at Ugarit. Diana Edelman points out that the addition of the definite article, which turns the proper name into a common noun, reads as a “deliberate tampering with the grammatical construction” five times in Kings: 1 Kings 15:13; 2 Kings 18:4; 21:7; 23:4, 7 (Edelman, 244). Hidden under the explicit narrative of the book of Kings, where prophets and reformminded kings work to rid Israel and Judah of the ­’asherim, is an implicit narrative that writes out the consort status of Asherah from the portrait of legitimate Yahwistic cult practice. Given the stratified composition history of Kings, it is difficult to point to one particular author or editor for that work or for DH as a whole. The Deuteronomistic perspective shows a distinct antipathy toward the northern kingdom of Israel, pointing to a probable Judean origin for the book. Rather than trying to pinpoint a single authorial vision beyond that, it is helpful to talk about the robust character of the narrative itself, which has a dominant theological agenda and yet preserves voices of dissent around that. This multiplicity of perspectives

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is what Cross’s idea of a “double redaction” began to parse, and it is what redaction critics are exploring when they do the very important work of identifying multiple editorial layers. Furthermore, consideration of the dissonant, yet sonorous whole is an especially important hermeneutical task for people whose identity falls outside of what a given culture, society, or religion considers normative. Ken Stone’s advocacy of this hermeneutic for queer readers is applicable, mutatis mutandis, for any socially marginalized identity: “Since ‘queer’ readers, who have often been asked, or forced, to conform our sexual and gendered lives to particular interpretations of political, social, and religious reality, know all too well the importance of acknowledging alternative perspectives and modes of life, we ought to read the books of Kings with special attention to the multiple points of view that can be detected there” (Stone, 224).

Women and the Social World of Kings Despite its dubious value as “history” in the modern sense of the term, Kings provides snapshots of the social world of ancient Israel that can inform our understanding of the monarchic era. The political context of ancient Israel and Judah as presented in Kings can be broadly understood as “imperial.” Though Solomon’s territory reportedly included territories from the Euphrates to Egypt (1 Kgs. 4:21), it would be an overstatement to describe even the united kingdom of Israel as an “empire,” given the paucity of its territorial holdings relative to its other imperial neighbors such as Egypt and Assyria. Nonetheless, the monarchic system as presented in Kings operates on the characteristically imperial principle of extraction: empires exist only by means of—and for the sake of—extracting resources from their constituent social units (Berquist, 79–80). When the prophet Samuel responds to the people’s request for a king (1  Sam. 8:1–22), he warns them that the modus operandi of the king will be to co-opt people and property for his own uses. The narrative underscores the extractive nature of kingship by using the verbs “he will take” (yiqakh) and “he will take a tenth” (ya‘sor) a total of six times in seven verses (1 Sam. 8:11– 17), listing all the people and property that will be taken over for royal service. The monarchic system, sustained by military violence, assumes

no right to bodily integrity on the part of its subjects. Instead, all bodies, including and perhaps especially those of women, may be co-opted for the uses of the king. Nevertheless, despite many moments in the narrative that appear to oppose the machinations of the monarchy, Solomon’s royal grandeur still marks a high ideal in the national memory: “Judah and Israel were as numerous as the sand by the sea; they ate and drank and were happy” (1  Kgs. 4:20). Thus, while the overall evaluation of kingship in Samuel–Kings does not reveal a single, clearcut “promonarchic” or “antimonarchic” stance, a strand of vigorous critique persists across the narratives, one that most vociferously criticizes practices of extraction. The social system described in Kings, in both its religious and political manifestations, is patriarchal: the prophets and the monarchs are men, and the moments in which women yield that kind of power are usually either aberrations or abominations. The social system is also patrilineal: title and property pass from father to son. That social system is presented, however, through a relatively narrow lens. As the book’s English title suggests, the primary focus of Kings is on the individual rulers of Israel and Judah. The narrative gives its principal attention to the Israelite and Judean royal realms and their personages. Both male and female characters in the books of Kings appear in service to that focus. In fact, the narrative strategies employed in Kings frequently echo the extractive impulses of the governmental system it describes, using “minor” characters to build fuller portraits of the royal stars. Characters largely exist in Kings to provide further means for the evaluation of the kings themselves. Nonetheless, readers can glimpse a wide variety of social roles among the books’ female characters, from servants to women prophets to queens. Kings presents, then, no uniform portrait of women in the monarchic era of Israelite history; the portraits of female characters in Kings are shaped by class, ethnic or national status, and the exigencies of the narrative. At the same time, nearly all of the women in Kings are mothers who are described in some relationship to that part of their identities. This is true across social classes, from the prostitutes who come before Solomon to the mothers of kings to the widow whose son Elijah brings back from the dead. This trend speaks to the overall cultural milieu of patrilineal societies in the



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ancient world, where a woman’s worth was often situated in her ability to produce children, especially a male heir. The ancestral stories of barrenness and miraculous conception in the book of Genesis and the story of Hannah in the book of Samuel make much of this cultural expectation. Likewise, in 2 Kings 4, Elisha bestows the gift of a child to the Shunammite woman, a wealthy woman who ostensibly has everything. Outside of the implicit facts that sex is necessary for procreation and is the commodity sold in prostitution, the book of Kings does not often dwell explicitly on the sexuality of “women” as an overall identity category. The book is practically fixated, however, on the seductive nature of foreign women. “Foreignness” is not confined to certain ethnicities, but rather is defined as not-Israelite or not-Judean. Foreign women are dangerously alluring, not simply enticing men to sex, but particularly “turning men’s hearts” toward foreign gods. Knowledge of the gods and goddesses of the surrounding regions would have entered the region of Palestine in any number of ways, such as trade, military engagement, and immigration. According to the Deuteronomistic perspective, simply having knowledge of those alternate deities could not be enough to provoke a man to apostasy.

Foreign women receive the blame for enticing men to the worship of foreign gods and goddesses. Implicit in the Deuteronomistic critique is an understanding of all women as charmers who can draw men away from what is “right”— usually what the patriarchal social structures deem right—and into sin and idolatry. Kings is thoroughly heteronormative; it assumes sexual acts occur between women and men, and it even lacks descriptions of the kind of deep intimacy the book of Samuel describes in Jonathan and David’s relationship, be they friends or lovers. One possible reference to homosexual activity could be the “the holy man” (haqadesh) mentioned at several points in the narrative (1 Kgs. 14:24, 15:12, 22:46; 2 Kgs. 23:7). The NRSV translates this phrase as “male temple prostitutes,” but the precise function of these holy men remains contested in biblical scholarship. They may be general cultic functionaries, or their ritual functions may be sexual in nature, though the idea that any cult prostitution at all existed in or around Israel is disputed. The “holy men” are in every case roundly condemned, but the narrative’s condemnation always falls within a list of improper worship acts, so that the book of Kings makes no specific comment about homosexual practices.

Content Solomon’s Kingship (1 Kgs. 1–11) The Death of David and the Rise of Solomon (1 Kgs. 1–2) The book of Kings opens with the conscription of an Israelite virgin girl, Abishag the Shunammite, for service to the elderly and declining King David. The very first scene of Kings, then, features a woman whose body has been co-opted for the uses of the monarch. Though couched in language of keeping the king “warm,” the nature of Abishag’s service is surely supposed to be sexual; however, the text recounts that, although she lay in the king’s bosom, he did not “know her sexually.” Abishag’s presence reveals the king’s sexual and political impotence. David’s waning physical virility provides an analog for his fading kingship; his impotence has become a matter of national security. Not even the most beautiful virgin found in Israel could rouse his masculinity to its former glory; thus, Israel

seeks a new king. In this scene, not only is the woman’s body subject to the uses of the state, but even the king’s body itself becomes spectacle for those waiting to crown his successor. Fitness for office is measured in terms of sexual virility. The king, it seems, has not shown himself to be a “real man,” and so no longer is an able king. David’s wife Bathsheba provides a marked contrast to the character of Abishag. Though both initially were brought to David for his sexual pleasure, Abishag is a virgin at the time of her conscription, while Bathsheba is a married woman (2 Sam. 11). David lies with Bathsheba but never with Abishag, and Bathsheba bears sons to David. Abishag never speaks in the narrative, but Bathsheba plays an active, vocal role in Solomon’s accession to the throne (1 Kgs. 1–2). Bathsheba plots with the prophet Nathan to win David’s appointment of Solomon over Adonijah, David’s oldest living son and expected heir, as David’s successor. In the wake

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of Solomon’s accession, Adonijah attempts to negotiate with Solomon via Bathsheba, requesting that he be given Abishag as his wife. Sex with Abishag had been the test of kingship that David failed, but Adonijah is ready to pass that test. Adonijah’s marriage to Abishag would signal that he was indeed fit to be king, able to accomplish things that David could not. Taking this request as a plot to undermine his own kingship, Solomon orders the killing of Adonijah. Thus Abishag the Shunammite becomes the silent, conscripted cause for the death of Adonijah, just as her virginal presence signals the imminent death of David. David’s deathbed charge to Solomon (1 Kgs. 2:1–9) provides an early indication that the Deuteronomic perspective persists in the book of Kings: if Solomon will keep the law of Moses, he will prosper. The Reign of Solomon (1 Kgs. 3–11) Four primary markers characterize Solomon’s kingship over Israel as presented in the book of Kings: his superlative wisdom, his remarkable prosperity, his accomplishment of building the temple, and his penchant for marrying foreign women. Solomon’s wisdom is described as a gift from God in fulfillment of Solomon’s prayer (1  Kgs. 3:12), and God provides the riches as a kind of “bonus” for a right request (1  Kgs. 3:13). The famous “split the baby” story of 1 Kings 3:16–28, in which Solomon judges a case brought by one prostitute against another, provides a stirring example of his wisdom on the “home front,” within the land of Israel. Prostitutes held little standing in ancient Israel, as a scene later in 1 Kings shows: when Ahab dies, “They washed the chariot by the pool of Samaria; the dogs licked up his blood, and the prostitutes washed themselves in it, according to the word of the Lord that he had spoken” (1 Kgs. 22:38). The story works on assumptions of the “nature” of women in particular social roles. Reading with Phyllis Bird, Claudia Camp describes how the story plays on competing expectations of the women as both prostitutes and mothers. As prostitutes, they are presumed to be liars; as mothers, they are presumed to hold the life of their children as their highest value. According to the text, “real” mothers preserve the life of their child at any cost. Thus, as Camp goes on to explain, Solomon knows how, in the language of Proverbs, to discern between a “wise woman”—one with

“true speech”—and a “strange woman,” who is “just” a harlot. The queen of Sheba’s visit provides a detailed anecdote of Solomon’s international influence, standing in complementary relationship to his adjudication between the two prostitutes. The two accounts show Solomon’s fitness to rule at home and his ability to navigate the international political landscape. In international scope, Solomon’s wealth and wisdom stand linked in Kings; the more the nations are impressed by his wisdom, the more they bring him gifts, adding continuously to his riches (1 Kgs. 4:34; 10:23–25). When word of Solomon’s reputation reaches the queen of Sheba, she visits him with “hard questions” (1  Kgs. 10:1). After Solomon addresses those questions even beyond her expectations, the queen lavishes extravagant gifts upon him. In turn, “King Solomon gave to the queen of Sheba every desire that she expressed, as well as what he gave her out of Solomon’s royal bounty” (1 Kgs. 10:13). This reciprocal gift-giving implies a political alliance (accomplished with a woman, yet without marriage); through his wisdom, Solomon builds Israel into a nation of international repute. Moreover, in what borders on a Yahwistic confession of faith, the queen proclaims that Solomon’s wisdom is a result of YHWH’s love of Israel: “Blessed be the Lord your God, who has delighted in you and set you on the throne of Israel! Because the Lord loved Israel forever, he has made you king to execute justice and righteousness” (1 Kgs. 10:9). The nations of the world can see not only the glory of Solomon himself, but also the grandeur of his God. The queen’s visit mitigates the portrait of foreign women in Kings, inverting the seduction usually enacted by foreign women onto Israelite men. Upon observing Solomon’s wealth and experiencing his wisdom firsthand, the queen is left breathless: “there was no more spirit [Heb. ruach, “spirit” or “breath”] in her” (1 Kgs. 10:5). Solomon has taken her breath away. With her heart now aflutter, the queen of Sheba is ready to praise YHWH, the God of Israel. These three female characters—the two prostitutes and the queen of Sheba—represent opposite ends of the social spectrum with very different levels of power. The prostitutes are local and of a low social class, while the queen of Sheba is the immeasurably rich leader of a distant land. Yet these characters all serve the same narrative purpose: their presence in the



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narrative aids the characterization of Solomon as wealthy, wise, and divinely favored. In addition to instituting an era of prosperity for all of Israel and Judah (1 Kgs. 4:20), Solomon is credited in Kings with supervising multiple construction projects, most notably the temple. The dedication of the temple falls in the center of the account of Solomon’s reign in 1 Kings 3–11; as Walter Brueggemann observes, the temple dedication (1  Kgs. 8) serves as a “pivot point,” with references to key themes like wisdom, foreign wives, and forced labor arranged in loose symmetry around the dedication (Brueggemann, 123). Among the five chapters (1  Kgs. 5–9) devoted to the construction accounts, multiple mentions are made of the forced labor Solomon used for all of his building projects, but statements on the identities of those laborers conflict. First Kings 5:13 affirms, “King Solomon conscripted forced labor out of all Israel,” while 1 Kings 9:20–22 emphatically asserts that “of the Israelites Solomon made no slaves.” This discrepancy testifies to the use of multiple sources by the author of Kings, though it is difficult to imagine why the author would allow such a blatant contradiction to stand. The defensiveness lingering in the refutation of Israelite enslavement echoes an overall ambiguity in the narrative’s assessment of the Solomonic age: life was great, but it could not have been too great, or else the kingdoms would not have been destroyed. The idea that Israelites were indeed among the forced laborers finally wins the day in Kings, as it is precisely that issue that drives the secession of the northern kingdom under Jeroboam. The first report of Solomon’s governmental activity announces his marriage to the daughter of Pharaoh, the king of Egypt (1 Kgs. 3:1). Royal marriages were utilized to make political alliances in the ancient Near Eastern world, just as readily as they have been, for example, in the European monarchies of recent centuries. The text provides no commentary to indicate that this move is unusual or problematic, though the notion of so close an alliance with Egypt may be particularly ominous in a Deuteronomistic work, given that tradition’s frequent invocation of the exodus from Egypt (e.g., 1 Kgs. 8:51; 9:9; 2 Kgs. 21:15). Still, there is no clear sense of judgment in the announcement of Solomon’s marital alliance. Likewise, the following verse mentions worship at the “high places” without particular vitriol, noting that this was

happening “because no house had yet been built for the name of the Lord” (1 Kgs. 3:2). Nonetheless, these two comments placed together at the outset of Solomon’s rule foreshadow the two connected issues that the Deuteronomistic authors will see as initial causes for the longterm decline of the monarchy: Solomon’s many foreign wives and worship at the high places. Throughout Kings, the worship of foreign gods is repeatedly linked with the influence of foreign women. Solomon’s wives’ seductive powers extend outside the matrimonial realm to the religious, where they “turn his heart” to the gods of their homelands. According to 1 Kings 11:1, the peoples represented in Solomon’s marriages include Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians, and Hittites. Notably, this list does not correspond to the book of Deuteronomy’s injunction against intermarriage (Deut. 7:1–6), even though the narrator seems to be invoking that prohibition. Marvin Sweeney notes that Solomon’s list corresponds instead to alliances and conquests made by David, and that the invocation of Deuteronomic law was probably a later redaction to make Solomon’s actions fit it, rather than having composed Solomon’s list in light of the Deuteronomic prohibitions (Sweeney, 155). This inconsistency further underscores the tension in Kings between politics and religion. Certainly the overall message of Kings sees Israel and Judah’s political and military outcomes as the result of YHWH’s favor or disapproval. Even so, Solomon’s coterie of wives represents the Davidic dynasty’s high status and plentiful international alliances.

The Divided Monarchy (1 Kgs. 12–2 Kgs. 17) Dividing the Kingdom (1 Kgs. 12–15) From the death of Solomon at the end of 1 Kings 11 until the fall of the northern kingdom in 2 Kings 17, the narrative generally alternates between accounts of the kingdom of Judah and the kingdom of Israel. The confrontation between Rehoboam, Solomon’s son and successor, and Jeroboam, Solomon’s appointed supervisor of forced laborers, initiates the division of the united kingdom and the narrative’s concomitant alternation. Rehoboam’s refusal to lighten the load of the forced laborers incites the rebellion of Israel, but his process of discernment on that issue echoes the measure of masculinity—and, by extension, kingship—by sexual

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virility that the encounter of David and Abishag illustrates. Rehoboam’s older advisers tell him to lighten the laborers’ work to win their hearts and minds: “If you will be a servant to this people today and serve them, and speak good words to them when you answer them, then they will be your servants forever” (1 Kgs. 12:7). In contrast, his younger advisers see the request as an affront to Rehoboam’s power: “Thus you should say to them, ‘My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins. Now, whereas my father laid on you a heavy yoke, I will add to your yoke. My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions’” (1 Kgs. 12:10b–11). In other words, Rehoboam should see himself as “more of a man” than his father, and therefore he should not bend to the requests of those under his power, nor to the aging—and, by implication, less potent—elder advisers. In his inability to consummate his relationship with Abishag, the aging David was unable to demonstrate his masculinity via sexuality— specifically heterosexuality—and therefore his kingship was deemed at an end. The narrative appears to endorse that test, or at least not to make any overtly negative judgments about it. However, Rehoboam’s assertion of his masculinity, metaphorical though his sexual imagery may be, reads as an illustration of his arrogance. The imperial strategy of extraction becomes intertwined with constructions of gender and power, so that a “manly man,” ostensibly even more sexually potent than his father Solomon (a man with a thousand sexual partners!), is also one who adds new levels of brutality to the kingdom’s strategies of domination. Rehoboam’s decision backfires, of course; not only does the kingdom split, but he incites a perpetual enmity between Israel and Judah (1 Kgs. 12:19; 14:30). Keeping with the Deuteronomistic theological outlook, the text attributes Rehoboam’s poor decision making to “a turn of affairs brought about by the Lord,” so that Ahijah’s prophecy to Jeroboam would be fulfilled (1 Kgs. 12:15). Despite the negative evaluation that the narrative gives to Rehoboam, its assessment of Jeroboam is much grimmer. Jeroboam has already taken refuge with King Shishak of Egypt to escape the wrath of Solomon in the wake of Ahijah’s prophecy, thus creating an ironic association between Jeroboam and the site of the Hebrews’ ancient enslavement (1  Kgs. 11:40). The same King Shishak later invades Judah (1  Kgs. 14:25–28)—and Israel, according to

archaeological sources—which does nothing to rehabilitate the narrator’s opinion of either Egypt or Jeroboam. Worried that regular pilgrimages to Jerusalem for sacrificial worship will entice the people of the north to reunite with the southern kingdom (and kill him in the process), Jeroboam fashions two golden calves, setting up one at Bethel and one at Dan (1 Kgs. 12:28–29). This establishment of alternate shrines is remembered throughout the rest of Kings as “the sin of Jeroboam.” His proclamation, “Here are your gods, O Israel, who brought you up out of the land of Egypt,” echoes almost word for word the cry of the Hebrews in the wilderness when Aaron makes a golden calf for them (Exod. 32:4). The parallels in the presentation make compelling rhetoric against Jeroboam. Having come up from Egypt himself and having delivered the enslaved Israelites from their bondage under Rehoboam, Jeroboam shows himself to be no Moses, instead making the same idolatrous mistake as Aaron. Though God relents from his wrath in the wilderness episode (Exod. 32:14), the outcome is still wrenching; at Moses’ direction, the sons of Levi kill three thousand people in the camp, and a plague from God follows (Exod. 32:25–29, 35). Any reader familiar with the exodus traditions, as the first audience of Kings surely would have been, knows that no good can come from golden calves. To compound Jeroboam’s sin, he establishes high places, declares festival days of his own accord, and appoints priests who are not of a priestly caste to work at Bethel. In the view of the Deuteronomistic voice of the text, his apostasies run deep and wide. Jeroboam’s wife is never named, nor does she ever speak. Nonetheless, she is the agent whose actions deliver the prophecy promising the doom of Jeroboam, his house, and the kingdom of Israel altogether. She is also the one whose step across the palace threshold signals the moment of her child’s death. The narrator never specifies whether the wife of Jeroboam who acts in 1 Kings 14 is also the mother of Abijah. The reader learns of that familial tie only when God tells the blind Ahijah that “the wife of Jeroboam is coming to inquire of you concerning her son” (1 Kgs. 14:5). In the narrator’s framework, “Abijah son of Jeroboam” and “the wife of Jeroboam” are described only in relation to Jeroboam, never in relation to each other. This trend is in keeping with the point of view



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of the text, which constructs nearly all the characters in Kings in terms of what they can contribute to the portrait of the kings themselves. Jeroboam instructs his wife to disguise herself and approach the prophet Ahijah at Shiloh in order to discover the fate of the child. Despite the prophet Ahijah’s blindness, her identity— still only “wife of Jeroboam”—is discovered. Ahijah, who had once declared the division of the kingdom because of God’s displeasure with Solomon’s religious infidelities, now proclaims, “Anyone belonging to Jeroboam who dies in the city, the dogs shall eat” (1  Kgs. 14:11a). Jeroboam’s lineage will be cut off, and the death of Abijah will be the first of many. Ahijah does have a word of comfort to offer to Jeroboam’s wife: Abijah alone of Jeroboam’s family will receive a proper burial, because of some unspecified quality God has found pleasing in him. Even so, her reentrance into the city will mark the moment of the child’s death, leading readers to imagine how long she lingered at the threshold before crossing over to her inevitable grief. Through its failure—or refusal—to name Jeroboam’s wife (regardless of whether the author had access to her name in any source), this episode underscores how ultimately the women of the Israelite and Judean monarchies can earn a place in the historical memory recorded in Kings only by contributing an heir, or else by association with remarkable apostasies. The book of Kings quite consistently names the mothers of the kings of Israel and Judah (see below) to identify their genealogical heritage. Jeroboam’s wife has borne an heir to Jeroboam, or perhaps two, if Nadab is also hers. But because the prophet has already declared that “the Lord will raise up for himself a king over Israel, who shall cut off the house of Jeroboam today” (1  Kgs. 14:14), it is as if her name is now a moot point. The end of the line of Jeroboam is imminent, and so the genealogical precision that would otherwise preserve her name is no longer required. She is a casualty of the Deuteronomists’ historical polemic. The book of Kings’ march through the regnal history of Israel and Judah employs a regular formula to identify each monarch. This formula identifies the year of accession with reference to the king of the opposite kingdom, tells how long the king’s reign lasted, reports his mother’s name, and provides a summary evaluative statement about the king’s faithfulness or lack thereof. The formula for the accession of Abijam

is typical: “Now in the eighteenth year of King Jeroboam son of Nebat, Abijam began to reign over Judah. He reigned for three years in Jerusalem. His mother’s name was Maacah daughter of Abishalom. He committed all the sins that his father did before him” (1 Kgs. 15:1–3a). Including the name of the king’s mother provides genealogical clarity about the king, but it does not serve to introduce the woman herself (e.g., 1 Kgs. 22:42; 2 Kgs. 21:19). There does, however, appear to have been an official role for the “queen mother,” evidenced by King Asa’s removing Maacah from that position because she made an image of Asherah (1 Kgs. 15:13). It is unclear what kind of power the queen mother would have held, or whether that position was afforded to every mother of a king in either kingdom. It does seem that “queen” was neither role nor office in Israel or Judah. The narrative presents only stories with wives of kings who may take more or less active roles, but the title of “queen” is not afforded to them as it is, for example, to the queen of Sheba. Even Athaliah, whom the narrative reports “reigned over the land [of Judah]” (2  Kgs. 11:3), is not called “queen,” though she is probably the daughter of Jezebel, and the narrative does not view her rule as legitimate anyway. Jezebel, Elijah, and the Northern Kings (1 Kgs. 16–22) At 1 Kings 16 the narrative turns much of its attention to the intrigues of the northern kingdom, focusing upon it until the inception of the Jehu dynasty and the end of the Omride dynasty in 2 Kings 10. The kings of Israel receive no benefit of the doubt from the Judean Deuteronomistic perspective. They consistently are said to have “walked in the ways of Jeroboam,” participating in a host of idolatries that incite the anger of God. The account slows dramatically at the reign of Ahab, devoting the end of 1 Kings 16 through much of 1 Kings 22 to that era. Interwoven with stories of Ahab and his wife Jezebel are stories of the prophet Elijah, who makes a dramatic figure of prophetic power pitted against the monarchic power of the royal couple. Jezebel’s very name has become an epithet for women with any number of perceived characteristics, from seductiveness to promiscuity to prosperity to self-assuredness to ruthlessness. Her power, her religious devotion, her ready deployment of violence, the drama and

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gore of her death, and the attention accorded to her by the narrative all make the story of Jezebel stand out to readers of Kings. She is introduced to the narrative at 1 Kings 16:31 in the description of Ahab’s accession. Taking on a sardonic tone, the narrator remarks of Ahab, “And as if it had been a light thing for him to walk in the sins of Jeroboam son of Nebat, he took as his wife Jezebel daughter of King Ethbaal of the Sidonians, and went and served Baal, and worshiped him.” This marriage was surely a political move, creating an alliance with the Sidonians, that is, the Phoenicians, whose kingdom was just north of Israel. Solomon had employed the same strategy hundreds of times, to the disdain of YHWH and the Deuteronomists, though with great political effect. In the eyes of the narrator, it is as if Jezebel herself is capable of more harm than Solomon’s seven hundred foreign wives and three hundred concubines put together. Ahab is not without culpability, either. The text repeatedly remarks on the superlative nature of his sins, for he “did evil in the sight of the Lord more than all who were before him” (1 Kgs. 16:30). The narrative lingers over the sins of Ahab and Jezebel with judgment and blood lust. The prophet Elijah is introduced immediately after the first mentions of Ahab and Jezebel, thus bringing to the fore all the main characters involved in the impending showdowns between prophet and monarchy. The Elijah and Elisha narratives were likely separate source collections of accounts of acts of power and holiness by each “man of God,” as the narrative calls them. The Deuteronomistic author probably inserted these independent sources among others into the larger history he was constructing. This process of composition makes clearer why some of the Elijah and Elisha accounts have little or nothing to do directly with the Israelite and Judean monarchies on which the rest of Kings focuses so acutely. At the same time, the prophetic legends provide an effective counternarrative to monarchic profligacy. Elijah and Elisha depend upon the hospitality of “ordinary citizens” of Israel, even as they interact with kings. They sleep in caves and under trees, rather than inhabiting pristine palaces. Their miraculous tales testify to the power of the God of Israel to work wonders grander than foreign gods and to provide for the people outside of the monarchic strategies of extraction.

The first presentation of Elijah shows him proclaiming to Ahab an imminent drought in Israel. YHWH then tells Elijah to go into hiding, where the ravens will feed him. The language of pursuit pervades the Elijah-Ahab stories, adding to the sense of opposition between prophet and king. Elijah persistently must flee for his life from Ahab, who relentlessly pursues him (1  Kgs. 18:10), knowing that Elijah proclaims his doom. After his wadi of refuge dries up in the drought, Elijah then travels at God’s command to Zarephath, in the territory of Sidon, Jezebel’s homeland. He seeks food and drink there from a widow; biblical law specifies that widows are a group in society who require special care, far from the wealth and power of Israel’s palaces. Instead of taking from the widow of Zarephath until nothing is left, Elijah brings tidings of plenty from YHWH the God of Israel. The meal and oil last through the time of drought. (The narrative does not address the plight of the rest of the poor of the land, who are surely suffering without prophets at their doorsteps.) When her son falls ill to the point of death, Elijah is able to bring him back to life, leading her to profess her faith not only in the power of YHWH, but in Elijah’s own status as a miracle-working “man of God”: “So the woman said to Elijah, ‘Now I know that you are a man of God, and that the word of the Lord in your mouth is truth’” (1 Kgs. 17:24). As a Phoenician woman who is poor, awed by Elijah’s power, and who professes the word of YHWH as truth, the widow of Zarephath stands in marked contrast to the wealthy, unflinching, Baal-worshiping wife of Ahab. The widow is a foil character to Jezebel in particular, but as a foreign woman who confesses YHWH, she also ever so slightly softens the text’s polemic against foreign women. Like the queen of Sheba, who also carries praises of YHWH on her lips, the widow is not another in the book’s line of seductive women turning men’s hearts against YHWH. Her Yahwistic confession mitigates her otherness; at the end of the day, religion still trumps ethnicity in the judgment of Kings. After these two scenes featuring Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, the narrative turns to a face-off between Elijah and the king. Elijah asks Obadiah, “who was in charge of the palace” (1 Kgs. 18:3), to deliver the news of Elijah’s return. Obadiah is reluctant, fearing for his life, and both he and the narrator testify that he has



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endangered his own life on behalf of YHWH’s prophets before. Here the narrative invokes an event understood to have occurred in the past but not otherwise referenced in the book of Kings. Obadiah says he hid and fed a hundred of YHWH’s prophets “when Jezebel was killing off the prophets of the Lord” (1 Kgs. 18:4, 13). In the sequence of the narrative so far, Jezebel has only appeared as another foreign woman married to an Israelite king. From Obadiah’s passing reference to her slaughter of Yahwistic prophets (1 Kgs. 18:13), the reader learns that Jezebel is much more than just a bad influence. As the story proceeds, Elijah calls for an assembly with “the four hundred fifty prophets of Baal and the four hundred prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table” (1 Kgs. 18:19). Again, the reference to Jezebel herself is made in passing, but the implications for her character are profound: Jezebel hosts prophets of Baal and Asherah while actively killing off prophets of YHWH. Still, though, the narrative does not turn to study Jezebel, watching instead the dramatic showdown between Elijah and the prophets of Baal. The drought, which has plagued the land for three years, will end in this confrontation; will Baal, rider of the clouds, show himself to be the true God, or is YHWH really in charge? The proof will not take the form of rain, but rather fire. The prophets of Baal have their chance to bring fire to the bull on their altar, but their efforts fail. Elijah—in a ritual that uses so much water that it surely made the droughtridden Israelites very nervous indeed—builds an altar and trench, prays to YHWH, and soon every part of the altar, from the bull to the water in the trench, is consumed with fire. In the wake of his victory, Elijah kills all the assembled prophets of Baal. Shortly thereafter, the rain begins. By slaughtering the prophets of Baal and thus answering Jezebel’s murders of the prophets of YHWH, Elijah shows that his zeal for his God is well matched to Jezebel’s own religious fervor. He also knows that she does not make empty threats. Upon hearing of Elijah’s deeds, Jezebel vows to kill him within a day, and he must again flee for his life—this time from Jezebel rather than Ahab. The replacement of Ahab with Jezebel as Elijah’s most terrible enemy looks forward to the story of Naboth’s vineyard (1  Kgs. 21:1–29), when Ahab withdraws from the exploitative privileges of his kingship, and Jezebel takes over in his stead.

Situated between Elijah’s defeat of the prophets of Baal and the story of Naboth’s vineyard is a bit of international intrigue. Elijah’s political involvement has escalated from reviving the dead son of a widow to slaughtering rival prophets to anointing kings both foreign and domestic. YHWH instructs Elijah to anoint Hazael king in Aram and Jehu king in Israel and to find a successor for himself in Elisha, thus bringing another central prophetic figure into the narrative. In the account of war between Israel and Aram that follows, Ahab successfully leads his army to defeat the Arameans, and prophets as well as YHWH himself seem to support Ahab’s campaign. Even so, the king of Israel receives a stinging rebuke from a prophet for allowing Ben-hadad the Aramean to live: “therefore your life shall be for his life, and your people for his people” (1  Kgs. 20:42). Ahab has received the rebuke of both prophet and narrator before, but here his lapse has not been idolatry, but rather failure to kill Ben-hadad, with whom he made a treaty in exchange for Ben-hadad’s life. In the wake of this rebuke, Ahab returns to Samaria “resentful and sullen,” an attitude that will resurface in the story of Naboth’s vineyard. The story of Naboth’s vineyard represents the convergence of monarchic modes of extraction with the narrative’s anti-Ahab and anti-Jezebel sentiments. Ahab wants to take over nearby Naboth’s vineyard for a vegetable garden convenient to the palace. Naboth refuses to sell or trade the vineyard because it is his ancestral inheritance. When Jezebel discovers Ahab pouting about Naboth’s vineyard, she mocks his unwillingness to exercise his powers of extraction, saying, “Do you now govern Israel?” (1  Kgs. 21:7a). She then arranges for Naboth to be stoned under false accusations of cursing God and king. When the deed is accomplished, she instructs Ahab to take possession of the vineyard, and he readily complies. For this act, Elijah returns to Samaria to confront Ahab, promising that his and Jezebel’s bodies will be eaten in the streets by dogs. This last blast of prophetic venom before the death of Ahab holds Ahab himself ultimately responsible for his seizure of Naboth’s vineyard, even though the agency in the seizure was almost entirely Jezebel’s. In this episode, the Deuteronomistic religious polemic has given way to a moral critique. Perhaps Jezebel’s foreignness, coupled with the extent of the brutality she has already demonstrated, makes her involvement

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almost a foregone conclusion. Ahab, though, has “sold [himself] to do what is evil in the sight of the Lord” (1 Kgs. 21:20). He has not only continuously worshiped idols, but he has now disrespected one of the pillars of the religio-ethical system of his land: the ancestral inheritance. Even Jeroboam did not stoop so low; for all the gravity of his sins, he also led Israelites out of enslavement by their own king. Ahab, both idolater and extractor, but without the favor of God that Solomon enjoyed, now represents the worst of all imperial worlds. He dies in battle with Aram, with dogs licking the blood that filled his chariot, just as Elijah had promised. Given that kingship has been so closely tied to masculinity earlier in Kings, it is reasonable to see a masculinization of Jezebel in the steady escalation of her power and influence as Ahab’s profile recedes. In the story of Naboth’s vineyard, one might say that Jezebel’s little finger is thicker than her husband’s loins (see discussion of 1 Kgs. 12:10 above). Though Jezebel is a mother—her sons Ahaziah and Jehoram will rule Israel in succession, and later her daughter Athaliah for a brief time—the Kings narrative does not engage that aspect of her identity beyond the remarks that Ahaziah “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, and walked in the way of his father and mother” (1  Kgs. 22:52), while Jehoram “did what was evil in the sight of the Lord, though not like his father and mother, for he removed the pillar of Baal that his father had made” (2 Kgs. 3:2). In all of its condemnatory language about Jezebel, the Kings narrative never comments on her sexuality. There is no indication that she was ever anything but faithful in her marriage to Ahab, and there is no language in the text that unambiguously points to promiscuity. There is one reference to “the many whoredoms and sorceries of your mother Jezebel” (2  Kgs. 9:22), but that language reads as a comment on religious practices—either the practice of cultic prostitution that may have accompanied the worship of some deities, or more likely as a metaphor for religious infidelity. That Jezebel has become associated in the popular imagination with harlotry or sexual indulgence is surely a comment on the images of women in the history of biblical interpretation or on assumptions about female power in our modern culture; the text does not make judgments about Jezebel’s sexuality.

Elisha and the House of Ahab (2 Kgs. 1–8) Second Kings begins at the death of Ahab and the accession of his son Ahaziah. The break between 1 and 2 Kings is purely a pragmatic move, to divide the longer narrative into more manageable chunks, so readers should regard the narrative as continuous, despite the separation of the books. As the fall of the northern kingdom creeps closer and closer, the narrative focuses more and more on international politics and the many wars swirling in the region. Elijah continues his prophecies against the house of Ahab by proclaiming to Ahaziah that he will not recover from his fall through the palace latticework. Ahaziah’s brother Jehoram (a.k.a. Joram), another son of Ahab and Jezebel, succeeds him. Elijah too needs a successor, and after Elijah is taken up into the heavens on chariots of fire, Elisha assumes his duties. Elisha’s prophetic abilities are confirmed by the “company of prophets” looking on from a distance. Elisha soon is confronted by the wife of one of these prophets. Her husband has died, she has been left with many debts, and one of her creditors is coming to enslave her children. In a miracle reminiscent of Elijah’s making the widow’s oil and meal last through the end of the drought, Elisha instructs the prophet’s wife—another widow—to fill multiple vessels from the same lone jar of oil, so that she may sell the oil and pay off her debts (2  Kgs. 4:1–7). The infinite multiplication of a finite food supply is a continuing theme of Elisha’s miracle stories (see also 2 Kgs. 4:38–41 and 42–44). In the face of a militaristic, extractive governmental establishment, the miracle-working men of God create a portrait of YHWH as a giver of fullness. Elisha’s next encounter is with a wealthy woman of Shunem, who with her husband has built a room onto their house so that Elisha may stay with them when he passes through their town. Elisha is grateful for her hospitality and wishes to do something to show his thanks. When he learns that she has no children and is not likely to conceive, he decides to give her a child—specifically a male child. The supposition that conception would be the gift a childless woman most desires reflects a cultural assumption prevalent throughout the Hebrew Bible. The Shunammite woman seems to have everything else, including money, power, and social standing; she even turns down a special word with the king or commander of the army,



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because she has no need of it. Yet the promise of a son seems to resonate as her deepest wish. Indeed, the woman replies to Elisha’s declaration with disbelief, as if she dared not hope such a thing could be true: “No, my lord, O man of God; do not deceive your servant” (2 Kgs. 4:16). Thus motherhood continues to be a role shared by almost all the women in Kings across class and ethnic distinctions. When the Shunammite woman’s child dies, Elisha brings him back to life in a manner very much like Elijah’s revival of the widow of Zarephath’s child, though in a slower-paced, much more meticulous narrative. The detailed account gives the fullest portrait of a female character anywhere in the book of Kings. She is married, but her husband is very passive in comparison to the woman’s forthright activity (see Camp). She proposes to set up Elisha’s guest room, and after her son dies in her lap, she saddles the donkey, rides to Elisha, and compels him to return with her to resuscitate the boy. This dramatic tale with its detailed dialogue reveals a woman who is selfreliant, pious, and a leader. In 2 Kings 5 the narrative introduces a young Israelite slave girl who serves the wife of Naaman, Aramean military commander. The girl is a spoil of war, a victim of one of the many wartime encounters between Israel and Aram. She suggests to Naaman’s wife that the “prophet in Samaria”—that is, Elisha—could cure Naaman of his leprosy. Naaman jumps at this suggestion, and after some resistance by both Elisha and Naaman, he is indeed cured. His cure leads to conversion, though with an “out” (2 Kgs. 5:18) when keeping his job requires acknowledging the god of Aram. The Israelite slave girl is, like so many characters in the narratives of Kings, an “agent” who functions to move the plot in a certain direction. For Naaman, an Aramean, to request an audience with Elisha, an Israelite prophet, he must somehow learn about Elisha’s efficacy. A slave taken during war is a practical choice for the narrative, since she would be an Israelite with close access to Naaman. No more mention is made of the girl after this scene; her character has served its purpose. Her identity as slave is unremarkable to the narrative, an everyday reality of the violence that helps realize the imperial dream. Elisha’s acts of prophecy, power, and zeal continue, intersecting with both Israelite citizens and the political elite, and with even more prominent references to international players.

A second siege of Samaria by King Ben-hadad of Aram (cf. 1 Kgs. 20) brings severe famine to the city, another consequence of the international military engagement that monarchy has brought. Elisha advises the king of Israel against the strategies of the king of Aram, such that the relationship between prophet and king is more cooperative here than in other prophetic accounts. The king of Israel is circling the city wall wearing sackcloth when he encounters a woman crying for help. The woman says that a second woman urged her to give up her son as food for them both the day before, promising that the next day they would eat the second woman’s own son. The first woman complied, and now she complains to the king that the second woman has hidden her son rather than give him up. The horror of this image of cannibalism— a taboo widespread across cultures—is compounded by the identity of eater and eaten as mother and son. The expectations in wise Solomon’s well-ordered world that mothers value their children’s lives above their own (1  Kgs. 3:16–28) have crumbled in the face of the chaos born of war (Camp). Moreover, the conditions are so severe that the notion of some social value gained through bearing children, especially male children, gives way to raw survival. As Walter Brueggemann writes, “She intends to survive, no matter what the cost may be. She is an unexpected witness ‘from below,’ a marginalized woman who attests to the deep cost of famine and war brought about by patriarchal power. Indeed, the makers of war rarely pay the costs of war regularly borne by the voiceless, surely the poor, always the mothers” (Brueggemann, 356). The Israelite king—unnamed here, as in most of the Elisha material, though the surrounding chronology points to Jehoram—is grieved to the point of rage. That he would blame Elisha for the famine is peculiar, as Benhadad’s siege is clearly identified as the cause of the famine. More than that, though, the king’s turn to Elisha has completely ignored the woman’s request. The king immediately sends a man to kill Elisha—who now, like his predecessor Elijah, is sought out for assassination by the king of Israel. In angry despair, the king enters on the heels of the messenger, exclaiming, “This trouble is from the Lord! Why should I hope in the Lord any longer?” (2 Kgs. 6:33). Elisha promises that the price of food will drop by

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its exorbitant rates to a mere shekel in just one day; in other words, the famine caused by the Aramean siege will soon be at an end. Four leprous men—more outsiders of low social standing—contemplate defecting to the Arameans in hopes of being fed, figuring the worst that can happen is that they will die, which is what they know will happen to them if they stay and starve to death. When they arrive at the camp, they discover that it is deserted. After plundering the camp on their own for awhile, the men decide to report the matter, and the Arameans’ food is made available to the people. Again the king has been associated with war and want, while the prophet of YHWH is purveyor of plenty. Second Kings 8 brings another encounter between Elisha and the Shunammite woman. Elisha warns her of an impending seven-year famine, so she and her household go to Philistia until the famine ends. When she returns, she must appeal to the king for her house and land, and the implication of the narrative is that the king has confiscated it in her absence. Imperial extraction is at work again, and again the prophet provides recourse out of that cycle. Having once turned down the offer of Elisha’s word with the king (2 Kgs. 4:13), the Shunammite woman now finds herself in need, and she takes full advantage of her relationship with Elisha to win her appeal. She, her son, and Elisha’s assistant Gehazi all testify to Elisha’s wonders, and the king restores her land and all seven years’ worth of revenue from it. Amid scarcity wrought by the monarchy, the man of God is a source of plenty. Returning more prominently than ever to a role in international politics, Elisha travels to Damascus, where the ill King Ben-hadad sends Hazael to ask the man of God if he will recover from his illness. Elisha tells Hazael to lie to Ben-hadad, knowing that he will not recover and that Hazael will become king in Aram. This prophecy moves Elisha to tears as he foresees the havoc the new Aramean king will wreak in Israel. This emotive account of the emotionally wrought prophet, one of the last stories involving Elisha, makes a fitting transition from the collection of prophetic tales into the wars and political intrigue of the rest of the Deuteronomistic History. The prophetic promises of a world of plenty grounded in Yawhistic faithfulness give way to the machinations of the imperial system. If the narrator has guaranteed God’s judgment on Israel and Judah throughout DH,

then with Elisha’s tears the stories constituting the narrative itself now have yielded to that inevitability. Jehu’s Coup and the Death of Jezebel (2 Kgs. 9–11) After an extended foray into prophetic tales, the narrative returns its primary focus to the monarchy and its machinations. Two kings of Judah, Jehoram and Ahaziah, receive negative evaluations in the narrative and are linked with the Omride dynasty of the northern kingdom. Jehoram is married to Athaliah, who is likely the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel. Ahaziah, son of Jehoram and Athaliah, eventually succeeds him. After such an extended look at the evils of the northern kingdom, this familial crossover of the Omrides into Judah cannot bode well for the south. At this point Elisha makes his penultimate appearance in the narrative. He sends a young prophet to anoint Jehu, son of the southern king, Jehoshaphat, as ruler over the northern kingdom of Israel, unseating the Omride dynasty there. The proclamation of this anonymous prophet includes the cutting off of the house of Ahab and the ignominious end of Jezebel: “The dogs shall eat Jezebel in the territory of Jezreel, and no one shall bury her” (2 Kgs. 9:10). Jehu kills Joram and Ahaziah at Naboth’s vineyard, where the allied kings of Israel and Judah are gathered, thus fulfilling (albeit indirectly) Elijah’s prophecy that “in the place where dogs licked up the blood of Naboth, dogs will also lick up your blood” (1  Kgs. 21:19). He then rides on into Jezreel, where, in preparation for his arrival, Jezebel has “painted her eyes, adorned her head, and looked out of the window” (2  Kgs. 9:30). The image of painted eyes and adorned head might lead interpreters to think Jezebel plans to attempt to seduce her way out of her predicament, or that her vanity distracts her from understanding the danger she is in. On the contrary, Jezebel’s dialogue with Jehu shows that she is acutely aware of the future before her. She asks if he comes in peace, but the question drips with sarcasm, for she addresses him as “Zimri, murderer of your master.” Zimri had killed King Elah of Israel, but that assassination resulted in only one week of kingship for Zimri (1  Kgs. 16:8–20). Jehu wastes no time, calling up to any supporters who may be in Jezebel’s house. At Jehu’s prompting, eunuchs in Jezebel’s service throw her down from the



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window. The narrative’s description is graphic, reveling in the gore of the scene: blood on the wall, blood on the horses, Jezebel’s broken body under trampling hooves. Jehu sits down for a meal and as an afterthought sends to have Jezebel buried, “for she is a king’s daughter” (2 Kgs. 9:34). “But when they went to bury her, they found no more of her than the skull and the feet and the palms of her hands” (2 Kgs. 9:35). As Elijah promised, Jezebel’s body has been eaten by dogs until it is beyond recognition. This scene marks the ultimate triumph of the anti-Jezebel vitriol that has permeated the book of Kings, a release of violent rage not simply by the eunuchs or Jehu, but by the narrative itself. It is as if, by her evisceration, her mutilation, the erasure of her very face, the Deuteronomists could erase the apostasies Jezebel represents from the unfolding history of the fall of Israel and Judah. Yet the idolatry, like the memory of Jezebel herself, persists. Jehu continues his purgation of the house of Ahab, slaughtering all the remaining family and friends he can find. He then sets his sights on the prophets, priests, and worshipers of Baal, gathering them together under false pretenses and then murdering them as they worship (2  Kgs. 10:18–27). Despite his zeal for cleansing Israel of Baal-worshipers, he still cannot manage to let go of the sin of Jeroboam, so he worships the golden calves at Dan and Bethel. Syria—led by the hand of God, according to the Deuteronomistic perspective—begins to take territory away from Israel, bit by bit (2  Kgs. 10:32–33). In the midst of all the kings of Israel and Judah is one lone queen, though the narrative does not acknowledge her with that title. Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel and Ahab, mother of Ahaziah, and wife of Jehoram of Judah, reigns for six years after Ahaziah’s death. She who has lived through the violent deaths of her parents and son seizes the throne by attempting to murder all the possible Judean heirs, just as Jehu has done to Israel. Yet one heir survives: Jehoash (a.k.a. Joash), son of Ahaziah, is hidden by his aunt Jehosheba, sister of Ahaziah, in the temple until he is seven years old. At that point the priest Jehoiada arranges for Jehoash’s coronation and Athaliah’s execution. The daughter of Jezebel, whose mother was trampled into an unrecognizable skull, palms, and feet by horses, is dragged through the horses’ entrance to the king’s house and killed (2 Kgs. 11:16).

The End of the Northern Kingdom (2 Kgs. 12–17) This section of 2 Kings returns to the pattern of loosely alternating accounts of Israelite and Judean kings. Both monarchies repeatedly botch the same old tasks: the southern kings fail to remove the high places from the land, and the northern kings continue to walk in the sins of Jeroboam. The military landscape becomes more and more dire, as both Aram and Assyria press Israel and Judah for alliances and tribute. Israel and Aram, allied, attack Jerusalem to try to force Judah into an anti-Assyrian coalition (2 Kgs. 16). This Syro-Ephraimite war weakens all involved, though Israel continues to rebel against Assyria. After King Hoshea withholds tribute one last time (2  Kgs. 17:3–4), Assyria lays siege to Israel, destroying it in 722 BCE. The Deuteronomistic voice, which is attempting in this historical retelling to provide a theological understanding of these events, sums up its dominant theology at 2 Kings 17:7: “This occurred because the people of Israel had sinned against the Lord their God, who had brought them up out of the land of Egypt from under the hand of Pharaoh king of Egypt.” The passage goes on to specify those sins, which involve idolatry, high places, ignoring covenant law, and ignoring the prophets (2 Kgs. 17:7–18). In what is surely a later addition, the text goes on to say that the fall of Israel is simply a foreshadowing of Judah’s fate: “The Lord rejected all the descendants of Israel; he punished them and gave them into the hand of plunderers, until he had banished them from his presence” (2 Kgs. 17:20).

The End of Judah (2 Kgs. 18–25) Hezekiah and the Siege of Jerusalem (2 Kgs. 18–20) This final section of the book of Kings begins with praises for Hezekiah, king of Judah, who has instituted religious reforms crucial in the Deuteronomists’ eyes, including finally removing the “high places” from the land. He also “cut down the sacred pole” from the temple, that is, removed the cultic object of the goddess Asherah, who was probably being worshiped alongside YHWH as his consort. In the meantime, Assyria has taken Samaria and now has its sights set on Jerusalem, laying siege to it in 701 BCE. The Rabshakeh, an Assyrian official, comes to Jerusalem to taunt the people and their king,

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using Hezekiah’s religious reforms to incite fear: “But if you say to me, ‘We rely on the Lord our God,’ is it not he whose high places and altars Hezekiah has removed, saying to Judah and to Jerusalem, ‘You shall worship before this altar in Jerusalem’?” (2 Kgs. 18:22). The implication is that Hezekiah’s reforms have distanced the people from their worship of YHWH, rather than fulfilling what YHWH wishes. The Rabshakeh goes on to claim that YHWH told him to destroy Judah (2 Kgs. 18:25). While God’s hand in military conquest is one of the primary theses DH wants its readers to affirm, here the Rabshakeh’s words beg incredulity, given the steps Hezekiah has taken to keep apostasy at bay. In the face of this crisis and the goading propaganda being disseminated by the Rabshakeh, Hezekiah turns to the prophet Isaiah. In his prophecy concerning King Sennacherib of Assyria, Isaiah uses metaphors of Jerusalem as “daughter” and “virgin daughter” (2  Kgs. 19:21). Though the metaphorical rendering of Jerusalem as girl or woman can be highly problematic in the prophetic literature, fraught with images of sexual violence (e.g., Ezek. 16; 23; Hos. 2), here the metaphor functions as a term of endearment. God declares through Isaiah that Sennacherib’s siege of Jerusalem will not succeed, and that prophecy holds true; Judah survives for more than a century more. Even so, Isaiah delivers an ominous word to Hezekiah after visitors from Babylon come and see all that the king of Judah has in his storehouses. Isaiah declares that all the riches of Judah will be taken up to Babylon, along with some of Hezekiah’s own sons. The Babylonian exile is now intractably on the narrative’s horizon. Manasseh (2 Kgs. 21) In the eyes of the Deuteronomists, Manasseh is the most reviled of all the Judean kings. All the religious reforms his father Hezekiah instituted, Manasseh immediately undid, with more and varied apostasies besides. Baal and Asherah are back in full force. His offenses are moral as well as religious: “Moreover Manasseh shed very much innocent blood, until he had filled Jerusalem from one end to another, besides the sin that he caused Judah to sin so that they did what was evil in the sight of the Lord” (2 Kgs. 21:16). His son Amon is no better (2  Kgs. 21:21–22). God thus promises the destruction of Jerusalem with a remarkable domestic metaphor: “I will wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish,

wiping it and turning it upside down” (2  Kgs. 21:13b). The exile creeps closer. Josiah (2 Kgs. 22–23) Upon the assassination of Amon, eightyear-old Josiah is made king. In the narrative’s presentation, Josiah is as extraordinarily good as Manassseh is extraordinarily bad. He walks in the ways of King David without any of the exceptions by which earlier kings are marked (e.g., Amaziah son of Joash, who “did what was right in the sight of the Lord, yet not like his ancestor David” [2 Kgs. 14:3]). In the process of making repairs to the temple, the high priest Hilkiah finds “the book of the law in the house of the Lord” (2 Kgs. 22:8). Perhaps historically, but certainly in the narrative imagination, this book is some form of the law code of Deuteronomy. Josiah’s secretary Shaphan reads the book to Josiah, who is so convicted by its contents that he tears his clothes and sends an envoy to “inquire of the Lord.” The group makes this inquiry to Huldah, a prophet. Huldah presents a glimpse of another social role for women. Though the text mentions her husband’s work, Huldah is clearly a prophet in her own right. She does not, however, appear to be directly associated with the temple cult, since her visitors must go out from the city center to meet her where she sits. This could indicate that she is a court prophet, consulted at her home. Diana Edelman raises the possibility that Huldah could have been a prophet of Asherah, that is, of the consort of YHWH at a shrine away from the city center, and that the Deuteronomistic editor who inserted her oracle either did not know this or purposefully obscured that fact. Either way, Huldah’s oracle stands authoritatively before Josiah. Huldah’s declaration of coming destruction for the people of Judah because they have failed to keep the law certainly proves to be true. Some readers have held that the second half of her prophecy, in which she tells Josiah that he “shall be gathered to your grave in peace” (2  Kgs. 22:20), is an incorrect or failed prophecy, since he dies in a confrontation with Pharaoh Neco (2  Kgs. 23:29). However, this phrase need not indicate manner of death as much as proper burial (Edelman, 240–41). The content of the prophecy moves Josiah to renew the covenant and to institute sweeping religious reforms, even more remarkable than those attempted by Hezekiah. He reinstitutes the celebration of



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the Passover, and he takes down all high places, alternate altars, and sacred poles. Yet in the wake of Huldah’s prophecy these remarkable changes do seem to be too little too late. This chapter gives all the blame to Manasseh (2 Kgs. 23:26), but the book of Kings has been rolling steadily toward Judah’s destruction since the death of David, with every apostasy and breach of morality by its leadership marking the way. The Fall of Jerusalem (2 Kgs. 24–25) The monarchy for which the people clamored in 1 Samuel 8, the monarchy that will take, take, take, take a tenth, take, take a tenth, is now itself taken away to Babylon. Every treasure of palace and temple is taken; every official, every warrior, every artisan, all but the poorest of the land have been carried away. While a brief epilogue to the book (2 Kgs. 25:27–30) celebrates the release of the Judean king Jehoiachin from prison to dine at the Babylonian king’s table, it is but little solace. There is hardly any sense in the book of Kings that Israel and Judah could ever not be destroyed. Despite its literary artistry and historical formulae, Kings is at its heart a theological declaration, looking backwards through a narrative history to answer why a chosen nation with an anointed kingship would have its capital destroyed, its temple razed, and its people sent out of the long-promised land into exile. Looking back from the Babylonian exile (or beyond) in a kind of pained nostalgia, the narrative longs for the wealth, glory, and national autonomy the united kingdom of Israel once enjoyed, especially in the “golden age” of Solomonic rule. The book wields its editorial power sharply, crafting nearly of all of its characters in ways that point to its monarchic focus and further its theological agenda. Readers are left more with literary types than a straightforwardly historical, social-scientific portrait of either women or men in ancient Israel and Judah. Foreign women receive a particularly damning critique as seductresses whose religious practices are ultimately at the heart of the demise of the kingdoms. The book of Kings often thus effaces individual female characters within the story; recounting the gory death of Jezebel, the narrative revels in her literal defacement, so that represented in the broken body of a foreign woman is everything the Deuteronomistic narrative hates about the past that has paved the way to its doomed future.

Despite its longing, the book of Kings is not altogether settled in its nostalgia. The book recounts a system of rule based on the extraction of resources, be they agricultural, monetary, or human, from the communities under its governance. That kind of system exploits the bodies of both women and men for service to kingdom. The narrative shows some resistance to this, especially in the accounts of Elijah and Elisha, whose miracles point to an alternate reality governed by God, in which giving and fullness rather than extraction and famine are the structures in place. Those portraits draw the narrative’s view away from the kings and toward the widowed, grieving, and destitute who suffer under the effects of their policies. The critique leveled by Kings, then, is ultimately not only about religious fidelity. A quieter but no less fervent thread assails imperial, patriarchal systems that yield only suffering. Bibliography

Berquist, Jon L. “Postcolonialism and Imperial Motives for Canonization.” In The Postcolonial Biblical Reader, edited by R. S. Sugirtharajah, 78–95. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Brueggemann, Walter. 1 & 2 Kings. Smyth & Helwys Bible Commentary. Macon, GA: Smith & Helwys, 2000. Camp, Claudia V. In Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, 102–16. Expanded edition. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. Edelman, Diana. “Huldah the Prophet—of Yahweh or Asherah?” In A Feminist Companion to Samuel and Kings, edited by Athalya Brenner, 231–50. The Feminist Companion to the Bible 5. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1994. Römer, Thomas. The So-Called Deuteronomistic History: A Sociological, Historical, and Literary Introduction. London: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Stone, Ken. “1 and 2 Kings.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache, 222–50. London: SCM, 2006. Sweeney, Marvin A. I and II Kings: A Commentary. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007.

Jezebel and Her Interpreters Josey Bridges Snyder

Jezebel is one of the few biblical characters treated almost uniformly negatively both in the biblical text and in the subsequent interpretive tradition. The daughter of a Phoenician king, Jezebel becomes queen over Israel through her marriage to Ahab (1  Kgs. 16:31). From this introduction, we know that the Deuteronomistic editor thinks poorly of Jezebel. The fact of her marriage is sandwiched between two negative statements: first, that King Ahab’s sins exceeded those of Jeroboam and, second, that Ahab served Baal. The biblical text does not indicate direct causality between Ahab’s taking Jezebel as a wife and his sinfulness or worship of Baal. Still, the proximity of the statements in 1 Kings 16:31 creates the association in the mind of the reader—an association strengthened by a later verse that does directly blame Jezebel for Ahab’s misdeeds (1 Kgs. 21:25). While never the center of the story, Jezebel appears numerous times in the narrative of 1 and 2 Kings. She kills the prophets of YHWH (1  Kgs. 18:4, 13); provides sustenance to the prophets of Baal and Asherah (1  Kgs. 18:19); threatens revenge against Elijah after the episode at Mount Carmel (1 Kgs. 19:1–2); orchestrates the murder of Naboth in order to obtain his field for her husband (1 Kgs. 21:5–15); and boldly meets her death with painted face and freshly done hair (2  Kgs. 9:30–37). From the viewpoint of the Deuteronomist, everything Jezebel does is sinful, and she fully deserves the gruesome death predicted by Elijah (1 Kgs. 21:23) and Elisha (2  Kgs. 9:7–10). Moreover, while we have no indication in the text that Jezebel’s misdeeds include sexual exploits, Jehu, YHWH’s chosen usurper, accuses Jezebel of “whoredoms and sorceries” (2  Kgs. 9:22). Whether Jehu intends to insinuate sexual looseness or, more likely, religious infidelity (i.e., worship of multiple deities) is not clear. After her death, Jezebel is neither mourned nor buried, and the text never speaks of her again. And yet her character is not silenced. Her influence, perhaps greater than any other

woman’s in the course of Israelite political history, continues to live on (for better or worse!) in the course of interpretive history. In the New Testament canon, Jezebel’s name appears once, as a rhetorical device to discredit another powerful woman in the church of Thyatira who is charged with proclaiming herself a prophet and leading others to fornication and idolatry (Rev. 2:20). While none of the Thyatira woman’s deeds overlap with those attributed to Jezebel in Kings, this invocation of Jezebel’s name evidences an early example of associating her with a growing array of sinful behaviors, including fornication. In the Talmud, where we find the warning “he who follows his wife’s counsel will descend into Gehenna” (b. Bava Metzi’a 59a), Jezebel is again depicted as a sinful and troublesome woman. Interpreting the biblical verse about the prostitutes who bathe themselves in Ahab’s blood after he dies in battle (1 Kgs. 22:38), the Talmud narrates that Jezebel painted images of harlots on Ahab’s chariot in order to arouse him sexually, those painted harlots being the ones “bathed” by Ahab’s blood when he was mortally wounded in battle (b. Sanhedrin 39b). The implication, of course, is that Jezebel was an exceptionally sexual woman, possibly so much so that Ahab struggled to keep up with her. Perhaps drawing on Jehu’s accusation of Jezebel’s “whoredoms,” the legend may also intend to imply that Jezebel both expected and approved of extramarital affairs. Early Christian interpreters likewise amplify Jezebel’s sins and paint her in a wholly negative light. Ephrem the Syrian (306–73 CE), who refers to Jezebel as “the insane woman” and “the mad queen,” claims Jezebel made her husband and children her slaves and thus holds her responsible for the sins of the entire family. When Jezebel’s son, Ahaziah, inquires of the god of Ekron and subsequently dies for his apostasy (2 Kgs. 1:1–17), Ephrem blames Jezebel (despite the fact that she nowhere appears in the story), claiming Ahaziah acted on her

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advice (On the Second Book of Kings 1.1). Moreover, adding to the growing depictions of Jezebel as a lascivious woman, Ephrem interprets Jezebel’s adorning herself in her final scene as a fleeting attempt to seduce Jehu into taking her as his wife before the sight of him ignites her rage and she resorts to taunting him instead (On the Second Book of Kings 9.30). Clearly, for Ephrem, Jezebel is a dangerous woman, always acting in sin and striving to lead astray the men who surround her. Others take pains to depict Jezebel as wholly negative, so as to be a foil for Elijah, who is then viewed as wholly positive. Even though both Jezebel and Elijah murder hundreds of prophets, Augustine (354–430 CE) distinguishes between these acts, condemning Jezebel and vindicating Elijah, since Elijah murdered false prophets, while Jezebel murdered prophets of YHWH. Thus, Augustine concludes, “I think there was a difference in merit between the doers as between the victims” (Letter to Vincent 93.6).

Along similar lines, several Christian interpreters exhibit discomfort with the notion that Jezebel may have had influence—or, worse, victory—over Elijah when her threat caused him to flee. To deal with this difficulty, Ephrem insists that the death Elijah hopes for is not the same as the death Jezebel had threatened two verses earlier, since such might indicate a victory of Baal over YHWH (On the First Book of Kings 19.4). Likewise, Ambrose (333–97 CE) clarifies that Elijah did not flee from a woman (i.e., Jezebel), but from the world enmeshed with sin (Flight from the World 6.34). Five centuries later, Isho’dad of Merv is still concerned about Elijah’s flight from Jezebel, particularly in conjunction with his earlier complete lack of fear of Ahab. To resolve the apparent discrepancy, he determines that it was not Jezebel’s influence, but Elijah’s momentary lapse of faith, that caused him to succumb to fear and flee (Books of Sessions I Kings 19.2). In these examples, it seems the interpreters are equally troubled that Elijah

Jezebel is thrown to the ground among the dogs and horses that play roles in her gory demise, in Death of Jezebel, an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883), which was published in The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version (London: Cassell, 1866).

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might have fled from a woman as from a devotee to a foreign god, preferring any explanation other than that this woman, Jezebel, might have caused Elijah to stray. Negative portrayals of Jezebel increase exponentially when we consider her appearance in literature—poems, plays, novels, and movies—up through the modern era. As Janet Howe Gaines observes in her detailed analysis of many of these cultural artifacts, “[Jezebel’s] name serves as a sort of shorthand, a quick and efficient allusion to sinfulness” (Gaines, 147). Even when the Jezebels in literature do not intend to portray the “real” Jezebel from biblical tradition, the use of the name Jezebel creates a connection with the biblical character (at least in the mind of the reader) that is not easily broken or erased. The most-remembered Hollywood image of Jezebel is probably that of Bette Davis, who plays a willful and ruinously selfish Southern belle named Julie Marsden in the 1938 film Jezebel. Like the biblical Jezebel, Julie Marsden is always scheming, and though her schemes in the movie tend to fail, we get the impression that Julie is accustomed to getting what she wants. Aside from the title, the name “Jezebel” is evoked only once. After one of Julie’s selfish schemes turns deadly for a family friend, her aunt solemnly remarks, “I’m thinking of a woman called Jezebel who did evil in the sight of God.” At times, Bette Davis’s character seems too fickle and immature to carry the memory of the biblical Jezebel. In fact, when she loses her fiancé and locks herself, pouting, in her house, her actions are more reminiscent of Ahab’s sulking when he fails to purchase Naboth’s vineyard. Yet something of Julie Marsden’s resolve to follow her aims regardless of what others think— and perhaps too her courage in greeting death unafraid in the film’s final scene—does evoke the biblical character. Indeed, it is refreshing to see at least one example of allusion to Jezebel that focuses less on a woman’s sexual allure and more on her attempts to wield power. Turning to an earlier example, an eleventhcentury Norman poem titled “Jezebel” features a quick-tongued, irreverent female in a question-and-answer debate with an unidentified inquisitor. Her answers to the series of questions range from irreverent to shocking, continually depicting her as a woman who relishes sexual promiscuity and licentiousness. Though the only clear connection with the biblical character is the name, some have read this poem as

a debate between the biblical Jezebel and her nemesis, Elijah. Yet, even without making such a direct identification, it is not possible to read this poem without bringing to mind the biblical Jezebel. Moreover, once one is familiar with the poem—particularly due to its spicy language and vivid imagery—it is no longer possible to read the story of the biblical Jezebel without this “acid-tongued vixen” (Gaines, 152) also coming to mind. Haldane MacFall’s 1898 novel The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer draws on the reader’s memory of the biblical Jezebel to create the character of a black Caribbean woman who goes by the same name. Here again, it is not Jezebel’s political savvy or ambition that is remembered, but her supposed loose sexuality. MacFall—a white British author who lived in Jamaica for a time while serving in the military—places the following words in his main character’s mouth: “I has always been loose in me affections, honey, always, dat a fact—just de same like dat dar Jezebel in Holy Writ” (MacFall, 53). Here we see not only a (mis?)representation of the biblical Jezebel as sexually uninhibited, but the use of that stereotype to paint a black woman as similarly promiscuous. Such characterization is neither happenstance nor benign. As Patricia Hill Collins informs, images of black women Jezebels originated under slavery and have been an integral part of the oppression and control of black womanhood and, in particular, black women’s sexuality ever since (Collins, 81). Faced with such a stark reality, the potential benefits of reclaiming Jezebel as a positive female character—or at least as the politically bold and independent woman depicted in the biblical text—become ever clearer. Indeed, even in the historical interpretive tradition, such positive images of Jezebel exist. For example, some have suggested that Psalm 45, a royal wedding psalm, may have been written to celebrate Jezebel’s marriage to Ahab. While there is no clear criterion to prove the claim, the simple association of this psalm with Jezebel opens the possibility of interpreting Jezebel positively. In the psalm, the coming queen is greeted with enthusiasm and anticipation, with no hint of the difficulties in Jezebel’s reign to come. Of course, if the psalm does speak of Jezebel, the queen does not follow the psalmist’s advice to “forget your people and your father’s house” (Ps. 45:10 [Heb. 45:11]).



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Jewish interpretive tradition also offers an early example of interpreting Jezebel positively. Wondering why Jezebel’s hands, feet, and skull were neither trampled by the horses nor consumed by the dogs, Jewish tradition offers that these body parts were left unscathed because they were the portions of her body that she had used for good. As the tradition goes, Jezebel was an empathetic queen who would often join in the rejoicing or the mourning of wedding and funeral processions that passed by her palace (Pirke Rabbi Eliezer 17). Thus, even if the underlying implication is that Jezebel had never used any other body part toward a worthy end, we at least have one positive character trait associated with this oft-despised woman. In more recent material, we find several examples of those who wish to reclaim this hated queen from her history of interpretation—and, in some cases, even from her portrayal in the biblical text itself. Lafayette McLaws’s 1902 novel Jezebel: A Romance in the Days When Ahab Was King of Israel depicts a queen who is sympathetic to her husband’s religion and cares deeply for the welfare of the people of Israel. At the novel’s end, McLaws’s Jezebel even converts to monotheistic worship of YHWH. Thus, while McLaws certainly depicts Jezebel differently from the Deuteronomist, she accepts his premise: a good person means a good Yahwist. More recently still, two new publications— Eleanor Ferris Beach’s The Jezebel Letters and Lesley Hazelton’s Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen—have sought to reread the biblical material and reclaim Jezebel on her own terms, retelling the story from her perspective. Though they differ in their approach and execution, both books share a distrust of the biblical bias against Jezebel and seek to recover the “true” story of the Israelite queen. For both, Jezebel is primarily a strong political leader, ruthless perhaps, but no more so than other monarchs of her day. Though both books are at times overly confident in their historical claims, the images of Jezebel they portray are compelling, particularly because they allow her to be complex, hiding neither her virtues nor her faults. For these authors, Jezebel was not just the evil woman who led her husband astray. She was a woman torn between two worlds: Phoenician and Israelite. Loyalty to the gods of her ancestors conflicted with loyalty to her husband and his chosen deity. And, as both

of these authors point out, if the story were told from a Phoenician perspective, Jezebel’s character would be portrayed quite differently. So who was the real Jezebel? It is up to each reader to decide, but we cannot pretend the choice we make is an insignificant one. The biblical Jezebel challenges us. In her duel with Elijah, we are forced to take sides: male or female; YHWH or Baal; one deity or many; religious intolerance or tolerance. The Deuteronomist has chosen the former in each case, and the interpretive tradition has often done the same, but are we limited by this tradition? Even more, are we confined by the dichotomy it suggests? Can we reclaim Jezebel without demonizing Elijah? Can we celebrate the female without denigrating the male? Can we reject intolerance without becoming intolerant ourselves? Attending to Jezebel’s story and tradition raises more questions than it answers. Yet it also opens up new possibilities for reading and understanding. As this never-buried woman continues to live on in our memories and in the interpretive tradition—and as new traditions continue to arise—we are invited to return to her story, to read between the lines, and to listen for her voice speaking across the generations. Bibliography

Beach, Eleanor Ferris. The Jezebel Letters: Religion and Politics in Ninth-Century Israel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Collins, Patricia Hill. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2000. Gaines, Janet Howe. Music in the Old Bones: Jezebel through the Ages. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999. Hazelton, Lesley. Jezebel: The Untold Story of the Bible’s Harlot Queen. New York: Doubleday, 2007. Pippin, Tina. “Jezebel Re-vamped.” Semeia 69–70 (1995): 221–33. Trible, Phyllis. “Exegesis for Storytellers and Other Strangers.” Journal of Biblical Literature 114 (1995): 3–14. Ziolkowski, Jan M. Jezebel: A Norman Latin Poem of the Early Eleventh Century. Humana Civilitas 10. New York: Peter Lang, 1989.

1 and 2 Chronicles Christine Mitchell

Introduction First and Second Chronicles, known as Divre Hayyamim (The Annals) in Hebrew and as Paraleipomena (Things Omitted) in Greek, is found in all the canons of the Hebrew Bible. Its English name derives from the Vulgate’s Chronica. In the Jewish Tanakh it is one book, usually located at the end of the third division of the canon, Kethuvim (Writings), thus usually the final book of the canon. In the Christian Old Testament it is two books, located in the midst of the historical books, after 1–2 Kings and before Ezra, and thus in the middle of the canon. By immediately following 1–2 Samuel and 1–2 Kings, and being a repetition of much of their content, 1–2 Chronicles is often overlooked or assimilated to the previous books. In the Tanakh, the final Hebrew word, vaya‘al (“let him go up”), is a word of hope oriented toward the future, leaving the possibility of restoration unfulfilled. The Christian Old Testament uses that ending to make the transition to Ezra (which begins with the same sentence), which continues the story. First Chronicles may be divided into genealogies (1 Chr. 1–9) and the reign of David (1 Chr. 10–29). Second Chronicles may be divided into the reign of Solomon (2 Chr. 1–9) and the reigns of the kings of Judah from the death of Solomon to the Babylonian exile, ending with the decree of Cyrus restoring the Judahites to Jerusalem (2  Chr. 10–36). The building of the temple in Jerusalem by Solomon occupies the center of the combined book of 1–2 Chronicles (2  Chr. 3–9). Within the largely narrative portions of 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 36 there are lists, psalms, and speeches placed at key points.

Almost all of Chronicles has some parallel with another biblical text. The genealogies parallel texts from Genesis, Numbers, and Joshua. The story of David parallels 1 Samuel 31–1 Kings 1. The story of Solomon parallels 1 Kings 2–11, while the story of the remaining kings of Judah parallels 1 Kings 13–2 Kings 26. David’s psalm in 1 Chronicles 16 uses Psalms 96, 105, and 106. Yet Chronicles does not slavishly follow its source texts. It omits the stories of Samuel, Saul, and David’s rise (1  Sam. 1–30), the stories of Elijah and Elisha (1  Kgs. 17–2 Kgs. 6), and almost all the stories about the kings of the northern kingdom of Israel that follow from Solomon’s death (1  Kgs. 12 and following). Above all, Chronicles is concerned with the Davidic line of kings, Jerusalem and its temple, the Levites who serve in the temple, and the definition of “all Israel” as being those who worship God in the Jerusalem temple, whether their origin is Judahite (southern kingdom) or Israelite (northern kingdom). Theologically, the God of Chronicles is a rather remote, all-powerful deity, who punishes the wicked kings and rewards the faithful kings within their lifetimes (the doctrine of immediate retribution). The blame for the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile lies with the final king, Zedekiah. The ritual impurity and pollution accumulated within the land of Judah over the centuries is removed by the land remaining empty, fulfilling its Sabbaths (2 Chr. 36:21). Chronicles deftly combines the theodicy in Kings with the Sabbath and purity laws of Leviticus in its formulation of the reason for the exile.

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There is a general consensus among scholars that Chronicles was written in the fifth to fourth centuries BCE, the latter part of the Persian period, and probably before the widespread Hellenization of Judea following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the late fourth century. Scholars call the anonymous author the Chronicler; Jewish and Christian tradition has held that Ezra was the author. In the twentieth century, many scholars considered that the author of Chronicles was also the author of Ezra and Nehemiah; this hypothesis has been largely discarded. That Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah are all written in the same form of Hebrew (known as late biblical Hebrew) is largely agreed upon. However, the individual styles and vocabulary of Chronicles and Ezra– Nehemiah suggest different authors. The historical conditions of the fifth and fourth centuries in Yehud (the Persian province corresponding roughly to the former kingdom of Judah) are not well understood. The written evidence outside of Ezra–Nehemiah is scarce. Scholars rely on Greek sources such as Herodotus for the history of the Persian Empire, as very few Persian inscriptions or narrative texts from within the empire exist. Nevertheless, we can say that during the second half of the Persian period, Yehud was a relatively small, out-of-the-way province. The Chronicler was likely a Jerusalem temple official/scribe, perhaps a ­Levite, writing in an impoverished and neglected province of the vast Persian Empire. He does not seem to have had access to any texts outside of those that have come to us as part of the Hebrew Bible. He wrote in a form of Hebrew that was not the classical Hebrew of his sources, perhaps because his Hebrew imitated the spoken Hebrew of his time or because he saw classical Hebrew as the language of the golden age long past.

Women in Chronicles/Women as Readers of Chronicles Chronicles does not seem at first glance to be a book that might hold interest for women. There are very few women in the text; many of the women we find in Samuel or Kings appear in stories that Chronicles does not tell. As Roland Boer has noted, “Chronicles reminds me a little of East Sydney: men as far as the eye can see. . . . And if East Sydney was one of the first gay ghettos in the city, Chronicles is one of the first

men-only utopias. . . . [A] feminist criticism is that this male-only world relies on the silencing of women” (Boer, 251). Overwhelmingly, the most obvious characterization of the women who do appear in Chronicles is as mothers. Women appear often in the genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9 as the mothers of certain children (almost entirely male children). The most frequent mention of women in 1 Chronicles 10–2 Chronicles 36 is also as mothers: the usual formula at the beginning of each king’s reign notes the name of the king’s mother. There has been very little feminist scholarship on Chronicles: the only book-length work is Julie Kelso’s O Mother, Where Art Thou? While one of the dominant figures of Chronicles scholarship of the past forty years, Sara Japhet, is a woman, her work has not engaged with feminist discussions. What can we do for a reading of Chronicles that would be of interest to women? Cataloguing the occurrences of women would be tedious and short. Instead, I propose to read through the lens of gender performance. Originating in Judith Butler’s groundbreaking work Gender Trouble, the concept that gender may be analyzed as a performance, beyond a simple construct, has been used profitably in literary analysis. Since Chronicles is such a relentlessly textual book, drawing explicitly on previous texts and using many more texts than it explicitly cites, looking at how gender is performed in some other biblical texts may be of some use. In Isaiah and other prophetic texts, as Cynthia Chapman has shown, gender is performed in the deployment of imagery that links defeated enemies with women. YHWH is depicted as performing masculinity in his treatment of his daughter/wife Jerusalem. Extrapolating from this analysis of prophetic texts to the textworlds of the Hebrew Bible more generally, we may hypothesize that femininity is performed by not performing as a man. As a negative formulation this may be unsatisfactory for the reader of this commentary. As a positive formulation, we may hypothesize that performing femininity in ancient Israel and Yehud involves performing maternity and submission. What place is there for procreation? Women give birth—the biological fact. But this biological fact becomes part of a contested stage of performance. I shall argue that Chronicles attempts to depict procreation as a masculine performance, while attempting to efface the

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biological fact of procreation as a woman’s prerogative. Roland Boer’s essay in The Queer Bible Commentary offers one way into an analysis of the male-only world of Chronicles. I offer another. We both use Julie Kelso’s work as foundational; we both seek a liberational reading, and while Boer undoes the male utopia by showing its fundamental campiness, I hold out less hope that the male utopia can be undone. Readers

of this commentary hoping for a hermeneutics of recuperation will not find it. Chronicles is concerned with cleanness and simplicity (as in the doctrine of immediate reward/retribution). Often described as “inclusive” of foreigners, as having a “pan-Israel” theology, this text is actually highly exclusive: it overwrites, effaces, and erases women. This tendency toward describing that which excludes as “inclusive” is just as strong today. Chronicles teaches us how to see it.

Comment Genealogies: The Birthing Father (1 Chr. 1–9) Surely 1 Chronicles 1 is the most masculine chapter in the entire Hebrew Bible. Beginning with Adam, a genealogy of sons traces the male line to Esau and Jacob, concluding with a genealogy of the kings of Edom. As Julie Kelso points out, all this procreation happens without women and, more importantly, using the verb yalad, “he gave birth/he bore.” The men bear other men. The more usual form of the verb used of men is holid, “he caused to bear=he begot,” which does not require a named feminine partner but implies one. Compare Genesis 11:12–13 (“Arpachshad was alive for thirty-five years when he caused to bear [wayoled] Shelah. After his causing to bear [holido] of Shelah”) with 1 Chronicles 1:18 (“And Arpachshad bore [yalad] Shelah” [all translations mine]). The first woman to enter the text is Keturah, Abraham’s pilegesh (secondary wife), who bears (yaledah) sons (1  Chr. 1:32). These sons are then explicitly named as “the sons of Keturah” (1 Chr. 1:33). This maternal line is not the line of Israel. A woman performs maternity, and her children are outside the people. The most extensive genealogies in 1 Chronicles 1–9 are those of Judah, including David and the Judahite kings (1  Chr. 2:3–4:23), Levi (1 Chr. 5:27–6:66 [ET 6:1–81]), and Benjamin (1 Chr. 7:6–11; 8:1–40; 9:35–43). The Judahites, Benjaminites, and priest-Levites who (re)settled after “Judah was exiled to Babylon” (1 Chr. 9:1) are briefly described in 1 Chronicles 9:1– 34, with the bulk of the description going to the Levites. While the genealogies of both Judah and Benjamin include women—although in a complicated manner—the genealogy of Levi

includes only one woman: Miriam, the sister of Moses, who is never associated with maternity. Priests follow, in a long line of masculine procreation using the verb holid: priests cause—someone—to bear, but the mothers are all effaced and silenced. In a fantasy of masculine performativity, men replicate themselves, bypassing their women altogether. The mother of Jabez and her son are the only two speaking figures of 1 Chronicles 1–9. She speaks in 1 Chronicles 4:9, but she is not named. Her speech is to name her son Jabez (ya‘bets), “because I bore him in pain [‘otseb].” A woman who voices the performative act of maternity names it as pain and is herself left unnamed. Jabez’s father is not clearly named— Jabez “dangles.” Julie Kelso argues that Jabez’s speech, his prayer to God (1  Chr. 4:10), is a calling upon the surrogate father to negate the mother’s expression of authority through her act of naming. To extend this reading, by calling on God to perform the father’s role, Jabez seeks to undo the expression of the mother’s performance of maternity. It cannot be coincidence that the speech of the mother is immediately overspoken. We might take the acts of Jabez’s mother and Jabez as typological for the entire book of Chronicles. As the woman performs femininity through the ultimate performative act of birth and naming, the man immediately acts to perform his masculinity. The performance of masculinity requires that all creative acts (speech acts, naming acts, procreative acts) be appropriated. The allusion in 1 Chronicles 4:9 to Genesis 3:16—YHWH’s punishment of Eve, “in pain you shall bear sons”—also invites us to consider its continuation: “and/but for your man shall be your desire, and he shall rule over you.”



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Jabez’s mother, who performs maternity, does not desire any man, so Jabez takes her place and performs maternal desire for God, his man, at the same time as he rules over her speech.

David: The Begetter (1 Chr. 10–29) The second major portion of Chronicles is the story of David in 1 Chronicles 10–29. The story does not begin with David, but with the death of Saul. Saul is positioned in the story as the anti-David: everything David does is the opposite of Saul. We should not ignore the gendered aspects of 1 Chronicles 10. In the battle of Mount Gilboa, Saul was wounded/ pierced by arrows, asked his armor bearer to run him through, fell upon his own sword, was stripped by Philistines, and had his head nailed through. A body so exposed and pierced is not just humiliated, it is feminized: gazed upon, raped by the sword, pierced by the “uncircumcised” who Saul fears will humiliate him (the verb hith’allel has connotations of rape as well as humiliation). No wonder his body is named as a hollow shell (gufah), emptied of his sons (1 Chr. 10:4, 12). Saul performs femininity even as he most fears it. David, on the other hand, is a masculine man. His first act is to perform the masculine act of war and conquest of Jerusalem, and he succeeds—in contrast to Saul. Then Jerusalem/Jebus/Zion (1 Chr. 11:4–5) is renamed the City of David: David is the subject of the act of naming, as if he himself had given birth to the city. The first two chapters of David’s stories then enumerate all the warriors who established themselves or supported David. First Chronicles 11:10 introduces a term that is characteristic of Chronicles and rare outside of it: hithkhazzeq, “to make oneself strong/to establish/to strengthen”; fifteen of the twenty-seven occurrences in the Bible are in Chronicles, appearing with respect to almost every king (see Table 1). While the common verb khazaq “to be strong/to grasp” is frequently used, this rarer form emphasizes how the man performs his strength. David’s story begins with an account of his pumped-up manly men, pages and pages of them, all pledging loyalty. What do these manly men do next? They attempt to bring the ark to Jerusalem (1  Chr. 13). The manly men start singing and dancing— a moment of high camp, as Roland Boer notes. Perhaps the ultimate manly man, YHWH,

disapproves: he strikes down one man and makes David afraid. The ark’s journey is interrupted, which gives David time to build a house for himself. This house is both literal (a building) and metaphorical (sons). The text betrays a little anxiety here: David took more women and caused to bear more sons and daughters (1  Chr. 14:3), yet the narrative has not given any earlier procreative exploits (only in the genealogy—1 Chr. 3:1–3). Tellingly, none of his Jerusalemite wives are named: David causes to bear all these sons. At this point the manly men warriors fade from the picture, as David’s two battles against the Philistines in 1 Chronicles 14 are won by God, not by them. The next groups of men to appear are the priests and Levites—swarms of them in 1  Chronicles 15—with their instruments and choirs, and David himself leaping and dancing. Michal, daughter of Saul, sees David dancing and “despises him in her heart” (1 Chr. 15:29). The reason for her distaste is not given, nor is she named as his wife as in 1–2 Samuel. Michal is the last woman we hear of for quite some time; in fact, she is the last woman we hear of in the story of David. She is a dangling woman, looking out a window, with a dead (feminized) father and no named husband or sons. She is a decorative object, without function. She despises David. Do we see Chronicles’ masculine utopia disturbed? Do we see a fear that, in their hearts, the women despise the men? If performing maternity has been displaced from women to men already in the text, is hatred all that is left for the woman to perform? No wonder no other women are permitted to speak or act until the queen of Sheba in 2 Chronicles 9! The transition from David to Solomon is unmarked by women. Solomon is brought forward, named as David’s successor, popularly acclaimed and crowned in 1 Chronicles 28–29. The transition has been recognized as having been patterned on the transition from Moses to Joshua in Deuteronomy, complete with instructions for the work to be undertaken by the successor. In Solomon’s case, this work is the construction of the temple, for which David has provided not just the idea, but the site, the plans, the materials, and the arrangement of cultic personnel (1  Chr. 21–29). For a man of blood (1  Chr. 22:8; 28:3), David is peculiarly concerned with decoration and performance of cultic duties; Roland Boer is undoubtedly right also to describe David’s arrangements as high camp.

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Solomon: The Temple-Birther (2 Chr. 1–9) The man of peace (1 Chr. 22:9), Solomon, is a peculiar character in Chronicles. Stripped of his role as temple builder, and relegated to being a mere general contractor and decorator, he is also stripped of his women: no catalogue of wives and secondary wives, those women who cause him so much trouble in other texts (cf. Sir. 47:19–20). If to perform masculinity in Chronicles is to produce (give birth to?) sons, and to make one’s self strong, then Solomon immediately does the latter (2 Chr. 1:1), but not the former. We can see the temple as his procreative issue. In that case, David is the begetter and Solomon the birther. David causes Solomon to bear the temple, if we return to the causative meaning of the verb holid. At one stroke, Solomon becomes both the feminine object and is effaced as masculine subject. No wonder Solomon’s temple, the fruit of his labor, takes the form of an enormous phallic representation. As Julie Kelso and Roland Boer have both astutely recognized, modern commentators have been quick to ascribe the 120-cubit-high vestibule to scribal error (2 Chr. 3:4). Kelso goes on to suggest that the phallic vestibule in front of the womblike temple interior is an expression of the text’s desire for mono-sexual reproduction. If we read Solomon as the birther of this temple, his anxieties about performing the feminine role have been overwritten by his monstrously phallic vestibule. Yet we should note that Solomon has not caused to bear any actual sons. Solomon has effectively effaced the role of the woman in Chronicles. No stories of women are allowed to compete with him as producerprocreator of the temple. No hint that children of unknown fathers may be produced by women (1 Kgs. 3). No suggestion that a mother might be important for succession to the kingship (1 Kgs. 1). Solomon’s production is a representation of mono-sexual reproduction, the ideal expressed in the genealogies taken physical form. Solomon’s actual wife is mentioned in merely one verse. In this verse (2 Chr. 8:11), Solomon gives the reason for moving Pharaoh’s daughter to his own palace: “My own wife shall not live in the house of David, King of Israel, for the precincts are holy since the ark of YHWH has entered them.” The ark of the covenant of YHWH was brought into the Holy of Holies of the temple in 2 Chronicles 5:7, so the house

of David is conflated with the temple. No woman can be allowed to remain within the site of mono-sexual reproduction. Returning to 2 Chronicles 5, instead of the glory of YHWH filling the Holy of Holies when the ark enters (as in 1 Kgs. 8:10), the ark with its long carrying poles is the only representation of YHWH’s presence. Instead of YHWH as divine begetter entering the womb-temple, the priests withdraw from the Holy of Holies, because they have made themselves holy (2 Chr. 5:11). Holiness is human withdrawal, and so Solomon withdraws his wife from the temple precincts as well. Perhaps Solomon also withdraws from his wife, trusting in his ability to perform monosexual reproduction. The longest episode involving any woman in Chronicles is 2 Chronicles 9, the visit of the queen of Sheba. That this episode is in this text, this text that has written so many women out, is surprising. A woman’s judgment on Solomon’s wisdom, wealth, and general state of blessedness surely does not count for much in this male-oriented text. How does this episode depict the performance of masculinity and femininity? First, that this woman should come to Solomon places her as performing the active role and Solomon as performing the passive receiver. She tests him with riddles and speaks to him. The last speaking woman in Chronicles was Jabez’s mother in 1 Chronicles 4, who spoke Jabez into being and was overspoken by her son. The queen of Sheba can be read as all the displaced women of Chronicles. She comes, she gives of herself, she blesses Solomon and all his men, and then she leaves to return to her own land. By blessing Solomon’s kingdom and his God, she legitimizes the silencing of all the other women. Solomon does not beget any children in his own narrative. He produces only the temple, not sons. While Solomon’s reign ends on a narrative high, the production of the temple in place of sons soon comes to be a problem. Not until the very last verse of his story is his son Rehoboam mentioned (2 Chr. 9:31).

Kings and Queens of Judah (2 Chr. 10–36) Rehoboam is blamed immediately for the division in the kingdom, for the rebellion (from the Chronicler’s perspective) of the northern tribes under Jeroboam and the subsequent formation of the northern kingdom of Israel. The remnant



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faithful to David’s house forms the kingdom of Judah, centered on Jerusalem and its temple. Rehoboam attempts early and publicly to perform his masculinity. When confronted by the unhappy people, he ignores the wisdom of his father’s advisers and listens to his contemporaries instead. Their advice is to say, “My little finger is thicker than my father’s loins” (2 Chr. 10:10). They advise him to publicly expose himself, to show he’s a real man. Since Rehoboam’s existence is the only evidence that Solomon could perform his masculinity, the taunt is of greater import than we might expect (Solomon’s wives and secondary wives being written out of Chronicles). But when speaking to the people, Rehoboam declines to comment on the size of his finger, displacing his performance into the promise-threat of more work and oppression for the people. After the withdrawal of Israel from Judah, Rehoboam performs his masculinity in other ways in an attempt to outdo his father. He takes eighteen wives and sixty secondary wives, and causes to bear twenty-eight sons and sixty daughters (2  Chr. 11:18–21). He also spends a good deal of time building fortified cities: words for building and strengthening appear frequently in 2 Chronicles 11–12. However, he is forced to perform submission, both to Shishak of Egypt and to YHWH. Rehoboam humbles himself before YHWH and then strengthens himself. There is a constant back-and-forth between performances of masculinity and performances of submissiveness in the story of Rehoboam. Beginning with Rehoboam’s narrative, a certain number of formulaic features appear in the stories of the kings of Judah (see Table 1 at the end of this article). Typically, each king is given a regnal notice(s) that includes his age at accession, the length of his reign, the name of his mother, a source citation, and judgment as to his deeds being good or evil in YHWH’s sight. (In Chronicles there is recognition that a good king can go bad and a bad king good, so some judgments are mixed.) He is also described as having strengthened himself (hitkhazzeq) and having humbled himself (nikna‘) before YHWH; these terms are almost unique to Chronicles. His building activities, especially in regard to the temple, are also noted. There is a pronounced tendency to depict the kings in father-son pairs, especially so that a bad king is balanced by a good king. The most conspicuous representative of this trend is Ahaz (2 Chr.

28) and his son Hezekiah (2 Chr. 29–32): Ahaz is the most wicked king, the only one to close YHWH’s temple (2  Chr. 28:24); Hezekiah is the best king since David, especially in terms of temple restoration and worship (2 Chr. 29:2; 30:26; 31:20–21), and it is not a coincidence that his name means “May YHWH strengthen.” Dueling performances of gender are enacted by Jehoiada and Athaliah in 2 Chronicles 22–24. Athaliah, mentioned in 2 Chronicles 22:2 as the mother of Ahaziah and daughter of Omri, does not perform the maternal role as expected. Instead, she counsels Ahaziah to do evil (2 Chr. 22:3). Upon his death, she comes to the fore. She performs the masculine role: she destroys/ speaks (dibber) all the “royal seed” (2  Chr. 22:10). The speaking woman then goes on to “be king” (moleket) over Judah (2 Chr. 22:12). The performance of masculinity by Athaliah comes not coincidentally at the point when the Davidic line is closest to extinction. Only a sixyear-old boy, Joash, remains alive, but hidden. In Chronicles this is the most severe disruption imaginable (given more narrative space than Ahaz’s closing of the temple): not just that a woman reigns, not just that she is a daughter of the reviled house of Omri/Ahab, but that she speaks and performs masculinity. Athaliah’s performance is ended by the priest Jehoiada, the only nonroyal man who strengthens himself (hitkhazzeq) (2 Chr. 23:1); the term is often translated as “took courage,” but it is important to highlight the performance of royal masculinity by Jehoiada. He arms Joash’s bodyguard and stations the army to protect Joash’s anointing (2  Chr. 23:9–10). He makes a covenant between himself, the people, Joash, and YHWH (2 Chr. 23:16), and he restores cultic worship (2  Chr. 23:17–18). Jehoiada takes wives for Joash: it is possible to read this sentence “And Jehoiada took for himself two wives and he caused to bear sons and daughters” (2  Chr. 24:3), harkening back to the genealogies where men procreate. Finally, Jehoidada’s death is described the same way as David’s (2 Chr. 24:15–16, cf. 1 Chr. 29:28). And what of Athaliah? Before this display of male performativity she speaks again: “Treason! Treason!” (2  Chr. 23:13). Her performance is overwhelmed and negated: she is put to death, but most specifically, put to death by the sword (2 Chr. 23:21): penetrated by a whole army of men. It is not enough to silence this speaking woman by over-speaking her (as with Jabez’s

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mother), or by banishing, sending her off (as with the queen of Sheba); she is subjected not just to the male gaze, but to the performance of masculinity upon her body. With women so effectively written out of Chronicles, and the ultimate revenge fantasy enacted upon Athaliah, the final speaking woman is merely the channel for YHWH’s words. After Josiah’s men find a scroll of instruction while repairing the temple, they take it to Huldah the prophet (2 Chr. 34:22–28), who says no words of her own, but uses the formula “thus says YHWH” three times (2  Chr. 34:23, 24, 26) and “declares YHWH” once (2 Chr. 34:27). This speaking woman is the vessel for YHWH’s speech. She performs as every woman in the genealogies has performed: the elided means by which the male fantasy of autoprocreation is enacted. Josiah’s death at Megiddo in 2 Chronicles 35, pierced by arrows while in disguise, reminiscent of the deaths of both Saul (1 Chr. 10) and Ahab (2 Chr. 18), brings to mind the disruptions in the male bodies found in Chronicles. Even the good kings Asa, Uzziah, and Hezekiah are afflicted with disease, while the evil king Joram’s innards exit his body in a gruesome parody of birth (2 Chr. 21:18–19). Many of the evil kings are “put to death,” some explicitly murdered

(e.g., Joash in 2 Chr. 24:25). The frailty of the male body is on display. Yet by erupting in “birth” and by being pierced by arrows and swords and spears and knives, the male body performs femininity, as well. The idea of monosexual reproduction is exhibited, effacing and erasing the women of Chronicles. Bibliography

Boer, Roland. “1 and 2 Chronicles.” In The Queer Bible Commentary, edited by Deryn Guest, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache, 251–67. London: SCM, 2006. Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge, 1990, 1999. Chapman, Cynthia R. The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter. Harvard Semitic Monographs 62. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004. Japhet, Sara. I and II Chronicles: A Commentary. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1993. Kelso, Julie. O Mother, Where Art Thou? An Irigarayan Reading of the Book of Chronicles. London: Equinox, 2007.

(Re)builds temple Bearing sons Disease Pierced Good or evil or YHWH cult

Rehoboam Naamah 12:13 12:6, 12 No Yes Evil 2 Chr. 10–12 Abijah Micaiah 13:21 Yes Yes Implied good 2 Chr. 13 Asa Maacah 15:8 Yes Yes Good 2 Chr. 14–16 Jehoshaphat Azubah 17:1 Yes Good 2 Chr. 17–20 Jehoram 21:4 No Yes Evil 2 Chr. 21 Ahaziah Athaliah d. of Omri No Yes Evil 2 Chr. 22 Joash Zibiah Yes Yes Yes Good, then evil 2 Chr. 24 Amaziah Jehoaddan 25:11 No Yes Good, implied evil 2 Chr. 25 Uzziah Jecoliah Yes Yes Good 2 Chr. 26 Jotham Jerushah 27:6 Yes Good 2 Chr. 27 Ahaz YHWH No Evil 2 Chr. 28 humbled him 28:19 Hezekiah Abijah 32:5 32:26 Yes Yes Good 2 Chr. 29–32 Manasseh 33:12 No, then yes Evil, then good 2 Chr. 33:1–20 Amon Didn’t No Yes Evil 2 Chr. 33:21–25 33:23 Josiah 34:27 Yes Yes Good 2 Chr. 34–35 Final four kings 36:12 No Evil 2 Chr. 36

King Name of mother Strengthens Humbles himself

Table 1

Ezra–Nehemiah Tamara Cohn Eskenazi

Introduction The Book and Its Context To the remnant of Israel in exile, the conquest of Babylon by King Cyrus of Persia in 539 BCE signaled the dawn of a new era and the rebirth of the nation; Ezra–Nehemiah recounts the story of this rebirth. Only fifty years earlier the Babylonians had destroyed Jerusalem (587/586 BCE) and exiled its inhabitants. Israel suffered a devastating shock that irreversibly altered its religion and culture. Suddenly all the secure structures were demolished: the land that had been so essential to the religion and politics of the nation was now controlled by strangers; the temple had been razed; Jerusalem was in ruins; and many people (including the leaders) were taken captive to a foreign land. When Cyrus defeated the Babylonians and permitted the exiles to go home, the survivors of what had been ancient Israel faced an overwhelming challenge: rebuilding not merely their homeland but their very identity as a people and a religion. Ezra–Nehemiah is the only biblical book that attempts to give a history of the crucial yet obscure postexilic era. The book itself is complex and often difficult to interpret. Most English translations of the Bible separate it into two books: Ezra and Nehemiah, even though Ezra–Nehemiah constitutes a single book in the most ancient manuscripts and is best interpreted as such. It had been common to attribute Ezra–Nehemiah and the books of Chronicles to the same author, but most modern scholars recognize that Ezra– Nehemiah is a distinct work with its own literary and theological coherence.

The book begins with Cyrus’s edict, exhorting the people of God to go up to Jerusalem and build the house of God. Its account concludes about one hundred years later, after Jerusalem’s temple had been rebuilt (516/515 BCE) and the walls of the city restored and rededicated (445/444 BCE). Ezra–Nehemiah focuses its account on three stages of response to the edict, each with its own distinct contribution. The first, in which Zerubbabel and Jeshua are prominent, restores proper worship and rebuilds the temple (Ezra 1–6). The second, in which Ezra is prominent, implements the teachings of the Torah and reshapes the community by excluding foreign wives from its midst (Ezra 7–10). The third, under Nehemiah, rebuilds the walls of Jerusalem, thereby enclosing the community with a solid and secure boundary—both physically and metaphorically (Neh. 1–7). Once rebuilding is complete, the community celebrates its renewal in grand ceremonies climaxing with a public reading of the book of the Torah (Neh. 8–13). In recounting these events, Ezra–Nehemiah weaves a specific ideology into the very fabric of the story it tells. Through an effective use of sources and literary techniques such as repetition and shifts in perspective, the book articulates three themes: first, the community as a whole, not simply its leaders, is responsible for postexilic reconstruction; second, the house of God is no longer confined to the temple but encompasses the whole city of Jerusalem; and, third, the written text becomes the authoritative vehicle for divine communication and the source for insights and guidance. These themes express a shift toward greater democratization

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of society and therefore imply greater opportunities for women. To what extent these opportunities were realized in the lives of actual women remains unclear. In the book itself women remain silent. Their voices are not heard in the text, even when decisions directly involve them. Some easily overlooked details in Ezra–Nehemiah, however, offer intriguing glimpses into women’s lives and at least acknowledge their presence in each important event. In addition, certain extrabiblical sources help round out these glimpses into a fuller view by providing information about several Jewish women from the Persian period. A crucial issue for the postexilic community was self-definition and identity. What had been ancient Israel was suddenly reduced to a small province, known as Judah, under the rule of the Persian Empire. It became, in the words of one scholar, a colonially subject people. Notable portions of its population continued to be dispersed in other lands such as Babylonia, Persia, and Egypt. The term yehudim, “Judahites” or “Jews,” gained currency alongside “Israelites,” because the dominant portion of the population considered itself heir to the southern kingdom and the tribe of Judah, even when living for generations outside the land. During this era the land of Israel was populated by diverse ethnic groups (including Ammonites, Moabites, and others); diversity also characterized the Jewish community. There was tension between Jews whose families had gone into exile (and were transformed by the experience) and those who had not. Tension arose also between Jews who permitted exogamous marriages (marriages outside the clan) and those who did not. It is difficult to determine to what extent these groups overlapped (i.e., to what extent exogamy, for example, was directly related to the specific background of the population). The composition of these groups and their historical controversies remain subject to speculation, because the evidence is limited and tendentious. According to the perspective of Ezra–Nehemiah, the authentic Judahite community was constituted by the returnees from Babylon. These returnees distinguished themselves from another group called “people of the land,” who, according to Ezra–Nehemiah (e.g., Ezra 4:4), were people of foreign origins who now dwelt in the land and whose practices conflicted with authentic Israelite tradition, endangering loyalty to God. Earlier scholars had identified

the people of the land with the Samaritans, but they may actually have been Judahites who had not gone into exile and who did not, therefore, share the traditions of the transformed returnees. The conflict between the returnees and the “people of the land” thus could have been an intra-Judahite one, rather than one between different ethnic groups. Two particular issues in this period prove especially pertinent for understanding women’s lives: the consequences for women of ethnic and religious crises of identity and the effect of pioneer life on the place of women in a society.

Ethnic and Religious Crises of Identity Sociological studies of both ancient and modern societies reveal some common survival patterns in the face of the radical experience of exile and return. Typically, boundaries against the outside world become more rigid, in an attempt to protect a fragile sense of communal identity. Internally, flux and reorganization follow the disruption of stable patterns and hierarchies: new groups rise to leadership, and gender roles become more fluid under the pressure of ad hoc adaptation to rapid change. Ezra–Nehemiah clearly reflects similar patterns. It advocates ethnic purity and prohibits intermarriage in order to sustain group identity. Such strategies, however, were not universally accepted. Apparently, some of Judah’s best families either did not have the same concern or defined the community in more inclusive terms. They considered “foreign” women as acceptable marriage partners even for priests (Ezra 9–10; Neh. 13:28). The issue of communal boundaries appears to be a contested subject in the postexilic era, with the book of Ruth, as well as Isaiah 56:1– 8, showing ways in which foreigners may be included. In both of these cases, the foreigners who are included evince a commitment to Israel’s God and God’s teachings (Ruth 1:16–17; Isa. 56:6). Ezra–Nehemiah aims to exclude persons whom it charges with practices that resemble those of earlier Canaanite inhabitants of the land (Ezra 9:1). It does not refer to foreigners who have chosen to adopt Judahite religion and practices (although the mention of those who separated themselves from the people of the land in Ezra 6:21 may refer to such persons; these people are included in the celebration). Several scholars connect opposition to exogamy explicitly with the need to protect

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land rights. Religious membership and land ownership, they claim, were closely intertwined. Lacking a native king, the community was organized around the temple, with all members bearing responsibility for its upkeep. The land owned by members of the temple community, in fact, constituted the Jewish province. Intermarriage, however defined, endangered the physical as well as the spiritual boundaries of the community. A non-Jewish partner who had legal control over property could, once the Jewish spouse had died, rejoin the ethnic community of origin and remove the land from Jewish jurisdiction. Children of such marriages could do likewise, reducing the actual land belonging to the Jewish community and hence the province of Judah. As a result, foreign partners became a particular threat, because through them territory might be lost to the community as a whole. The language used for marriage suggests that land rights are indeed of concern. Uniquely in Ezra–Nehemiah, the verb that most translations render as “married” (Ezra 10:2, 10, 14, 17; Neh. 13:23) means in fact “to settle” or “to dwell.” Such terminology underscores the preoccupation with the fate of the land as a reason for opposition. According to this scholarly view, Ezra–Nehemiah seeks to prevent the loss of communal land by prohibiting marriage with outsiders.

Other Political Developments Ezra–Nehemiah promotes broader distribution of authority and power in the postexilic community (in contrast with the preexilic period, when power and authority were concentrated in the monarchy and related state elite). Such developments also influence attitudes toward women. With decisions and obligations more widely shared, the affiliation of adult members of the household becomes relevant. Similar developments take place in Pericles’ Athens (at about the same time, specifically 451 BCE), where citizenship is redefined. With the entrenchment of democracy in Athens, a new law demands that both father and mother must be Athenian if an offspring is to be a citizen. The parallels with Ezra–Nehemiah, in which women and not only men must be Judahites to be included in the community, are suggestive of a similar phenomenon and motives. This concern over the ethnic and

religious affiliation of the woman indicates that a woman’s social identity or religious affiliation was not (or no longer?) to be determined by or absorbed into her husband’s. Her status in these respects had to be assessed on a basis similar to how the status of the men in the household was assessed.

Women and Pioneer Life In Discovering Eve, Carol Meyers points out that women gain power during times of pioneer conditions in rural societies, when families constitute a central socioeconomic and political unit. She argues on the basis of sociological and archaeological data that women in premonarchic Israel, living in pioneer societies, must have possessed more power and greater equality than readers have recognized. Although Meyers herself does not analyze the postexilic era, her findings, if correct, suggest that women in the postexilic era would have benefited from a similar redistribution of power, because in some important ways they lived in similar circumstances. As in the premonarchic period, the family is central. Ezra–Nehemiah underscores the fact through the frequent use of the term ’abot (literally, “fathers”) to designate the family as the dominant force in the community. These three factors—the evolving communal boundaries in the face of radical change, the greater importance of families, and the increased concern over women’s own status— combine to suggest that women in the postexilic community possessed more power than the fleeting references to them in the canonical literature indicate at first glance. Extrabiblical sources corroborate this conclusion.

Extrabiblical Sources: Elephantine, Egypt Persian-period contracts and letters in which women figure quite prominently give evidence concerning the diversity of Jewish women’s roles and powers. The Elephantine documents unambiguously show that Jewish women in the postexilic era had more power and privileges than biblical texts and later traditions suggest. These documents come from the Jewish colony in Elephantine, Egypt, and can be precisely dated (mostly to the fifth c. BCE). They contain original contracts and letters,

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many belonging to Jewish women. From this storehouse of information about actual postexilic practices among one group of Jews, one can reconstruct social and economic realities of women’s lives. Various contracts from Elephantine show that these Jewish women were able to initiate divorce, buy and sell property, and inherit property, even when there were male siblings. The Elephantine documents also illustrate how women were able to climb the social and economic ladder. An interesting example is the case of an Egyptian slave named Tamut (or Tapmut) and her daughter. While still a slave of one man, Tamut married a Jewish temple official. She eventually gained her freedom and some kind of position in the temple comparable to her husband’s (although the precise nature of their titles is unclear). Her daughter (born during slavery as a child of either the master or the mother’s future husband) became wealthy and important in the community. Tamut’s daughter, not only her son, was a designated heir to the parents’ property, belying the notion that women could inherit only when there were no male descendants (cf. Num. 27). Marriage contracts from Elephantine are particularly fascinating. They list what each woman brought into the marriage and state that she retained control over such possessions. In cases of divorce, her belongings remained hers. The marriage contracts also indicate that either partner could initiate divorce. Some even specify procedures and financial responsibilities in cases of abuse. Tamut’s marriage contract, for example, includes the following:

If tomorrow or another day Anani rises on account of her [?] and says, “I divorce Tamut my wife,” the divorce money is on his head. He shall give to Tamut in silver 7 shekels, 2 R and all that she brought in. . . . If tomorrow or another day, Tamut rises up and says, “I divorce my husband Anani,” a like sum shall be on her head. She shall give to Anani in silver 7 shekels, 2 R, and all which she brought in her hand she shall take out. (Kraeling, 2:7–10)

Upon the death of the husband, the property was to go to the wife—not to a male relative, not even his son. Several documents concern another woman, the thrice-married Mibtahiah, who was a wealthy property owner and also her husband’s business partner. Mibtahiah’s third husband appears to have been an Egyptian who eventually took a Hebrew name and presumably joined her Jewish community. Their children bore Hebrew names and were clearly influential members of the community. These documents greatly augment the understanding of the lives of women in the Persian period and help to shed light on the more shadowy references in the biblical texts themselves. Although there is no parallel evidence from Judah concerning women’s legal status in that society, it may be reasonable to assume that the practices in one Jewish community (Egypt) were consistent with those of another (Judah) during the postexilic period, when both were under the same Persian authority.

Comment Cyrus’s Edict to Build the House of God in Jerusalem (Ezra 1:1–4)

God’s People Build the House of God in Jerusalem (Ezra 1:5–Neh. 7:73)

Cyrus’s edict opens Ezra–Nehemiah with an exhortation to the people of God to go up to Jerusalem and Judah to build the house of God. Although this edict is not preserved outside the Bible, it is consistent with what is known about Cyrus and conforms to other ancient decrees. If historical, this declaration would have been proclaimed in 538 BCE.

A brief introduction sums up the events to follow: “Then rose up the heads of the families of Judah and Benjamin, and the priests and the Levites, and everyone whose spirit God had stirred, to go up and build the house of God in Jerusalem” (Ezra 1:5, my trans.). Ezra– Nehemiah describes three stages of return and reconstruction. Each begins in exile and ends in

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Jerusalem, highlighting the book’s main themes: the centrality of community, a broadened notion of the house of God as city, and the authoritative role of the written text. The book recounts these stages by focusing primarily on the roles and deeds of men, but includes some intriguing references to women at each important event. First Movement: Returnees Build the Altar and Temple (Ezra 1:5–6:22) The first section describes the return from Babylon of a large contingent of exiled Judahites (or Jews). Upon their arrival, the Judahites build an altar and resume proper worship. They also begin to rebuild the temple in accordance with Cyrus’s decree. Their leaders include Zerubbabel, a descendant of David, and Jeshua, a priest. But the real focus of the story is on the larger participating community. The people of the land, whose earlier background, according to Ezra 4, was non-Judahite (but see the introduction above), volunteer to help rebuild the temple but are rejected. After difficulties and delays, the returnees finish building the temple (probably in 516/515 BCE) and celebrate the event (Ezra 6:14). One of the most striking aspects of this first part of the book is the list (repeated in Neh. 7) that enumerates the returnees as descendants of specific ancestors or people of a particular place. The names of household heads are typically male. However, according to Ezra 2, the returnees included the descendants of hassoperet (Ezra 2:55). The word hassoperet literally means “the female scribe” (see also Neh. 7:57). The most obvious reference of this term is to a group (perhaps a guild) whose members traced their descent to a female scribe. Unfortunately, this meaning is usually lost in translation. Translators typically treat the word as a personal name, and most commentators confine themselves to noting a guild without mentioning the possibility that a female stood at its head. The rationale for ignoring the possible reference to a woman is based on Ecclesiastes 1:1, where a similar grammatically feminine noun refers to an apparently masculine subject (qohelet, “one who gathers an assembly”). This argument overlooks the numerous other occurrences of such grammatically feminine nouns that are recognized as references to women (e.g., the feminine herald in Isa. 40:9). It is noteworthy, however, that one medieval Jewish commentator (Ibn Ezra) supposed that

hassoperet in Ezra–Nehemiah referred to a female scribe. There were female scribes in the ancient Near East in preexilic times, although there is no clear information about them for the postexilic period. Another intriguing reference in the list of returnees mentions “the descendants of . . . Barzillai (who had married one of the daughters of Barzillai the Gileadite, and was called by their name)” (Ezra 2:61//Neh. 7:63). Although families generally did not trace their descent through the mother’s line, this reference shows that men did sometimes relinquish their own family name for that of their wife (and presumably also for the wife’s family inheritance). The list of returnees in Ezra 2 and Nehemiah 7 claims that approximately forty-two thousand people returned. In addition, there were male and female servants and singers (Ezra 2:65// Neh. 7:67). The roles of women as music-­ makers is well attested in ancient sources (see, e.g., Exod. 15:20, where Miriam “took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing”). It is tempting to link these female singers with the temple cult, but their place in the list (between servants and animals) suggests, rather, that they were entertainers of relatively low status. Temple singers appear earlier in the list without specific references to women. Second Movement: Ezra and the Exiles Build the Community according to Torah (Ezra 7–10) The second stage of the return features Ezra as an outstanding figure, commissioned by the Persian king Artaxerxes to implement divine teachings in Judah. According to the biblical account, Ezra arrives in Judah in 458 BCE. Ezra is presented as a priest and scribe of the Torah, entrusted with virtually unlimited powers to bring the Jewish province into conformity with the law of God and the law of the king (Ezra 7:26). It is generally assumed that Ezra’s Torah is some form of the Pentateuch or portions thereof. Recent studies link Ezra’s seemingly religious mission with the political agenda of the Persian Empire in the face of military unrest in the Mediterranean region. Among the new arrivals with Ezra appear the descendants of Shelomith (Ezra 8:10). In the Bible the name Shelomith can refer to either a man or a woman. The Greek versions of Ezra add a name in a way that precludes reading

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Shelomith as a woman’s name (“of the descendants of Bani, Shelomith son of Josiphiah”). Such a translation could either reflect later discomfort with the implication of a feminine name or represent a genuine alternate tradition. Many English translations follow this reading. The Hebrew text, however, leaves the gender unspecified. Given the pattern in the other names in the list, the sentence should be translated: “From the descendants of Shelomith: the son of Josiphiah, and with him 160 men.” According to 1 Chronicles 3:19, Shelomith was a daughter of Zerubbabel, the last known descendant of David to possess any political power (see his role in the return in Ezra 1–6). A postexilic seal referring to Shelomith and to Elnathan the governor has been discovered. If this is the seal of Shelomith the daughter of Zerubbabel, it might indicate that Elnathan, a governor of Judah (approximately 510–490 BCE), attached himself to the Davidic line by marrying Shelomith. It is conceivable that Ezra 8:10 also refers to relatives of the famed princess. According to Ezra 9:1–4, Ezra learns shortly after his return to Jerusalem that some of Judah’s leading citizens had married so-called foreign women from the peoples of the land. This crisis leads Ezra to mourn publicly and to convene an assembly. The offending men are pressed to divorce their foreign wives, and many of them do (Ezra 10). The actual background of these women is unclear. They could actually be foreign or simply from Judahite families whom the author of Ezra–Nehemiah refuses to recognize as members of the people of Israel. Both possibilities can be supported by the available evidence. The reasons given for divorce in the text are what one might call religious: the practices of the offending outsiders are compared to those of the earlier Canaanite inhabitants of the land, who were a threat according to Deuteronomy 7:1–6 (Ezra 9:1–2). Economic, social, and political factors, however, would have been important, possibly the most important considerations (the distinction between such categories is itself modern and does not adequately represent ancient societies). The constant reference to marriage in the Hebrew with the verb meaning “settle” (Ezra 10:2, 10, 14, 17) highlights this possibility. The urgent need to redefine identity probably combined with practical and economic concerns to establish specific boundaries from which certain groups were

excluded. Ezra–Nehemiah does not record any protest from the women, nor does it report what specific arrangements were involved. According to a later book, 1 Esdras, which is included in the Apocrypha, foreign wives were “put . . . away together with their children” (1 Esd. 9:36). Many English translations insert this statement as the conclusion of Ezra 10. However, the Hebrew of Ezra 10:44 that concludes the episode is different. It is best rendered as informing readers that some of the foreign wives had children who were “placed,” but the sense of “placed,” alas, remains obscure. Only the men in the high priest’s family explicitly divorce their wives, according to Ezra 10:18– 19, a step that conforms to the restrictions on priestly marriages also mentioned in Leviticus 21:14–15. It is possible that the marriages of nonpriestly members were of less concern. The silence about a dissolution of marriages of nonpriestly men indicates that these were of lesser concern to the author. The procedure may have been primarily to challenge priestly violations. Nonpriestly families may have remained intact. The documents from Elephantine lead one to suppose that economic compensations had to be made (which may account for the length of time it took to effect the separation), but Ezra–Nehemiah shows no interest in these details. Its aim is to establish the principle that such marriages are to be forbidden. It is noteworthy that, although the prohibition against marrying outsiders applies to both men and women, Ezra 9 does not mention any Judahite women marrying foreigners. Modern readers react in different ways to the exclusion of the foreign wives. Unsympathetic readings focus on the harshness of the expulsion and on the exclusivism it reveals. In particular, the silence about the reaction of the women is striking; they appear to have no choice and no voice. Sympathetic readings stress the plight of the new Judahite community struggling for spiritual, economic, and ethnic survival when it finds itself a minority society in a sea of diverse cultures. Recent studies of the postexilic Judahite community link religious concerns with socioeconomic ones. Opposition to mixed marriages is placed in a larger context in which the issue is not simply one of ethnic or religious purity, but rather is tied to the impact of marriage on communal land ownership: marriage with outsiders spells loss of land to the Jewish province. Moreover, with

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the broadening of communal participation, the identity and loyalty of all members matters. As in Pericles’ Athens in the same fifth century BCE, affiliation depends on both parents now being reckoned as community members. In addition to political concerns, sympathetic readings point out the need to secure partners and families for the women of the new Judahite community in the face of competing possibilities (see the emphasis on remaining faithful to the wife of one’s youth in the contemporary writing of Mal. 2:14). The pressures on new immigrants to marry up and out is well documented in ancient and modern situations. An opposition to foreign women is thus understood not as a misogynist restriction, but rather a defense of the rights of women in the community against outside competition, and therefore a matter of maintaining communal cohesiveness and continuity. Whatever the attitude of the reader, Ezra– Nehemiah’s preoccupation with the separation of foreign wives implies that women and their status were important in reshaping religious and social life. This preoccupation also implies that women’s rights to property in Judah were similar to those in Elephantine. It is when women can inherit land from their husbands or fathers that foreign women pose an economic threat; without such rights they would not represent a loss of land to the community. Third Movement: Nehemiah and the Judahites Build Jerusalem’s Wall (Neh. 1–7) The third stage is presented through the eyes and words of Nehemiah in a first-person recollection often labeled “memoirs” (which many scholars attribute to Nehemiah himself). These chapters relate how Nehemiah, at first a favored cupbearer to King Artaxerxes, is overcome by concern for the welfare of his people. Leaving the comforts of the royal court, he hastens to Jerusalem as its newly appointed governor in order to rebuild the city’s walls (445 BCE). Nehemiah spurs the Judahites to rebuild despite threats from neighbors. Under his leadership, the walls are quickly restored, and Jerusalem is repopulated. Nehemiah 3 lists the names of the actual builders, emphasizing communal involvement. That list of builders includes the daughters of Shallum (Neh. 3:12). Although the reference to daughters is unquestionably clear

in the Hebrew text and in all ancient manuscripts, some translators have obscured their presence. One translation even replaces the word “daughters” with “sons,” presumably under the assumption that daughters would not have been mentioned. Writing in 1913, L. W. Batten stated: “Daughter” is a regular term for the hamlets which grow up about a city and which are dependent upon it, 11:25–31. Ryle prefers a literal interpretation that Shallum’s daughters aided him in the work. But as women in the East were quite sure to have a large share in such work as this, their special mention here is unnecessary. Against the other view it may be urged that a solitary mention of hamlets is inexplicable. Berth. [Bertholet] says it would be easiest to reject the words but that such a course is arbitrary. The meaning is really unknown. (Batten, 213–14, emphasis added)

It is intriguing to read that the meaning of “he and his daughters” is unknown. The confusion of commentators in the face of such a clear statement appears to be bred solely by a refusal to recognize the book’s recognition of the role of women in building the city walls. Fortunately, modern commentators fare better, both as translators and interpreters. They usually preserve the reference to women. Some, like H. G. M. Williamson, conclude on the basis of Numbers 36:8 that, if Shallum had no sons, “it would be natural for the daughters to help on an occasion like this, since they would inherit his name and property” (Williamson, 207). From the Elephantine documents one learns that daughters may inherit even when there are sons. Nehemiah’s “memoirs” describe his confrontations with opponents whose opposition he views as interference with the cause of God. After one confrontation with the prophet Shemaiah, Nehemiah calls upon God to punish his opponents: “Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to these things that they did, and also the prophetess Noadiah and the rest of the prophets who wanted to make me afraid” (Neh. 6:14). Nehemiah’s words ignore Shemaiah and complain instead about two of Nehemiah’s best-known opponents and about an otherwise unknown prophet. Tobiah

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is described as an Ammonite official who hampers Nehemiah all along; Sanballat was the governor of Samaria. The mention of this mysterious female prophet together with such highly placed officials suggests that her status was comparable to theirs and that she, like them, was a prominent person. The importance of this reference to Noadiah the prophet is highlighted when one realizes that the Hebrew Bible names only four women as prophets. The other three are preexilic (Miriam, Deborah, and Huldah). With Noadiah there is evidence that the prophetic office was open to women in the postexilic period. The basis of her disagreement with Nehemiah remains unknown.

God’s People Celebrate and Dedicate the House of God (Neh. 8–13) Ezra–Nehemiah reaches its climax with the public reading of the book of the Torah, after the walls of Jerusalem are restored. As the celebration begins, all the people gather in the plaza before the Water Gate. Ezra reads from the Torah to an attentive communal assembly. The reading is followed by a celebration of the holy day of Sukkot and several days of festivities and rededication ceremonies. Perhaps the most significant reference to women in Ezra–Nehemiah comes on this momentous occasion. Later Judaism compares this time of rededication to the giving of the law at Sinai. But although there have been doubts about the role and presence of women at Sinai, since the message “do not go near a woman” (Exod. 19:15) implies that only men were addressed, no such doubts occur in this receiving of the Torah. Ezra–Nehemiah is explicit: And Ezra the priest brought the Torah before the assembly, both men and women and all who could hear with understanding, on the first day of the seventh month. And he read from it facing the square before the Water Gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women and those who could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the Torah. (Neh. 8:2–3, my trans.)

The Hebrew term qahal used here for the assembly does not refer to a mere aggregate of people but to a religiously constituted

community. The fact that this assembly includes men and women implies religious egalitarianism at least on this level of participation. Men and women gather; men and women hear and heed; men and women celebrate. The teaching of God belongs to the entire community. Women, however, are not named (as far as one can discern) among the citizens who later help Ezra read aloud and interpret the teachings to the community. Women are mentioned in the festive events that follow, though their roles are not specified (Neh. 12:43). It is particularly important to observe that the communal pledge that delineates communal responsibilities for the temple, for keeping Sabbath, prohibiting foreign marriages, and other obligations explicitly includes women as signatories, even though no individual woman is named (Neh. 10:28). As the book concludes, the danger of foreign wives looms once more. Having erected the wall as a physical boundary, Nehemiah engages in securing other communal boundaries. He mounts an attack on a wide array of religious violations, including the marriage of Judahite men with outsiders (this time described as women of Ashdod, Ammon, and Moab). According to Nehemiah, half of the children of such marriages speak the language of their mothers, one of several signs in postexilic texts that women’s influence in the home was strong. Enraged, Nehemiah rails against foreign partners: “You shall not give your daughters to their sons, or take their daughters for your sons or for yourselves. Did not King Solomon of Israel sin on account of such women?” (Neh. 13:25b– 26a). Nehemiah does not allege that a woman is dangerous by virtue of being a woman. Nevertheless, his association of sin with foreign women helped pave the way to views that too easily link women in general with sin.

Conclusion A careful reading of Ezra–Nehemiah discloses a little more than one expects concerning women but not as much as one would like. One knows of an important prophet Noadiah but not about her concerns; one knows that Shallum’s daughters helped build the wall but no longer knows their names; one knows that women were expelled but does not know their story; one knows that women celebrated with men but not to what extent. These and other tantalizing references

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offer glimpses into a world that the literature largely ignores. They acknowledge the participation of women in each important task: return, rebuilding, and reading of the Torah. Combined with the evidence from Elephantine, such glimpses lead to a more precise reconstruction of the postexilic era. Although the women still remain silent, their presence and growing visibility help to fill in the empty spaces in the text and in Israel’s pivotal age of return and rebirth. Bibliography

Batten, L.W. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Books of Ezra and Nehemiah. International Critical Commentary. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1913. Dor, Yonina. “The Composition of the Episode of the Foreign Women in Ezra IX–X.” Vetus Testamentum 53 (2003): 26–47. Eskenazi, Tamara Cohn. Ezra–Nehemiah. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday (forthcoming). ———. In an Age of Prose: A Literary Approach to Ezra–Nehemiah. Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 36. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988. ———. “Out from the Shadows: Biblical Women in the Postexilic Era (Sixth to Fourth Century BCE).” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 54 (1992): 25–43. ———. “The Missions of Ezra and Nehemiah. In Judah and Judaism in the Persian Period,

edited by Oded Lipschitz and Manfred Oeming, 509–30. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2006. Frevel, Christian, ed. Mixed Marriages: Intermarriage and Group Identity in the Second Temple Period. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2011. Kraeling, Emil G. H., ed. The Brooklyn Museum Aramaic Papyri: New Documents of the Fifth Century B.C. from the Jewish Colony at Elephantine. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953. Meyers, Carol L. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Perdue, L. G., J. Blenkinsopp, J. J. Collins, and C. Meyers. Families in Ancient Israel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. Porten, Bezalel. Archives from Elephantine: A Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968. Washington, Harold. “Israel’s Holy Seed and the Foreign Women of Ezra–Nehemiah: A Kristevan Reading.” Biblical Interpretation: A Journal of Contemporary Approaches 11, nos. 3–4 (2003): 427–37. Williamson, H. G. M. Ezra, Nehemiah. Word Biblical Commentary 16. Waco, TX: Word Books, 1985. Zlotnick-Sivan, H. “The Silent Women of Yehud: Notes on Ezra 9–10.” Journal of Jewish Studies 51, no. 1 (2000): 3–18.

Esther Sidnie White Crawford

Introduction The book of Esther is part of the section of the Hebrew Bible known as the Writings, and is one of only two books in the Hebrew Bible that takes its name from its leading female character. Esther is an account of the events that led to the inauguration of the Jewish festival of Purim. Its plot is fast-paced and exciting, the story is well told, and all ends happily. The book, however, had difficulty attaining canonical status in both Judaism and Christianity, not least because of the actions and character of its heroine, the Jewish woman Esther. As we shall see, its interpretation, especially within Christian circles, continues to be problematic.

Content The book of Esther tells one story with a single plotline and a short time frame. It begins at a banquet held by the Persian king Ahasuerus for all the inhabitants of his capital, Susa. After a drinking bout, the king summons his queen, Vashti, to appear before the court so that they may admire her great beauty. Vashti refuses, and the king, angry, banishes her. After a time, the king regrets losing his queen, and his nobles suggest that he hold an empirewide search for a new queen. Ahasuerus agrees, and all the eligible virgins in the kingdom are gathered into his harem. At this point the narrative introduces the heroine, Esther, and her guardian, Mordecai. Esther enters the harem of the king and wins the regard of all who know her. When her turn with the king arrives, Esther also gains the admiration of Ahasuerus, who makes her his

queen. After this, Mordecai discovers a plot to assassinate the king and reports it to Esther, saving the king’s life. Some time later, the king promotes Haman the Agagite to the position of vizier. Haman demands that all the people bow down to him. Mordecai, however, refuses. Angered, Haman decides to exact revenge on Mordecai by plotting to slaughter all the Jews in the Persian Empire. Mordecai learns of the plot and turns to Esther to intercede with the king. At the climax of the story, Esther, in peril of her life, appears unsummoned before the king in an attempt to save her people. She gains Ahasuerus’s favor and then, in a series of skillful maneuvers, uncovers Haman’s plot and foils his scheme. Haman is put to death, the enemies of the Jews are destroyed, and Mordecai is elevated to the position of vizier. The book ends with Esther and Mordecai instituting the festival of Purim to commemorate these great events.

Historical Setting, Date of Composition, and Genre The book of Esther is set in the historical context of the Persian Empire, which ruled the ancient Near East from modern Iran to Egypt from 539 to 332 BCE, when it fell to the Greek Alexander the Great. The story takes place in Susa, one of the capitals of the Persian Empire, and displays a striking knowledge of the Persian court and its surroundings. Interestingly, the book has a total lack of interest in Judah and in particular its cultic institutions. The audience the book addresses appears to be Jews who live in close 201

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proximity to foreign rulers and must learn to make their own way in a society in which they are a minority and in which there is always danger of persecution and oppression. For these reasons, it is probably the case that Esther was composed in the eastern Jewish Diaspora of the Persian Empire. The book of Esther gives no firm indication of date, and therefore a range of dates, from the fourth century to the second century BCE, has been proposed for it. The earliest possible date depends on the identification of King Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus is normally identified as Xerxes I, who reigned from 486 BCE to 465 BCE; thus the book must have been composed following his reign. The latest possible date is less solid, but can be posited on the lack of Hellenistic elements in the book (including an absence of any Greek vocabulary). In addition, Esther reflects a more sympathetic attitude toward the Persian king and toward Gentiles in general than would be expected in a work from the Hellenistic period. In the Persian period, the Jews for the most part were willing servants of their Gentile rulers (witness Nehemiah). However, the later Hellenistic period witnessed a change in that attitude, brought about by the increasingly harsh policy of the Seleucid rulers toward their Jewish subjects (see 1 and 2 Maccabees). Therefore, the most likely date for the composition of the book lies between the late fifth century and the early third century BCE. Since the book’s portrayal of the events of the reign of Xerxes is not historically accurate (e.g., one Amestris was Xerxes’ queen, not Vashti), a certain distance from that reign is probable. Thus a date in the late fourth or early third century BCE is preferable. The genre of the book of Esther is most easily described as an early Jewish novella. A novella is a fictional piece of writing in prose that is not designed to meet any tests of historical accuracy. It is written by a single author and meant to be read, not recited. Its plot moves from the establishment of a tension through complications to its resolution, depicting only one chain of events over a limited time frame, and concentrating on the development of characters and situations. In its final form, the book of Esther fits the description of a novella; however, as with most biblical books, the author may have used preexisting material in the composition of the book. For example, a similar story concerning Jews in the Persian court was

found among the Dead Sea Scrolls (4QprotoEsther ar). It does not, however, mention Esther or Mordecai. Esther also has elements of a royal courtier tale, in which a protagonist rises to power in a royal court, encounters opposition, falls, and then is reinstated. This type of tale is also found in Daniel 1–6 and the Joseph cycle in Genesis. The presence of the “royal courtier tale” form in Esther explains the existence in the book of many elements found in Wisdom literature, such as the court setting, the struggle between two royal courtiers, the relationship of Esther to Mordecai as the adopted child of the wise courtier, and the portrayal of Ahasuerus as the type of the foolish king. The author of Esther uses several structuring elements to give the book a sense of balance and symmetry. The most prominent of these is the use of banquets or feasts, which occur in pairs, with each member of the pair opposing or complementing the other. The book contains ten banquets or feasts:  1. Ahasuerus’s banquet for the nobility (1:2–4)   2. Ahasuerus’s banquet for all the men of Susa (1:5–8)   3. Vashti’s banquet for the women (1:9)   4. Esther’s enthronement banquet (2:18)   5. Haman and Ahasuerus’s banquet (3:15)   6. Esther’s first banquet (5:4–8)   7. Esther’s second banquet (7:1–9)   8. The Jews’ feasting (8:17)   9. The first feast of Purim (9:17, 19) 10. The second feast of Purim (9:18) Banquets 1 and 2 go together, as do 3 and 4, 6 and 7, and 9 and 10. Banquet 5, in which Haman and Ahasuerus toast the destruction of the Jews, makes a contrasting pair with banquet 8, where the Jews celebrate the averting of their slaughter. The use of pairs is also evident among the characters, who occur in three pairs of men and women: Ahasuerus and Vashti, Mordecai and Esther, and Haman and Zeresh. The characters are also grouped in complementary or contrasting pairs throughout the book: Vashti/ Esther, Haman/Mordecai, Mordecai/Esther, and Esther/Haman. The main literary characteristic of the book of Esther is the use of irony and humor to explore the darker themes of power and its absence, ethnic tension and the threat of genocide, and the sin of pride and its consequences.

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The use of irony is immediately evident in the author’s choice of heroine: Esther is a female Jewish orphan, the least powerful member (orphan) of the less powerful gender (female) of a powerless people (Jews) in the mighty Persian Empire. Yet she reaches the heights of power, and the powerful man who attempted to slaughter her and her people ends up dead himself. This theme of ironic reversal (peripety) occurs throughout the book.

Hermeneutical Issues Esther did not achieve undisputed canonical status in Judaism until after the third century CE. The Western church accepted the book as canonical in the fourth century CE, while the Eastern church did not accept it until the eighth century. The reason for the difficulty in achieving canonical status is the book’s perceived lack of religiosity. Most glaring is the complete absence of any mention of God. In addition, the concepts of law and covenant are absent, and there are no prayers. In fact, Esther, the heroine of the tale, is married to a non-Jew, does not uphold the dietary laws, and lives in a completely Gentile environment. These facts indicate that, for the audience of the book of Esther, being a Jew was more an ethnic designation than a religious one. To compensate for this lack of religiosity, the Septuagint Additions to Esther (see below) and rabbinic traditions attempt to add religious elements to the book (e.g., Rabbi Johanan states that Esther, like Daniel, ate only vegetables). Nevertheless, the book remains one of the most secular in the Hebrew Bible. A religious element is not entirely absent, however. Esther calls for a fast before going to confront the king. Fasting is a religious practice in Judaism (e.g., the fast of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement). More important, God’s control of events and the Jews’ status as God’s chosen people seem to be assumed by the book. In 4:14 Mordecai tells Esther, “For if you keep silence at such a time as this, relief and deliverance will rise for the Jews from another quarter, but you and your father’s family will perish.” The word “quarter” may be a veiled reference to God, and the hand of God behind the scenes in the events taking place seems to be assumed by the verse. The probable reason for Esther’s final inclusion in the Hebrew canon is its connection with the festival of Purim, an extremely popular festival that began to be celebrated in the

Diaspora and later was accepted in Judah. During the celebration, the merrymaker is told to get so drunk that he can no longer distinguish between “Blessed be Mordecai!” and “Cursed be Haman!” The festival continues in popularity today. The inclusion of the book of Esther in the Jewish canon was probably the result of popular pressure. Some have argued, however, that the connection of the story of Esther and Mordecai to the festival of Purim is very doubtful. The only link between the story and the festival is the word pur, or “lot,” which Haman casts to determine the most propitious day for the slaughter of the Jews (3:7). The addition of the Purim material to the story appears as an afterthought, an association made after the composition of the original work, to legitimate a festival already celebrated by Diaspora Jews. However, as it stands, the book should be considered a coherent whole, since the book contains themes and structures that span all ten chapters. The question of the relationship between the book and the feast of Purim remains unresolved, although the festival of Purim was the original impetus for the inclusion of Esther in the Hebrew canon. Esther’s interpretive problems did not cease upon its acceptance into the canon. The book’s indifference to religious practices, its dubious sexual ethics, and its female heroine continued to baffle commentators, particularly male Protestant commentators, who wished to make the book conform to the expectations of a Western Christian audience. The tendency among scholars was to exalt Mordecai as the true hero of the tale and to downplay or even vilify the role of Esther. As late as 1971 Carey Moore stated, “Between Mordecai and Esther the greater hero in the Hebrew is Mordecai, who supplied the brains while Esther simply followed his directions” (Moore, lii). Esther’s sexual ethics in particular are called into question. “Esther, for the chance of winning wealth and power, takes her place in the herd of maidens who became concubines of the king” (Paton, 96). This attitude indicates a failure to accept the book on its own terms, in its historical setting of the androcentric, male-dominated Persian Empire. Modern women are also made uncomfortable by the actions of Esther—her entry into the king’s harem and her lack of challenge to the status quo. For many women, Vashti is the more palatable female character, since she directly challenges the male power structure.

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However, in order for the character Esther to be fully appreciated as the heroine of the story that bears her name, the book must be accepted in the cultural milieu that produced it. In the world portrayed by the book of Esther, Esther has no choice but to obey the king’s command. Disobedience would mean death for her and for her guardian Mordecai. Once made queen, Esther skillfully manipulates the power structure of the Persian court in order to attain her goal, the salvation of her people. This goal takes precedence over any personal considerations, including her fear for her own life. In fact, Esther, precisely because she was a woman and therefore basically powerless within Persian society, was the paradigm of the Diaspora Jew, who was also powerless in Persian society. Because she was successful in attaining power within the structure of society, she served as a role model for Diaspora Jews seeking to attain a comfortable and successful life in a foreign society, but also as a model of selfsacrifice if circumstances demanded it.

The Additions to the Book of Esther The Septuagint version of Esther, produced in the late second or early first century BCE, contains six passages not found in the Hebrew text of the book of Esther. When the Christian

scholar Jerome revised the Old Latin translation of the Bible, he collected them and placed them at the end of the canonical book. In English translations, Protestant Bibles will place the Additions in the Apocrypha (either alone or integrated with Hebrew Esther), while recent Roman Catholic Bibles (JB, NAB) translate Hebrew Esther but include the Greek Additions in the appropriate places. Tradition assigns the additions the letters A–F. A. Mordecai’s dream; the conspiracy against the king B. The royal edict of Haman C. The prayers of Mordecai and Esther D. Expansion of the account of Esther’s audience with the king E. The royal edict of Mordecai F. Explanation of Mordecai’s dream; conclusion and colophon The purpose of the Additions was to add a specifically religious element, to heighten the dramatic interest, and to lend a note of authenticity to the events of the book. For further information, see the commentary on the Greek Book of Esther in the Apocrypha section of this volume. The comments below address the original Hebrew version.

Comment The Story of Vashti (Esth. 1:1–22) The first female character the book of Esther introduces is Vashti the queen, the wife of Ahasuerus. Ahasuerus summons her to appear before his court in the midst of a wild drinking party, in order that he may show off her beauty. She refuses, and Ahasuerus, on the advice of his nobles, who fear that her example may cause other wives to rebel against their husbands, banishes her from court. The author here introduces a touch of the burlesque; Vashti’s refusal to comply with the king’s demand is perceived by the men as a grave threat to the dominance of every husband in the kingdom. Ahasuerus and his courtiers appear as hapless buffoons before the calm strength of Vashti and, by implication, of all their wives! The motive for her refusal is not given in the text, which has led to much speculation

in the commentaries. For instance, the Targum (the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible) informs the reader that the king wished Vashti to appear naked before the company and that out of modesty she refused. Vashti serves mainly as a foil for Esther, although her character is in some ways more congenial to the modern woman. She is a strong female character who loses her position as a result of her refusal to acquiesce to the greater society’s demands upon her. It is another one of the author’s ironies that her punishment gives her exactly what she wanted: she is no longer to appear before the king!

Esther Becomes Queen (Esth. 2:1–23) This chapter introduces the reader to the main characters, Esther and Mordecai. Esther, the cousin and ward of Mordecai, is described as

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very beautiful, but no hint concerning her character is given. In verse 8 Esther is taken, with all the other virginal women in Susa, into the king’s harem. The text gives no judgment on the matter and seems to take her obedience to the king’s command for granted. To disobey would be suicidal. Verse 9 begins to portray Esther as more than merely beautiful. She earns the regard of Hegai, the king’s eunuch, who gives Esther the best of everything in the harem. Esther, in other words, has taken steps to place herself in the best possible position within her situation. Mordecai, the guardian of Esther, is described as “sitting at the king’s gate” (2:19), that is, as a royal courtier. He is portrayed as very concerned for Esther’s welfare. Among other things, Mordecai charges her not to reveal her Jewish identity. The motive for this advice is not given, although it hints at ethnic tensions that will surface later in the book, and it serves as a plot device to heighten tension later in the story. Esther sensibly follows the advice of her more seasoned guardian and mentor. When Esther’s turn with the king arrives (again, it must be emphasized that the text does not give a negative judgment on this process), she wins the love of Ahasuerus and becomes the queen. She wisely follows the advice of Hegai, and by working within the power structure of her environment (the Persian harem system), she moves from a completely powerless position into the relatively more powerful one of queen. Her last act before the main events of chapter 4 is to inform the king of the plot of the eunuchs that Mordecai had uncovered. She is attempting to use her position to enhance the status of her relatives, the action of a wise courtier.

The Downfall of Haman and the Triumph of Esther (Esth. 3:1–8:2) The central section of the book chronicles the rise and fall of the royal favorite, Haman the Agagite, and the actions of Esther that bring about his downfall and save the Jews of the Persian Empire. In this section we witness Esther successfully manipulating the power structures of the Persian Empire, using the tools that are available to her to achieve her goals. Haman is introduced as a descendant of Agag, the king of the Amalekites, the ancient and bitter enemies of Israel (Exod. 17:14–16; 1 Sam. 15:32–33). Therefore the struggle between

Mordecai and Haman is not merely personal but has national, ethnic implications. Because of this, it is important to investigate the behavior of Esther and Mordecai during the crisis precipitated by Haman and to question the interpretation that casts Mordecai in the role of the wise courtier. Chapter 3 outlines the struggle between Haman and Mordecai. Haman, having been made the king’s vizier, desires that everyone in the kingdom should bow down to him. Mordecai refuses, and an angry Haman plots the destruction of all the Jews in the Persian Empire. The reason for Mordecai’s refusal to bow down to Haman is not given in the text; there is no impediment to paying homage to human rulers in Jewish law. Commentators, beginning with the rabbis, have sought to supply the reason. Midrash Rabbah suggests, for example, that Haman had an idol pinned to his breast, and thus Mordecai could not bow down to him. Among modern commentators, L. B. Paton saw in Mordecai’s action a “spirit of independence.” The text itself, however, is silent. With no reason for it given, Mordecai’s action appears foolish in the extreme, placing his life and the life of his people in jeopardy. In Esther 3:4 the other servants wait to see who will prove stronger, Mordecai the Jew or Haman the Agagite (Amalekite), again implying an ethnic conflict. At this point in the story, Haman seems to be winning. Mordecai’s reaction to Haman’s plot does not seem to help his own cause. He appears to go into a panic, putting on sackcloth and wailing in the king’s gate (4:1). Mordecai’s response to the crisis that he set in motion is to bring the problem to the attention of Esther, who fortuitously now occupies a position of influence with the king. Esther now reappears in the story, responding to the report of Mordecai’s behavior by sending messengers to discover the cause of his actions. Mordecai responds by sending word to Esther of the disaster and charging her to go to the king. This is the turning point of the story. Esther ceases to be the protégée of the male characters surrounding her and becomes instead the chief actor and controller of events. In 4:11 Esther speaks directly for the first time in the narrative: “All the king’s servants and the people of the king’s provinces know that if any man or woman goes to the king inside the inner court without being called, there is but one law—all alike are to be put to death. Only if

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the king holds out the golden scepter to someone, may that person live. I myself have not been called to come in to the king for thirty days.” Esther’s reaction to Mordecai’s demand is not cowardice but a statement of fact. If she goes to the king unsummoned, the chances are good that she will die. In addition, what influence would she have with the king if he has not wished to see her in thirty days? Mordecai responds, however, by prodding her to act, emphasizing the importance of human action in accomplishing God’s purpose (4:13; a major underlying theme in Esther) and reminding her that as queen she does have power (4:14). Thus prodded, Esther springs into action; the reactor becomes the actor. Esther orders a fast and then prepares to go to the king. The purpose of the fast is not stated; it remains unclear in the text whether or not the act of fasting is directed to God. This ambiguity seems to be deliberate on the part of the author, who prefers to emphasize the importance of human action. In her decision to confront the king, Esther continues on the same wise course she has taken until now. As a subordinate member of the court, she does not risk direct confrontation without first taking every possible precaution to safeguard herself and to obtain her desire. She uses her knowledge of the king’s character in order to attain her goal by appealing to his emotions. The author has already demonstrated that Ahasuerus reacts emotionally rather than rationally (e.g., his banishment of Vashti). Esther’s best way to appeal to this king is clearly through his emotions. After her fast, Esther appears unsummoned before the king. She has put on her royal robes in order to appear as attractive and queenly as possible. Her strategy works, for she wins his favor (5:2). Ahasuerus offers to grant any request of hers up to half of his kingdom. This might seem like the right time to ask the king to save the Jews; however, that would not neutralize Haman, as Esther appears to realize. Rather than making her request and leaving the results to the discretion of this mercurial king, she sets out to lull Haman into a false sense of complacency and to place the king in a position where a strong emotional response from him is guaranteed. She invites the king and Haman to a private dinner party. This places the king in her territory, the women’s quarters, where she can more easily control the situation. It also puts Haman off his guard (your enemies don’t invite

you to dinner!). Her strategy is again successful: the king is further inclined to do Esther’s will, and “Haman went out that day happy and in good spirits” (5:9). At this point in the narrative, the third female character, Haman’s wife Zeresh, is introduced (5:10). Zeresh has a minor role, but serves as a mirror to Esther. She too is a wise courtier; in her first appearance she gives Haman advice on how to punish Mordecai (have him executed!), which he accepts. In her second appearance, however, she realizes that Haman is about to fall: “If Mordecai, before whom your downfall has begun, is of the Jewish people, you will not prevail against him, but will surely fall before him” (6:13). How Zeresh, a non-Jew, knows this is not made clear, but her wisdom is certainly greater than her husband’s. Chapter 6 contains a short interlude in which Ahasuerus unwittingly humiliates Haman. Haman, brought down by his own arrogance, is forced to give Mordecai (for saving the king’s life in chap. 3) the reward that he constructed for himself, namely, to parade Mordecai through the streets on the king’s horse, loudly proclaiming that Mordecai is favored by the king. The king’s attendance at the second banquet to which Esther invites him is the affirmation that he means to grant Esther’s request. It should be noted that although the reader has the benefit of chapter 6 and knows of Haman’s humiliation before Mordecai, there is no indication in the text that Esther knows anything about it. She views Haman as just as dangerous as before. So when she makes her request, she must convince the king of the rightness of her position. She appeals to Ahasuerus’s emotions by the raw urgency of her plea: “Let my life be given me—that is my petition—and the lives of my people—that is my request” (7:3). She then argues, against Haman, that the destruction of the Jews would be a great (financial) loss to the king. Later in the scene, when Haman pleads for his life, the fact that she does not try to save him may appear unattractive. Esther, however, must act on her primary loyalty to her community, which has motivated her throughout this scene. Haman left alive would still constitute a threat to the Jewish community. Esther acknowledges by her silence that Haman must die for the Jews to be safe. By 8:2 Esther has won a complete victory. She has received Haman’s property from Ahasuerus and persuaded the king to make

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Mordecai his vizier in place of Haman. Esther now controls wealth, court appointments, and access to the king. She has risen from her lowly status in chapter 2 to the very pinnacle of power in the Persian Empire.

The Festival of Purim (Esth. 8:3–10:3) The last section of the book describes how Esther and Mordecai overturn the edict of Haman, the subsequent victory of the Jews, and the inauguration of the festival of Purim. Esther and Mordecai act together in the king’s name, assuring the complete triumph of the Jews over their enemies. In fact, so complete is this victory that many Gentiles “profess to be Jews” (8:17). The rather bloodthirsty tone of chapter 9 may be troubling to a contemporary reader; the Jews seem to have turned on their enemies the very violence that threatened them. Two considerations may mitigate this objection. First, the fact that according to the story many people in the empire were willing to carry out Haman’s edict indicates an underlying anti-Jewish sentiment that will continue to threaten the Jewish minority (9:5). Second, it is made clear that the Jews do not plunder their enemies (9:10, 15, 16), suggesting that they were fighting for survival and not for increased wealth. The result is that the oppressed and endangered minority becomes the most powerful group in society. This reversal has been accomplished by human action motivated by ethnic solidarity and an underlying faith in the providence of God, specifically by the action of the

woman Esther, a powerless member of a powerless group. She serves as the role model for all Diaspora Jews, who find themselves in a minority status. This then is the original purpose of the book: to acquaint the Jews in the eastern Diaspora with a mode of conduct that will enable them to attain security and to lead happy and productive lives. Esther the queen, by her deeds and in her character, typifies this mode of life. Bibliography

Crawford, Sidnie White. “The Book of Esther: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, edited by Leander Keck, 3:853–942. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999. Fox, Michael V. Character and Ideology in the Book of Esther. Studies in Biblical ­Personalities. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. Laniak, Timothy S. Shame and Honor in the Book of Esther. SBLDS 165. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1998. Levenson, Jon D. Esther: A Commentary. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. Moore, Carey A. Esther. Anchor Bible 7B. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1971. Paton, L. B. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Esther. International Critical Commentary. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1908.

Job Carol A. Newsom

Introduction A woman reading the Bible for the first time might wonder whether the book of Job would be worth her while. It appears to be another of those books in which men do all the talking. In fact, the only time a woman ventures to make a comment, she is silenced with the criticism that she talks like a fool. It would be a great mistake, however, for women to ignore the book of Job. When one reads it closely, some surprising things appear. What Job and his friends are debating turns out to include some important issues that feminist theology has been raising in recent years: the significance of personal experience as a source of religious insight, the importance and difficulty of solidarity among those who are oppressed, a critique of traditional models of God, and the relationship between human existence and the whole of creation.

Composition and Structure Dates for the composition of Job have ranged from the tenth century BCE to the second century BCE, although most scholars assume that the book was written during the early postexilic period, perhaps during the fifth century. As elusive as the date is the question of what kind of literature Job is. While it is usually associated with the Wisdom books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Sirach, Job is unique within biblical literature. The book of Job has a curious structure. The first two chapters, which introduce the characters and set up the plot, are written in a “once upon a time” style, almost like that of a fairy tale. In these chapters Job appears as the traditional

character of patient endurance, bearing his misfortunes with complete acceptance. In chapter 3, however, both the style and the character of Job change dramatically. The simple prose is replaced with beautiful but highly demanding poetry, and Job, no longer patient, begins to speak bitter, almost blasphemous words. From chapter 4 through chapter 27 Job and his three friends, Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar, argue with one another about the meaning of Job’s misfortunes and what light they shed on the character of Job and of God. A poem on the inaccessibility of wisdom (Job 28) provides an interlude before Job takes up his speech again to challenge God directly (Job 29–31). Although one expects God’s response to follow immediately, instead there occurs the long speech of a fourth friend, Elihu, who has not previously been mentioned (Job 32–37). In all probability these chapters are a later addition to the book, provided by someone who thought he could do a better job of answering Job than the three friends. In the opinion of most subsequent readers, he does not. The climax of the book occurs in the speeches of God from the whirlwind and Job’s response to them (38:1–42:6). What is initially puzzling about the divine speeches is that they do not address Job’s questions directly but are mostly concerned with an elaborate description of the created world. At the end of the speeches, however, Job retracts his accusations against God. The ending of the book (42:7–17) returns to the simple prose of the first chapters as it describes Job’s restoration. Most modern readers are frustrated by the seams and tensions that prevent the book of Job

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from being a seamless whole; but perhaps this frustration can be put to good use. One of feminism’s important insights is that all understanding is partial and depends in significant measure on the perspective from which one views things, an insight sometimes called “standpoint theory.” While we are accustomed to thinking of books as being composed from a single perspective or standpoint, and so conveying the perspective of the author, what if a book were composed from a variety of perspectives that were intentionally not harmonized with one another? This type of writing is called “polyphonic,” with reference to the way in which polyphonic music makes use of different voices singing independent lines of melody, even as the work is experienced as a complex whole. So it is with the book of Job. The prose tale is one perspective on the story of Job. The dialogue between Job and his friends is modeled on a very different ancient genre, one in which two clashing perspectives are allowed to confront each other without receiving resolution. The wisdom poem in chapter 28 belongs to yet another genre with its own way of perceiving what is at stake. The final speeches of Job and God seem intentionally designed to contrast with one another in terms of the perspectives they take—Job from the perspective of his own experience, God from the perspective of creation and cosmos. And, of course, Elihu is a voice from a different time and place entirely. If one does not insist that all of the different voices be merged into a single one, then a new insight emerges. Each voice is able to tell part of the truth about the story of Job, but no one of them is able to tell the whole truth. Indeed, even the entire polyphony of the book can see and say only so much. The truth about Job is inexhaustible and requires readers throughout the centuries, located in new standpoints and seeing from new perspectives, to continue to explore hitherto unrecognized aspects of the truth of Job’s story.

Religious Issues in Job In the opening chapters Job’s perfect character becomes the occasion for a disagreement between God and the satan. Not to be confused with the later Jewish and Christian figure of the devil, the satan in Job is a member of God’s heavenly court, whose functions are rather like those of a prosecuting attorney. The satan raises

questions about the motivation of Job’s piety, suggesting that Job is pious because God has blessed his life abundantly and that if all his blessings were suddenly destroyed, he would curse God. To determine the motivation of Job’s piety, God permits two sets of disasters to befall Job: the loss of his possessions and his children, and the loss of his health. The notion of a wager in heaven at Job’s expense is, of course, quite outrageous, but to dismiss the book as unworthy would be to miss an important experience. The book of Job is rather like a parable, in that it tells its frankly outrageous tale for the purpose of disorienting and reorienting the perspectives of its readers. Perhaps an even closer analogy would be the feminist science fiction of Ursula LeGuin. She described her novels as “thought experiments.” Since one could not actually run an experiment to see what would happen, for instance, if there were no such thing as fixed gender identity, she could write a book (The Left Hand of Darkness) in which that was the situation of life on another planet. Similarly, the prose tale in Job 1–2 and 42 wonders whether, if God blesses people, people are good only in order to get the blessing, or if truly disinterested piety exists. One cannot conduct an experiment, but one can tell a story. Within the prose tale, Job’s behavior and responses in chapters 1–2 seem to affirm that his piety is offered without expectation of reward. But the polyphonic structure of the book interrupts the voice of the prose tale with other voices that see different issues at stake. Once the friends arrive and Job breaks the sympathetic silence of their presence with his harrowing curse on the day of his birth (Job 3), matters quickly become more complicated. Though all of them are ignorant of the events in heaven, Job and his three friends assume that his misfortunes come from God. The friends essentially understand Job’s sufferings as either a punishment from God or a disciplinary warning. In either case they urge him to adopt a penitent and humble attitude, and they assure Job that God will restore him if he turns to God in trust. But Job, who knows that he has not been guilty of any conduct that would warrant such punishment, cannot accept their advice. To do so would be to destroy his own integrity. Because he suffers without being guilty, Job concludes either that some enormous mistake has been made about him or, more disturbingly, that God is not a just god

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but rather a monstrous tyrant. The book had begun as an inquiry into the motives of human piety. Through the compelling speeches of Job it becomes an examination of the character of God. But God’s response to Job once again

reframes the issues, challenging the whole set of assumptions that Job and his friends had made the basis of their argument and offering a radically different model of God, creation, and human existence.

Comment Women Characters in the Book of Job (Job 1–2; 42) Although they have only “bit parts,” Job’s daughters and his wife have long intrigued readers and commentators. Job’s daughters seem to have a status within the family that is more prominent than what is typically assumed about the position of daughters in ancient Israel. Perhaps it is the author’s way of underscoring the exceptional nature of everything that has to do with Job. In describing the cycle of banquets held by the seven sons of Job, the narrator specifically mentions that the sons would invite their three sisters to join the festivities (1:4). More intriguing is the note about the three daughters born to Job after his misfortunes. The narrator gives the names of each: Jemimah (“Dove”), Keziah (“Cinnamon”), and Keren-happuch (“Box of eye shadow”). Not only are they said to be exceptionally beautiful; Job gives them an inheritance among their brothers (42:14–15). That their inheritance is mentioned suggests that it was not a customary practice. Later interpreters were fascinated by the mention of the daughters’ inheritance. The Testament of Job, a Jewish writing from the first century BCE, speculates that Job gave his daughters golden sashes with mystical properties that allowed them to understand and speak the language of the angels. It is Job’s wife, however, who is of most interest as a female character. (See the separate article on Job’s wife.) Her words to Job are radical and provocative: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die” (2:9). What she says echoes God’s assessment of Job as one who persists in integrity (2:3b), but the course of action she urges would end the wager on the satan’s terms (2:5). There is an ambiguity in her words, however, that is seldom recognized, one that revolves around the thematically crucial word “integrity.” The term “integrity” (tummah) denotes a person whose conduct is in complete accord with moral

and religious norms and whose character is one of utter honesty, without guile. Job’s wife’s disturbing question hints at a tension between these two aspects of the word. Her question could be understood in two different senses. She could be heard as saying: “Do you still persist in your integrity (=righteousness)? Look where it has gotten you. Give it up, as God has given you up. Curse God, and then die.” Or she could be understood as saying: “Do you still persist in your integrity (=honesty)? If so, stand by it and say what is truly in your heart. Curse God before you die.” However Job has understood her words, his reply, criticizing her in the strongest terms (“you speak as any foolish woman would speak,” 2:10) has generally set the tone for her evaluation by commentators from ancient times to the present. There have occasionally been more sympathetic interpretations of her motives among both ancient and modern writers. The Septuagint gives her a longer speech in which she talks movingly of Job’s sufferings and of her own. In The Testament of Job she is clearly a figure of pathos, whose sufferings and humiliations as she tries to provide for her ailing husband are vividly described. Even in these treatments, however, she remains a foil for the morally superior Job, who corrects her understanding. By making Job’s wife a more sympathetic character, both the ancient writers and the modern commentators who follow their lead patronize her. Her words become “excusable,” and consequently it is not necessary to take them seriously. What gets overlooked in this approach is that Job’s wife is the one who recognizes, long before Job himself does, what is at stake theologically in innocent suffering: the conflict between innocence and integrity, on the one hand, and an affirmation of the goodness of God, on the other. It is the issue with which Job will struggle in the following chapters. The honesty and religious radicalism of Job’s wife have not been entirely overlooked, at least

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in modern literary rewritings of the story of Job. Robert Frost, in A Masque of Reason, portrays her as a sharp but rather shrewish protofeminist. He hints at her “heretical” stance by naming her Thyatira, the city from which John’s opponent, “Jezebel,” came (Rev. 2:20–25). In Archibald MacLeish’s well-known play J.B., it is Sarah, J.B.’s wife, who first understands and then expresses the humanistic, postreligious vision of the play: sarah: You wanted justice and there was none—Only love. j.b.: [God] does not love. He Is. sarah: But we do. That’s the wonder. Both in the original Hebrew book of Job and in many of the retellings of the story, Job’s wife is the prototypical woman on the margin, whose iconoclastic words provoke defensive condemnation but whose insight serves as an irritant that undermines old complacencies.

Experience and the Critique of Tradition (Job 3–27; 32–37) It is interesting that Job’s outburst against his wife is the last thing he says for some time. Apparently not acknowledging the presence of the three friends who come to comfort him, Job sits in silence for seven days. When he finally speaks in chapter 3, his words sound distinctly like those of his wife. Though he does not exactly curse God, he curses the day of his birth. Though he does not die, he speaks longingly of death. In the chapters that follow, his persistence in his integrity—both his moral righteousness and his honesty—motivates his angry, iconoclastic words. His wife’s troubling questions have become his own. In an ironic reversal Job’s disturbing words provoke a defensive reaction from his friends, just as he had rebuked his wife. They attempt to recall him to reason, that is, to the received traditions that are accepted as common sense within their community. The friends’ response to Job takes a variety of forms but is largely a variation on a few themes. Their fundamental conviction is that God acts in accordance with justice, treating persons as they deserve. At first they urge Job to steadfastness. Since he is basically a good man, he can rest assured that his misfortunes are but temporary, for God always protects the righteous from utter destruction

(4:6–7; 5:19–22). Indeed, Job should even rejoice at his misfortunes, because they are the reproof and discipline of God (5:17), designed to alert him to hidden faults before they become fatal (33:15–18). In any event Job should not be astonished if God seems to treat him as unrighteous and impure; all creatures, even the angels, are so before God (4:17–21). Of course, as Job persists in what they perceive as his obstinacy, his friends gradually become convinced that Job is in fact a wicked man. Since only a sinner could talk as he does (15:4–6), they are warranted in charging him with serious moral offenses (22:2–11). What is of interest to a feminist reading of Job is to notice the sources of authority upon which the friends ground their confident assurance that they know what is true. They appeal to common sense, what “everybody” knows (“Think now, who that was innocent ever perished?” 4:7), confident that their perceptions are the same as Job’s (“See, we have searched this out; it is true. Hear, and know it for yourself,” 5:27). Sometimes they cite anecdotal evidence (“I have seen . . . ,” 4:8; 5:3). Or they may argue deductively from what they assume are universally agreed principles (“Far be it from God that he should do wickedness. . . . For according to their deeds he will repay them. . . . Of a truth, God will not do wickedly,” 34:10–12). The friends buttress their own arguments with the weight of tradition (“For inquire now of bygone generations . . . for we are but of yesterday, and we know nothing. . . . Will they not teach you and tell you?” 8:8–10). Even the transcendent authority of revelation is invoked (“When deep sleep falls on mortals . . . a spirit glided past my face. . . . There was silence, then I heard a voice,” 4:13–16). The friends’ sources of authority are powerful ones, not to be discounted lightly. Where then does Job find the basis to contest their construction of reality? Although his arguments are sophisticated and varied, Job holds his ground for a single fundamental reason: he knows that his friends’ common sense and their traditions, their rationality and their revelations are inconsistent with his own experience. For Job, to hold fast to his integrity means to insist on the validity and authority of his own experience, even when it seems to be contradicted by what all the world knows to be true. What is at stake between Job and his friends should sound familiar to women. The sense of

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what is normative in a society—its highest values, its ideal of human nature, its notions of God—has been constructed largely on the basis of male experience. Women who have found that their experience is inconsistent with or not adequately described by these norms have often tended to discount their own experience. Where women’s lives do not fit the patterns of male experience, women are frequently judged to be defective or inferior. It has been one of the tasks of feminist thought to encourage women to hold fast to the integrity of their own experience. To be sure, Job and his friends are not engaged in a debate about men’s and women’s experience. But what is important for feminist thought is that the issue of different sources of authority is explicitly raised in this book in such a way as to authenticate the crucial role of personal experience in the critique of received tradition. Although Job’s own perceptions are incomplete and in need of correction, it is the friends and not Job who are rebuked for failing to speak truly (42:7).

The Moral World of Biblical Patriarchy and the Problem of Solidarity (Job 29–31) For the author’s purposes it was necessary that the hero of the book be a character at the top of the social order. The hero must be one who quite literally has everything to lose. It is scarcely surprising then that Job is depicted as a patriarch rather like Abraham, the wealthy and respected head of a large household with many dependents. Readers are accustomed to thinking of Job as a universal character, at least as “everyman” if not “everywoman.” Although it is certainly possible to gain insight into the human condition in general from the book, it is important to remember that Job experiences his suffering precisely as a patriarch. Without his really being aware of it, his sense of identity, his expectations about the world and his place in it, and even his image of God have all been shaped by his status in a particular social and moral order. When his world is shaken by the suffering he undergoes, it becomes possible to see something of the dimensions and the limitations of that world. The term “patriarchy” is a problematic one, because it has been used in so many different contexts and for so many different purposes. It

is not only a matter of male-female relationships but a whole set of social and moral arrangements in which authority resides primarily with older males. In Israel the basic social unit was the household, within which the senior male had considerable authority over its members. The social values of biblical patriarchy were what one could call paternalistic. Within the village or larger social area, wealthier men also had responsibilities for those who could not provide for themselves and were subject to exploitation: traveling strangers, the poor of both sexes, but especially women and children who had no male to provide for them. In return for this patronage, the patriarch received their loyalty and respect. Even more important, the patriarch received honor from his peers. Maintaining the social order was also part of the responsibility of the senior males. Not only were they responsible for justice within their own households, but when issues of a broader community nature arose, the senior males would meet at the city gate to take counsel together and to adjudicate disputes (see, e.g., Ruth 4; Jer. 26). The prosperity and the dignity of these men were generally seen as divine approval for the proper fulfillment of their social responsibilities. Indeed, to a significant extent the biblical image of God is drawn from the model of the patriarch. When Job’s three friends come to comfort him, they form a group of society’s most privileged members who are trying to make sense out of a disturbing disruption in their world. As they grope for an explanation, the three friends attempt to account for the way in which prosperity and loss, good and bad fortune, are distributed. It is not surprising that the three friends are convinced that people essentially get what they deserve and deserve what they get. Apparent discrepancies, such as Job’s misfortunes, are merely temporary. Although they are not aware of it, their complacency about the order of their society is rooted in large measure in their own privileged position. They simply cannot see injustice in the world. Job, however, has been shocked out of his own previous complacency by the wholly undeserved suffering he has experienced. Gradually he begins to see things from a different perspective, from the perspective of others who suffer. In a powerful speech in 24:1–17 Job describes the desperate condition of the very poor, who are without food, shelter, or adequate

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clothing, exploited by those who hire them or lend to them, and subject to repeated violence. Job draws particular attention to the plight of the widow and the orphan, for, then as now, women and children make up a disproportionate number of the poorest of the poor. Here Job stands in solidarity with all the wretched of the earth. Readers who find Job’s speech in 24:1–17 so moving are often disconcerted by his next speech in chapters 29–31. As he sums up his experiences and challenges God to confront him, Job no longer orients himself according to the suffering of the poor. Instead, as he speaks, he is very much the proud patriarch. It is a valuable speech, however, for anyone who wishes to understand the moral world of Israelite patriarchy. In chapter 29 Job recalls the days when all was well with him, contrasting them in chapter 30 with the misery of his present existence. In chapter 31 he challenges God through a series of oaths in which he vows to accept terrible curses upon himself if he has committed any of the sins he enumerates. What Job remembers most fondly is the honor and deference he received from his peers. When he went to the city gate, not only would the young men withdraw before him; the elders would rise and stand, as everyone waited silently for Job to speak (29:7–10, 21–25). The reason Job commanded such respect did not have to do with wealth and power as such, but with the fact that he exercised his authority in order to bring relief to the weak: “I delivered the poor who cried, and the orphan who had no helper. . . . I caused the widow’s heart to sing for joy. . . . I was eyes to the blind, and feet to the lame. I was a father to the needy” (29:12–16). Even in the nobility of Job’s words, however, it becomes evident why true solidarity with the oppressed is an impossibility for Job. The moral world of ancient patriarchy was an essentially paternalistic and hierarchical one. It placed a high value on alleviating the distress of the poor and weak, but for the most part it could not conceive of the fundamental changes in the organization of society that would prevent the powerlessness and destitution that so often struck the widow and the orphan. This is not to accuse Job individually of moral failure; rather, it is to recognize the limitations of the very moral world that formed him. An even less attractive face of patriarchy’s moral world appears in the following chapter. The paternalism expressed in chapter 29 is

an apparently benevolent form of hierarchical social relations. But social resentment lurks in even benevolent hierarchies, to be unleashed, as Job discovers, when a previously high-ranking member of the social order falls on hard times. “But now they make sport of me, men who are younger than I, whose fathers I would have disdained to set with the dogs of my flock ” (30:1 RSV). Job’s scathing contempt for these lowerclass people takes the form of mocking their poverty: “Through want and hard hunger they gnaw the dry and desolate ground. . . . They are driven out from society; people shout after them as after a thief. In the gullies of wadis they must live, in holes in the ground, and in the rocks” (30:3, 5–6). Job’s former solidarity with the poor seems to have evaporated before his perception that his honor—the most precious possession a man could have in his moral world—has been trampled by those without honor. Similarly, Job’s great oath in chapter 31 is a virtual catalogue of the values of ancient Israel’s patriarchal society. Job swears that he has never engaged in deceit for the sake of greed (31:5–8) or overvalued wealth (31:24–25). He has respected the daughters and wives of other men (31:1–4, 9–12). Within his own household he has upheld justice (31:13–15), and never has he taken legal advantage of the powerless (31:21–23). He has been generous to the poor (31:16–20), hospitable to the stranger (31:32), responsible to his land (31:38–40). He has not engaged in idolatry (31:26–28), nor exulted over his enemies’ misfortune (31:29–31), nor hidden his own transgressions (31:33–34). But for all the genuine nobility of this inventory of moral values, a modern woman cannot but feel aghast at the oath Job takes in defense of his sexual integrity: “If my loins were seduced by a woman and I loitered at my neighbor’s door—let any man take my wife and grind in between her thighs!” (31:9–10, trans. Mitchell, 73). Job’s words are in keeping with the patriarchal perspective that saw a woman’s sexuality as the property of her husband and an abuse of it as an injury to the husband, rather than to the woman herself. Although modern readers are critical of the proprietary view of women in Job 29–31 and of the way concern for honor tends to translate into social resentment and contempt, there is little indication that an ancient audience would have so reacted. For them, chapters 29–31 would have presented Job in the noblest possible terms—a model patriarch. He is, as God

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has described him, a man who “fears God and turns away from evil” (1:8).

Models of God (Job 38–41) There is one important respect in which Job’s patriarchal assumptions are put in question by the book. Job’s mounting frustration with God comes from his expectation that God should behave toward him as Job behaves toward his own dependents. Job has envisioned God in his own image, as a sort of divine patriarch. It is a model of God drawn from the highest and best that ancient Near Eastern culture could imagine. Job has expected God to be benevolent and paternal, but above all Job has expected God to be just, intervening directly to vindicate righteous conduct and punish wickedness. Repeatedly, Job’s language has turned to legal metaphors as he imagines coming before God (Job 9–10; 13; 16; 19; 23). Job knows how he has conducted himself in the seat of judgment (29:12–17) and when he heard complaints within his own household (31:13–15). Despite his own recent inexplicable experiences, he clings to the belief that God will yet vindicate him, if he can summon God to judgment. The radicalness of the book of Job lies in this: the rejection of Job’s model of God as inadequate. The God who meets Job in chapters 38–41 is not the great patriarch Job has anticipated. That the book remains a difficult challenge to modern readers is an indication of the extent to which the model of God as patriarch still prevails. Whereas Job’s speeches were oriented to themes of rights and injustices in the human realm and to a God who should see that justice is always done, God speaks of the ordering of creation: the foundation of the earth; the birthing of the sea; the ordering of day and night; and the mysteries of water in its myriad forms of snow, hail, rain, frost, and dew. Already in this section there is a hint of the strategy by which God attempts to reorient Job. Although tradition spoke of the giving and withholding of rain as a response to human conduct (e.g., Amos 4:7–8), here God speaks of the rain that falls in the desert where no human lives (38:25–27). Job’s categories have been too narrow, his conception of God hopelessly anthropocentric. That is to say, both Job and his friends have assumed that God primarily reacts to human conduct, a view of the world that puts

the individual human being at its center. God’s education of Job continues as God turns to speak of the animals for whom God has provided (38:39–39:30). These are not domestic animals but wild ones—the lion, the raven, the mountain goat, the wild ox, the ostrich, and so on. God quite evidently delights in their very wildness and their freedom from human use—another implicit criticism of Job’s exclusively anthropocentric views. Images of birth, nurture, and vitality abound. This is, however, an unsentimental view of the natural world, in which food for the lion’s cubs and the eagle’s nestlings means the shedding of blood, including human blood. Job’s categories of rights and wrongs and his conception of God as a larger version of himself are simply inadequate to encompass the vision God shows him. The egocentricity of Job’s view is underscored in the concluding speeches as God describes the wondrous legendary creatures Behemoth and Leviathan (Job 40–41), reminding Job that Behemoth is one of God’s creatures as well as Job and that Leviathan too is a creature proud, fearless, and magnificent (much as Job had presented himself in Job 31). For all the beauty of the divine speeches, many readers are disturbed by the fact that God’s reply does not directly address Job’s questions. Truly, God does not tell Job how to think through the issues of suffering and oppression—that remains a human task. What God has done by ignoring Job’s way of posing the question is to illumine the inadequacy of Job’s starting point, his legal model of rights and faults and his image of God as the great patriarch. From Job’s perspective, innocent suffering had to imply the injustice of God. The divine speeches hint at a different perspective. Moral and theological thinking after Job 38–41 has to begin with a new image of God and a new image of the world that can be glimpsed in these speeches. This new image is one of God as a power for life, balancing the needs of all creatures, not just humans, cherishing freedom, full of fierce love and delight for each thing without regard for its utility, acknowledging the deep interconnectedness of death and life, restraining and nurturing each element in the ecology of all creation. It is a description of God and the world that has strong points of contact with contemporary feminist thought. Yet one should not gloss over the elements of the tragic that God’s

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response implies. Though humans passionately desire to find a way of living that keeps the world whole and children safe, as Job did (1:5), the divine speeches insist that the forces of chaos and moral evil remain a part of the fabric of the world (38:8–15; 39:27–30; 41:1–34 [40:25–41:26]). Job’s verbal response to the divine speeches, though somewhat enigmatic, is certainly a retraction of his earlier accusations and an embrace of this new vision of God (42:1–6). His trust in a new understanding of reality is given concrete expression as this previously isolated and alienated sufferer reestablishes relationships. Not only is he reconciled with God; he also prays to God for his friends, receives his brothers and sisters, and becomes a father to ten more children (42:7–17). Women may regret that nothing is explicitly said about Job’s wife, but her own outspoken integrity, as much as her husband’s, remains a model for those who seek truth. Bibliography

Balentine, Samuel. Job. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2006.

Brenner, Athalya. A Feminist Companion to the Wisdom Literature. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Clines, David J. A. Job 1–20. Dallas, TX: Word Books, 1989. ———. Job 21–37. Nashville: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2006. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1987. MacLeish, Archibald. J.B.: A Play in Verse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1958. Mitchell, Stephen. The Book of Job. Translated with an introduction by Stephen Mitchell. Rev. ed. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1987. Newsom, Carol A. The Book of Job: A Contest of Moral Imaginations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. ———. “Job.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, 4:317–637. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. Schifferdecker, Kathryn. Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job. Harvard Theological Studies 61. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. van Wolde, E. J. Job’s God. London: SCM Press, 2004.

Job’s Wife and Her Interpreters Anne W. Stewart

While Job’s wife makes only a fleeting appearance in the book itself, she looms large in the history of interpretation. Commentators, theologians, poets, and artists alike have rendered her both as a compassionate companion and a merciless irritant. In the biblical text, Job’s wife issues a brief and enigmatic retort to her husband, asking “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die” (2:9). In Hebrew, the term usually translated “curse” literally means “bless,” adding further complication to

understanding the import of her words. Rabbinic Jewish commentators disputed the meaning of her speech, suggesting it could connote either care or cynicism. One interpretation views her comments as an act of concern; fearing that Job would not be able to endure his suffering with steadfastness, she advises him to pray for death immediately so that he might die as an upright man, thus preserving his integrity (Ginzberg, 457). Another interpretation suggests that Job’s wife told him to blaspheme God

Job’s Affliction, a woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger (1497–1543), depicts many of his woes: “loathsome sores” (Job 2:7), fire consuming buildings, herds of animals driven away. This illustration is from Die gantze Bibel by Christoph Froschauer (Zurich, 1531).

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so that punishment of death would befall him and relieve his suffering (Ginzberg, 458). On the other hand, the nineteenth-century Russian Jewish commentator Malbim argued that the words of Job’s wife were sarcastic and should be understood as “bless God,” not “curse God.” Job blessed God after the first test (1:21), but it led only to more suffering. In Malbim’s reading, Job’s wife suggests that the only thing that would result from more blessing is death! In any case, Job’s reply in the biblical text indicates disapproval of the sentiment of his wife’s question, as he likens her speech to that of a foolish woman, asking, “Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (2:10). The Septuagint translation of the book of Job contains a longer speech by Job’s wife. Here Job’s wife highlights her own pain as a grieving mother who is equally beset by suffering, left without home or comfort: “As for me, I am one that wanders about and a hired servant—from place to place and house to house, waiting for when the sun will set, so I can rest” (LXX 2:9 [see Pietersma and Wright, NETS]). Her final word does not hold quite the ambiguous rhetorical force of the Hebrew text, for in the Greek translation she exclaims, “Say some word to the Lord and die!” (LXX 2:9). While Job’s wife remains morally inferior to the righteous Job in this translation, her character here is also more sympathetic than in the biblical text, for she draws attention to her own suffering and does not speak rashly but only “after a long time had passed.” In The Testament of Job, a Greek text from the first century BCE or CE, Job’s wife holds a more prominent role than in the biblical version. Named Sitis, she works as a maidservant in order to earn bread to feed Job. Job’s attitude toward Sitis is more compassionate in this version of the tale. He laments, “The gall of these city fathers! How can they treat my wife like a female slave?” (T. Job 21:3–4). After a number of years, Sitis earns barely enough bread to feed herself, yet she continues to divide her wages with Job. Eventually these circumstances force her to beg from the bread merchants in the marketplace, and here she encounters Satan, who disguises himself as a merchant in order to trap her. Satan promises Sitis three loaves of bread in exchange for her hair, an arrangement to which Sitis gladly agrees. But after Satan cuts her hair, she returns to Job, sitting on the dung heap, and rebukes him with words quite similar to her speech in the Septuagint. In addition

to describing her own grief and suffering, Sitis laments the loss of her luxurious household and decries her shame in selling her own hair to obtain provisions. Sitis wishes for Job’s death as much to bring her own relief as Job’s, saying, “In the weakness of my heart, my bones are crushed. Rise, take your loaves, be satisfied. And then speak some word against the Lord and die. Then I too shall be freed from weariness that issues from the pain of your body” (T. Job 25:10). Even as The Testament of Job depicts Job’s wife as a compassionate caregiver and herself a victim of Satan’s manipulation, she is also a rather vain character who is unable to endure suffering to the same degree as her husband. Job, in fact, rebukes his wife for selling her hair, asking, “Do you not see the devil standing behind you and unsettling your reasoning so that he might deceive me too? For he seeks to make an exhibit of you as one of the senseless women who misguide their husbands’ sincerity” (T. Job 26:6). Sitis makes another appearance in The Testament of Job while Job is conversing with his friends. Wearing tattered garments, she pleads with Job’s friends and implores them to send their soldiers to dig through the ruins of Job’s house so that her children’s bodies might be recovered. Job, however, forbids this action, explaining that the children’s bodies were already taken up to heaven. As he prays, the children appear in the sky, crowned in splendor with “the heavenly one” (T. Job 40:3). Upon seeing her glorified children, Sitis falls to the ground praising God. She soon dies peacefully in her sleep, and at her death the entire city— even the animals!—mourn. Job’s wife is thus a principal character in The Testament of Job. Although she is an agent through whom Satan tries to mislead Job, she is not a willing accomplice, but one who is deceived in her efforts to be a devoted wife. Augustine (354–430 CE) holds a slightly different understanding of the relationship between Satan and Job’s wife, calling her “the devil’s accomplice.” In his Expositions on the Psalms, Augustine states that Satan left Job’s wife unscathed not as an act of mercy but as his own ally—for just as Eve tempted her husband to disobey God, so too Job’s wife would lead him astray, not comfort him. In her foolishness, Job’s wife, like Satan, was unable to see Job’s inner strength to prevail in spite of his suffering. As he likens Job’s wife to Eve, Augustine

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also compares Job to Adam. However, unlike Adam, who listened to his wife and thus was expelled from paradise, Job did not listen to his wife and so gained entrance, says Augustine. The sentiment of Job’s wife is also negotiated in various artistic renditions. Job’s wife is at times a wretch who covers her nose to stave off the stench of her husband, and at others a faithful and tender companion. Several Byzantine sarcophagi, for example, depict Job’s wife, who holds her garment to her nose to block his vile smell, using a long stick to supply Job with bread. However, other artwork presents a more tender picture. In the Jabach Altarpiece (1504– 10), Albrecht Dürer portrays Job’s wife pouring water over his neck while two musicians look on. Given the primarily negative characterization of Job’s wife in the Christian interpretive tradition, following Augustine and others, some have interpreted this artistic rendition of her in a negative light. However, in Dürer’s work, her facial features appear soft and congenial, her gesture one of comfort (see Seow, 366–67). Job’s wife also plays a part in more modern interpretations of the book. She is a prominent character in Robert Frost’s delightful play A Masque of Reason, which purports to be “chapter 43” of the book of Job and recounts an encounter between Job, his wife, God, and the devil, years after the events recorded in the biblical text. In this tale, Job’s wife is named Thyatira, perhaps a subtle allusion to the biblical Lydia, a prominent and learned woman from the city Thyatira who was a student of Paul (Acts 16:14), or to Jezebel, the opponent of John, from Thyatira (Rev. 2:18ff.). In Frost’s play, Job’s wife is an outspoken interlocutor with God. She defends her treatment of Job, calling it her “wifely duty,” and takes God to task, arguing that while she stood by Job, “All You can seem to do is lose Your temper when reason-hungry mortals ask for reasons” (Frost, 478). Even as she finds unacceptable God’s initial unwillingness to explain himself to Job, she believes that there is no universal reason: “And no one but a man would think there was. You don’t catch women trying to be Plato” (Frost, 478). Frost depicts Thyatira as a protofeminist who inquires of God why women prophets are burned as witches while male prophets receive honor. Job explains to God, “In [Thyatira’s] suspicion You’re no feminist. You have it in for women, she believes. Kipling invokes You as Lord God of Hosts. She’d like to know how You

would take a prayer that started off Lord God of Hostesses” (Frost, 479–80). Job’s wife also holds an important role in Archibald MacLeish’s play J.B. In this adaptation of the biblical text, Job’s wife is figured as the beautiful Sarah, an opinionated companion to her husband J.B. As the play begins, J.B. and Sarah enjoy wealth, a beautiful home, and four happy children, and Sarah upholds God’s justice. She assumes that their happy life requires due diligence in praising God. God will remember those who praise him but will forget those who forget God, she insists. For this reason, she prompts the family to gives thanks to God continually for their blessings. However, once their children die and J.B. loses his fortune, Sarah vehemently questions divine justice. When her husband insists that he has sinned and God is in the right, Sarah replies hysterically, “Does God demand deception of us?—Purchase His innocence by ours? Must we be guilty for Him?” (MacLeish, 109). Sarah threatens to leave if J.B. persists, for “I will not stay here if you lie— [c]onnive in your destruction, cringe to it: [n]ot if you betray my children” (MacLeish, 110). Sarah insists upon her children’s innocence. Divine justice does not account for their untimely deaths, she maintains, and she tells her husband that she refuses to “[l]et you sacrifice their deaths [t]o make injustice justice and God good!” (MacLeish, 110). Yet Sarah returns to him in the final scene of the play. When the two reunite, Sarah affirms that there is no justice in the world. She explains to her husband that she left him because she loved him and could not help him. Though he wanted justice, love is all there is. J.B. replies that God does not love. Sarah quips, “But we do. That’s the wonder” (MacLeish, 152). In MacLeish’s depiction, Job’s wife speaks authentically of pain, suffering, and the lack of reason in the world. Like Sitis in The Testament of Job, she feels suffering acutely as a grieving mother. At the same time, her views are congruent with the biblical Job to the extent that she maintains the innocence of J.B. and their children, though unlike Job, Sarah holds no hope of receiving divine explanation. Job’s wife takes on a life of her own in the history of interpretation. Her character gathers different names, various characterizations, and longer speeches. Despite the diversity among them, each tradition continues to grapple with the serious issues the biblical woman raises as she witnesses both the integrity and the anguish

Job’s wife provides some comfort to her suffering husband in the Jabach Altarpiece (oil on panel, 1504) by Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528). Their burning home is in the background on the left. The painting is owned by Städel Museum in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.

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of the one who suffers. The lively interpretive tradition surrounding Job’s wife thus ultimately points us back to the ambiguity of her words in the biblical text. Does she offer the balm of affirming Job’s integrity or the belittlement of his act of blessing? The history of interpretation would have it both ways, and perhaps indeed this is the function of her speech as an authentic response to the experience of suffering. She captures the impulses to console and to be consoled, to defend and to be defensive. Job’s wife and her cadre of interpreters teach that egregious suffering defies straightforward response. Bibliography

Augustine. Expositions of the Psalms, translated by Maria Boulding. In The Works of Saint Augustine, 3:15–20. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2000. Frost, Robert. A Masque of Reason. In The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Lathem, 471–90. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969. Ginzberg, Louis. Legends of the Jews. 2 vols. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 2003.

MacLeish, Archibald. J.B.: A Play in Verse. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958. Pfeffer, Jeremy. Malbim’s Job: The Book of Job Newly Translated and Interpreted according to the Commentary of Rabbi Meir Lebush Malbim. Jersey City, NJ: Ktav Publishing House, 2003. Pietersma, Albert, and Benjamin G. Wright. A New English Translation of the Septuagint: and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under that Title. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Seow, C. L. “Job’s Wife—With Due Respect.” In Das Buch Hiob und seine Interpretationen; Beiträge zum Hiob-Symposium auf dem Monte Verita vom 14.–19. August 2005, edited by Thomas Krüger, 351–73. Zurich: TVZ, 2007. Spittler, R. P. “The Testament of Job.” In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 1, Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, edited by James Charlesworth, 829–68. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1983. Terrien, Samuel. The Iconography of Job through the Centuries: Artists as Biblical Interpreters. University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1996.

Psalms Nancy L. deClaissé-Walford

Introduction The book of Psalms is a rich and varied collection of poetry from the life of ancient Israel. The psalmists express a wide range of emotions and feelings: joy, sorrow, fear, relief, oppression, hurt, amazement, yearning, betrayal; and they address a wide variety of topics: interpersonal relationships, enemies, illnesses, national crises, the splendor of creation, the goodness of God, Israel’s history, personal sins. Arguably the most-loved book of the Hebrew Bible, the Psalter testifies to the multifaceted dimensions of humanity’s relationship with God and with one another. From the time of the Enlightenment until the mid-twentieth century, biblical scholars spent the majority of their time undertaking text, source, form, and redaction criticism. Hermann Gunkel and his student Sigmund Mowinckel devoted significant portions of their careers to the critical study of the book of Psalms. Gunkel applied a form-critical method to the psalms, categorizing each by its type, or genre, and its setting in life. Sigmund Mowinckel built on the work of Gunkel and attempted to describe where and how each psalm in the Psalter was used in the cultic worship of ancient Israel. Gunkel and Mo­winckel understood the psalms as individual compositions that were compiled to form the book of Psalms of the Hebrew Bible. Gunkel’s form-critical method has had a lasting impact on psalm studies, allowing those studying the psalms to group like types together for comparison. A simplified form of Gunkel’s types follows:

Major Types Four major types of psalms appear in the Psalter, classified according to their form and literary type. Hymns   1. Hymns of the Community (e.g., Pss. 15, 29, 46, 67, 76, 81, 105, 107, 113, 125, 129, 147, 150) represent the collective voice of the community of faith praising God (halelu yah) for all that God does on behalf of the people and praising God for God’s presence among them. In Gunkel’s words, “The predominant mood in all the Hymns is the enthusiastic but reverent adoration of the glorious and awe-inspiring God.”  2. Thanksgiving Hymns of the Individual (e.g., Pss. 23, 34, 66, 87, 91, 111, 121, 139, 146) were sung by individual voices, praising God for goodness to them or on their behalf, usually for deliverance from some trying situation. Gunkel describes the occasion on which these songs would have been offered: “A person is saved out of great distress, and now with grateful heart he brings a thank offering to YHWH.” Laments   1. Community Laments (e.g., Pss. 12, 44, 53, 74, 83, 85, 90, 106, 126, 137) were sung by the assembled people, protesting and grieving the tragedies and injustices

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in and the threats to their communities. Community laments consist of the people’s appeals to God and their confidence that God has responded or will respond to their appeals.  2. Individual Laments (e.g., Pss. 3, 9, 10, 11, 27, 36, 51, 59, 71, 88, 102, 120, 141, 143) were sung by single voices, and like Community Laments, appealed to God for deliverance from life-threatening situations. Gunkel points out the typical characteristics of these psalms: “first, the wailing, almost desperate lament and the passionate prayer; then, suddenly, the certainty of deliverance in a jubilant tone.”

Minor Types In addition to the four major types of psalms there are a number of minor, but significant, types. These psalms are categorized, for the most part, by subject matter rather than by form and literary type. For example, a royal psalm may be a hymn or a lament, but is categorized as a royal psalm because its subject matter is the Israelite king.  1. Royal Psalms (e.g., Pss. 2, 21, 45, 72, 89, 110, 144) spoke of YHWH’s provision for the Israelite kings who reigned in Jerusalem during the period of the monarchy (ca. 1000–587 BCE).   2. Creation Psalms (e.g., Pss. 8, 19, 65, 104) celebrated God’s sovereignty over the created world and the place and role of human beings in the world.   3. Wisdom Psalms (e.g., Pss. 1, 32, 37, 49, 73, 78, 112, 119, 127, 128, 133, 145) provided instruction in right living and right faith in the tradition of the other wisdom writings of the Hebrew Bible— Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job. In most of these psalms, the path to wisdom is through adherence to the Torah, the instruction of YHWH.   4. Enthronement Psalms (e.g., Pss. 47, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99) celebrated the enthronement of God as king in the midst of the people of God. The “kingship of God” is an important theme in the book of Psalms. In the mid-twentieth century, Brevard S. Childs championed an approach to the biblical

text called “canonical.” His 1976 essay “Reflections on the Modern Study of the Psalms” and his 1979 book Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture encouraged scholars to move away from dissecting the biblical text into its most minute components and to move toward examining the text in the form in which it was preserved for us, as a whole. Childs maintained, in fact, that it was useless to attempt to understand the underlying layers of traditions that make up the biblical text, because the editors who compiled and transmitted the texts deliberately obscured the layers in a process Childs calls “actualization,” a process whose purpose was to keep the text from “being moored in the past.” Thus the only way to study and interpret texts is in the form in which we have them. The book of Psalms, therefore, should not be read as an artifact of various compiled expressions of the sorrow, fear, relief, oppression, amazement, yearning, and betrayal in the lives of our ancestors in the faith, but as a book that reflects the larger human condition, as a book “for all times.” James A. Sanders shared Brevard Childs’s interest in studying the final form of the text of the Hebrew Bible. But he disagreed with Childs’s assertion that it was useless to try to understand the underlying layers of traditions that make up a text. Sanders maintained that biblical texts are grounded in historical settings, that those settings can be discovered, and that they are important for understanding the shape of the texts. He believed, however, that scholars had been looking in the wrong places for those historical settings. While Hermann Gunkel looked at the individual oral settings of the psalms and Sigmund Mowinckel examined cultic settings, Sanders studied communities of faith. Every psalm in the Hebrew Psalter is a discrete composition; many were used in ancient Israel’s worship experience. All, however, were remembered, valued, repeated, and passed on generation after generation within the ancient Israelite communities of faith. Communities found value in the texts, or they would not have been preserved and incorporated into the book of Psalms. The details of the process by which the Psalter achieved the form in which it appears in the Hebrew Bible are lost to the pages of history. But the book itself contains a few clues. Many of the psalms appear to have been parts of smaller, already-existing collections before they were incorporated into the Psalter. Some of the collections that can be identified are:

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the Davidic Collections Pss. 3–41; 51–72; 108–110; 138–145 the Korahite Collections Pss. 42–49; 84–85; 87–88 the Elohistic Collection Pss. 42–83 the Asaphite Collection Pss. 73–83 the Enthronement Psalms Pss. 93; 95–99 the Songs of Ascents Pss. 120–134 the Hallelujah Psalms Pss. 111–118; 146–150 Some psalms apparently come from early in the life of ancient Israel, such as Psalms 3 and 48, and some seem clearly to be from Israel’s later life, such as Psalms 1 and 137. In addition to the collections of psalms within it, the Psalter itself provides some clues to its “shaping” process. First, it is divided into five books: Pss. 1–41; Pss. 42–72; Pss. 73–89; Pss. 90–106; and Pss. 107–150, each of which concludes with a doxology. Second, there appears to be a “movement” from lament psalms in the first portion of the Psalter to hymnic psalms in the latter portion of the Psalter. Third, the number of psalms with superscriptions is significantly higher in the first three books of the Psalter than in the last two books. The superscriptions of the psalms, while for the most part relatively late additions, may provide some clues about their composition and interpretation. Seventy-four of the psalms in the Hebrew Psalter are ascribed to David; two are ascribed to Solomon; twenty-five to Korah, Asaph, Ethan, and Heman, described in 1 Chronicles 15:16–19 and 2 Chronicles 20:19 as musicians in David’s and Solomon’s courts; and one to Moses. Psalms 120–134 are identified in their superscriptions as “Songs of Ascents,” and thirty-six psalms have no superscriptions. Fourth, psalms attributed in their superscriptions to David are greater in number in Books I, II, and V than in Books III and IV. Each of these phenomena contributes to an understanding of how communities of faith heard, preserved, and handed on the songs of ancient Israel and eventually shaped them into the book of Psalms.

Historical Backgrounds A brief recounting of the time period in which the Hebrew Bible in general and the book of Psalms in particular were most likely shaped into their final forms may be helpful. In 597 BCE, the

army of the Babylonian Empire carried King Jehoiachin of Judah and many of his subjects into exile in Babylon (2 Kgs. 25). A decade later, its army sacked Jerusalem and destroyed the temple. The southern kingdom, ruled for centuries by a succession of Davidic kings, appeared to be at its end. But its story continued, because in 539 BCE, Babylon fell to the Persian Empire, a new power in the east, led by Cyrus II. The following year, Cyrus issued an edict that allowed the peoples held captive by the Babylonians to return to their homelands. Portions of the edict are recorded in Ezra 1:2–4 and 6:3–5. Sometime after 538 BCE, a number of Jewish exiles returned to Jerusalem and began the process of rebuilding the city and the temple. By 515, a temple was standing once again and functioning as the Jewish cultic center (Ezra 6:15–16). The Persian government allowed the Jews to rebuild their temple and resume religious practices, so long as those practices did not conflict with the Persian laws. Temple and cult were restored, but the nation-state of Israel with a king of the Davidic line at its head was not. Except for a brief time of independence during the rule of the Hasmoneans from 141 to 63 BCE, the Jewish people lived continuously as vassals, first to the Persians, then to the Greeks, and then to the Romans. Under the same circumstances, most of the nation-states of the ancient Near East simply disappeared from history. But ancient Israel did not. The postexilic community found an identity and structure for their existence that went beyond traditional concepts of nationhood. King and court could no longer be the focal point of national life; temple and worship took center stage. And YHWH, not a king of the Davidic line, reigned as sovereign over the new “religious nation” of Israel. Postexilic Israel redefined nationhood and found a way to remain a separate and identifiable entity within the vast empires of which it found itself a part during the next five centuries. The major source of identity for the postexilic community was their story—the text of the Hebrew Scriptures. The people looked to their traditional and cultic literature for answers to the existential questions “Who are we?” and “What are we to do?” and then shaped their literature into a document that provided answers to those questions. The Hebrew Bible in general and the Hebrew Psalter in particular are hermeneutical rationales for survival for the postexilic community.

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Listening for the Feminine in the Psalter In the story of the Psalter outlined above, a story that is very “nationalistic,” with continual references to the Davidic dynasty, oppression by foreign powers, and political maneuvering, is it possible to find the “feminine voice” within its poetic offerings? First, the structure and language of the Psalter permit one to hear multiple voices, both female and male, in the psalms. Second, the language used about God in the Psalter evinces feminine as well as masculine images of the God of Israel. Third, the prominent wisdom features in the Psalter (wisdom psalms, along with wisdom language and motifs) suggest the presence of Woman Wisdom, calling humanity to heed the words of the psalmists.

Multiple Voices The psalms are, for the most part, the words of humanity addressed directly to God. They are anonymous compositions, even though a “voice” is assigned to many of them in their superscriptions—in many cases the voice of David. Thus the superscriptions present us with two barriers to “hearing” the voice of all humanity in the psalms: David is a man; and David is royalty. Furthermore, many ­historical-critical interpreters locate the recitation of the psalms in the temple by the priests and the king, thus effectively removing them from the realm of common humanity. English translations of the Psalter place the superscriptions of the psalms as introductory notes before verse 1 of the psalms, but in the Hebrew text the superscriptions are verse 1 and thus are integral parts of the psalms. Many commentators ignore the superscriptions as late additions with little to offer in terms of interpreting the texts. We still must acknowledge, however, that the superscriptions are an ancient and integral part of the text as it was passed from generation to generation, and we have much to gain in taking into account the “story-world” suggested by the superscriptions. In a 1980 article titled “Canonical Context and Canonical Criticism,” James Sanders states that such editorial additions indicate “the intense interest of redactors in date lines and historical contexts” and that if readers want to understand the full message of a psalm, they must “consider the original historical context in which the

passage scored its point” for the readers/hearers of the psalm. An approach to reading the psalms is to view the superscriptions, such as Psalm 51’s “a psalm of David, when the prophet Nathan came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba,” as initial “hooks” on which to “hang” the psalms, as initial “story-worlds” for their words. But we must not leave the psalms “anchored” in the past. The sentiments expressed in them are not time-, class-, or gender-exclusive; they are the words of every human. Thus we read the heartfelt words of Psalm 13: “How long, O YHWH? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?”(13:1); Psalm 81’s glorious “Sing aloud to God our strength; shout for joy to the God of Jacob. Raise a song, sound the tambourine, the sweet lyre with the harp” (81:1–2); and the wonder of Psalm 139: “For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb” (139:13). The words of the psalmists are genderless and timeless, the words of every person in every time and place.

Images of God God as king is perhaps the dominant image of God in the Psalter. Psalm 2 introduces the metaphor and it occurs no less than twentynine times in the book (see e.g., Pss. 5:2; 48:2; 84:3; 145:1; and esp. Pss. 93 and 95–99, the enthronement psalms). But king is not the only metaphor for God in the book of Psalms. William P. Brown, in Seeing the Psalms, reminds us that when a metaphor becomes literalized to the point of excluding other metaphors for the same subject, the metaphor, no matter how profound, becomes absolutized, as though it were itself considered ultimate. The beauty of metaphoric images for God in the Psalter is that they allow for a multiplicity of conceptualizations or, as Luis Alonso Schökel suggests, “a vast collection of interwoven images.” A powerful metaphor for God in the book of Psalms is found in God’s self-revelatory words to Moses in Exodus 34:6–7 (“a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness”). The words are woven into many psalms (e.g., 86:15; 103:8; 111:4; 145:8) and include God’s “compassion” or “mercy,” popular translations of the Hebrew verbal root rakham. The more concrete idea (or metaphor) of the verbal root is manifest in

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the noun form rekhem, which means “womb.” God’s compassion or mercy is tied closely to the concept of “womb love,” the love a mother feels for her yet-to-be-born child. Over and over, the psalmists remember and call upon God’s compassion, God’s womb love: “Be mindful of your mercy [rakham], O YHWH, and of your steadfast love” (25:6); “Answer me, O YHWH, for your steadfast love is good; according to your abundant mercy [rakham], turn to me” (69:16); “YHWH is good to all, and his compassion [rakham] is over all that he has made” (145:9). References to God from the verbal root rakham occur no less than twenty-two times in the Psalter. Psalm 22 connects God’s identification with “womb-love” to the physical referent for the metaphor. In verse 10 the psalmist cries to God, “Upon you I was cast from the rekhem” (NRSV “from my birth”). Here God is intimately tied to the life-giving womb and is further pictured as midwife. Phyllis Trible, in God and Rhetoric of Sexuality, describes the image in this verse as a “semantic movement from a physical organ of the female body to a psychic mode of being.” In Psalm 77 the psalmist asks, “Has God in anger shut up his compassion [rekhem]?” (77:9b). The verb translated “shut up” (qapats) is used most often in the Hebrew text in reference to “shutting the mouth,” but one does not have to travel far metaphorically to connect “mouth” with “womb opening” in this poetic construction. Another prominent metaphor for God in the Psalter is that of “refuge,” and often the refuge is imaged as shelter under the wings (kenapayim) of God: “Guard me as the apple of the eye; hide me in the shadow of your wings”(17:8); “Let me abide in your tent forever, find refuge under the shelter of your wings” (61:4); “he will cover you with his pinions, and under his wings you will find refuge” (91:4). Images of winged gods and goddesses are found throughout the ancient Near East. The goddess Isis is depicted with wings outstretched to protect her husband Osiris in an Egyptian statue that dates to the twenty-sixth dynasty. In a carved relief of the Assyrian king Ashurnasirpal II from Calakh, the king is flanked by two winged deities. The ark of the covenant is described in 1 Kings as being underneath the wings of the cherubim: “For the cherubim spread out their wings over the place of the ark, so that the cherubim made a covering above the ark” (1 Kgs. 8:7). Protective wings bring to mind the image of a mother

hen caring for her young, keeping them warm, providing shelter, and warding off predators (Matt. 23:37).

Woman Wisdom The depiction of Woman Wisdom (hokmah) in the Hebrew Bible and the Apocrypha is largely accepted as a postexilic construct that is consistent and yet varied. It is consistent in that, except in Job 28, Wisdom is depicted as a woman, something of a divine consort or feminine counterpart to YHWH (Proverbs, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, and Baruch). It is varied in that Wisdom is described in various roles and capacities. In Job, Wisdom is hidden and inaccessible to humanity; only God knows where Wisdom dwells (Job 28:23). In the book of Proverbs, in contrast, Woman Wisdom is present in the midst of humanity, crying out in the streets and at the entrance to the city gates, calling on passersby to heed her words, for with her lies the knowledge of God (Prov. 2:5). She claims to have an intimate acquaintance with God; she was there at creation, working beside God and “delighting in the human race” (Prov. 8:31). In the Wisdom of Solomon, Wisdom is sought after as the desired spouse of “Solomon”; she has knowledge of “things of old,” gives “good counsel, “and teaches “self-control and prudence, justice and courage” (Wisd. Sol. 7:22–8:9). In Sirach, Wisdom states that she “came forth from the mouth of the Most High” at creation and was destined to dwell in Israel (Sir. 24:1–12; see also 1:1–20). The sexually evocative language of 24:19–34 (see also 51:13– 20) equates the pleasures of knowing Woman Wisdom with the pleasures of knowing the Torah. Sirach 24:23 states, in fact, “all this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us.” And Baruch 4:1 says, “She is the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever.” Thus we see in postexilic Israel a transformation in the concept of wisdom from “family wisdom” (e.g., Prov.) to “national wisdom” embodied as Torah (e.g., Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, Baruch). The Psalter equates wisdom with Torah (e.g., Ps. 1), thereby inviting the reader to hear the voice of Woman Wisdom in the various wisdom elements of the book. David Noel Freedman, in Psalm 119: The Exaltation of Torah (p. 89), maintains that Torah becomes, in general in the Psalter and in particular in Psalm 119, “a

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monolithic presence, consisting of individual laws and teachings to be sure, but described in only the most general terms . . . tora has become for the psalmist much more than the laws by which Israel should live; tora has become a personal way to God. In short, Psalm 119 gives tora virtually the status of a divine hypostasis, like wisdom (hokma) in Proverbs 8”—and, this author would add, like Woman Wisdom in Sirach, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Baruch. Thus we are called to hear the wisdom psalms and the wisdom elements of the Hebrew Psalter as the voice of Woman Wisdom, the feminine iteration of YHWH, calling humankind to listen to, heed, and search out the path to a right relationship with YHWH through obedience to the Torah. Psalm 1, classified as a wisdom psalm, states that the “content” or “happy” (’ashre) person is the one who “delights in and meditates on the Torah” (1:2). In addition to those psalms classified as wisdom compositions (Pss. 1, 32, 37, 49, 73, 78, 112, 119, 127, 128, 133, 145), wisdom language and motifs abound in the book. The word ’ashre, widely accepted as a wisdom word, occurs twenty-eight times in the Psalter (only twelve times in the remainder of the Hebrew Bible). The “righteous” (tsadiq) and the “wicked” (rasha‘), appear fifty-two times and eighty-one times, respectively, and are contrasted with one another; “path” (derek) occurs seventy-six times; and the word “wisdom” (hakam) occurs in noun and verbal forms twelve times. The wisdom influence on the Psalter culminates in Book V’s prominent wisdom content, both in wisdom psalms and wisdom language. Psalm 107 ends with the words, “Let the one who is wise heed these words and consider the steadfast love of YHWH” (107:43, my trans.). Half of the wisdom psalms in the Psalter (six of the twelve) occur in Book V, including the massive acrostic Psalm 119. Psalm 119 begins with ’ashre, the same word with which Psalm 1 begins, and echoes Psalm 1’s veneration of Torah as the path to wisdom. Psalm 145, the final psalm in the book before the doxological ending (Pss. 146–150), is a wisdom acrostic that celebrates God as king over all the earth. Let us now explore the content of the Psalter in depth.

Book I (Pss. 1–41) Book I opens, in Psalm 1, with words encouraging faithful meditation upon the Torah. The

book continues in Psalm 2 with words of warning to the nations and their rulers to recognize the God of Israel as king over all. The psalms are framed (1:1 and 2:11) with the wisdom word ’ashre. Readers thus enter the Psalter with two guiding instructions for the path to wisdom: to diligently study and delight in the Torah and to acknowledge God as sovereign. Beginning with Psalm 3, all of the psalms in Book I are attributed, in their superscriptions, to David. Psalms 10 and 33 do not have superscriptions, but they are linguistically and thematically tied to the previous psalms, 9 and 32, and thus are considered to be “of David.” The psalms provide insight into every facet of David’s life: the king, the human being, the warrior, the parent, the servant of the YHWH. As stated above, the reader may view the superscriptions as initial “hooks” on which to “hang” the psalms, as initial “story-worlds” for their words. Psalm 3 opens with, “A Psalm of David, when he fled from his son Absalom.” The “storyworld” of Psalm 3 is recorded in 2 Samuel 15. Imagine David’s anguish at his son’s betrayal, at having to leave his home, at the taunting of his enemies. Psalm 3’s words are heartfelt. But we must not leave Psalm 3, or any other psalm, “anchored” in the past. The original story-world provides a frame; our own stories provide the picture within the frame. Psalm 3 is classified as an individual lament. Most (54 percent) of the psalms in Book I are individual laments, in which the psalmist calls on God to act against enemies and oppressors. Psalm 6’s cry to God, “I am weary with my moaning; every night I flood my bed with tears; I drench my couch with my weeping. My eyes waste away because of grief; they grow weak because of all my foes” (6:6–7), has been compared by Patrick Miller to Hannah’s plight in 1 Samuel 1. A number of linguistic and thematic ties link the two texts. Hannah’s rival wife, Peninnah, provokes (tsarah) her in 1 Samuel 1:6. The verbal root in its masculine form tsar is one of the most common terms for enemies and oppressors in the book of Psalms, occurring some fifty-three times. The word describing Peninnah in relation to Hannah is translated in 1 Samuel 1 as “rival” (ka‘as), and the “wasting away” (NRSV) in Psalm 6:7 is a translation of the same word, ka‘as. The first nonlament psalm in the Davidic portion of Book I is Psalm 8, a creation psalm. Its words evoke the language of Genesis 1, but

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they also incorporate concepts from both the creation story of Genesis 2 and from the salvation history of the entire Torah. The psalmist (in the initial story-world of the psalm, King David) observes the expanse of the heavens and sees the work of the fingers of God (8:3). The only other times the term “finger” of God occurs in the biblical text are in Exodus 31:18 and Deuteronomy 9:10, in reference to God writing the Torah on stone tablets for Moses. In Psalm 8:4 (my trans.), the psalmist muses over the place of humanity in the created order and asks, “How is it that you remember a human being [’enosh]; that you care for a mortal one [ben ’adam]?” The words “humanity” and “mortal one” are singular in the Hebrew and denote humanness without reference to gender. Psalm 22 is connected by the Gospel writers with the crucifixion of Jesus (22:1, 7, 8, and 18). It is a heartfelt composition that moves from words of lament to words of trust to words of praise, employing numerous metaphoric images. The psalmist is a worm, her bones are out of joint, her heart is like wax, and her mouth is dried up like a potsherd. The enemies are bulls, lions, dogs, and wild oxen. God is enthroned on the praises of Israel, God is king, and God is midwife: “you brought me forth [gokhi] from the womb [beten] . . . on you I was cast from the womb [rekhem]” (22:9, 10, my trans.). Book I ends with Psalm 41, an individual hymn of thanksgiving. It begins with the wisdom word “content” (’ashre), the same word with which Psalm 1 (1:1) begins and Psalm 2 (2:11) ends. Book I tells the story of the reign of David, and its ’ashre ending reminds the reader of the dual message of the introduction to the Psalter: delighting in the Torah (Ps. 1) as instructed by Woman Wisdom and acknowledging God as king (Ps. 2).

Book II (Pss. 42–72) Book II of the Psalter, like Book I, contains many lament psalms. But unlike Book I, not all of the psalms are attributed to David. The Korahites, who were, according to the book of Chronicles, temple singers during the reigns of David and Solomon, mix their voices with David’s in Book II (Pss. 42–49). Fifteen psalms of David appear in the middle of Book II (Pss. 51–65). Fourteen are laments, and eight of the fourteen are connected in their superscriptions to particular events in the life of David. Again, the original

story-world of the psalms may be viewed as the frames; the individual reader’s story-world provides the pictures for the frames. The only untitled psalm in Book II is Psalm 71, an individual lament that appears to be an aged person’s supplication to God not to forget or forsake. In its position in the story of Psalter, Psalm 71 may be read as the words of an aged David looking back over his life. Verse 6 (my trans.) echoes the midwife imagery of Psalm 22: “Upon you I have leaned from the womb [beten]; from my mother’s womb [me‘eh] you took me.” And in verses 17 and 18, the psalmist declares: “O God, from my youth you have taught me . . . so even to old age and gray hairs, O God, do not forsake me.” Psalm 72, a royal psalm, is one of only two psalms in the Psalter ascribed to Solomon (the other is Ps. 127). Its words are wishes and prayers for the well-being of the king, likely used at an enthronement ceremony for a king in Jerusalem. Brevard Childs suggests that the canonical placement of Psalm 72 indicates that the psalm “is ‘for’ Solomon, offered by David,” as David handed the rule of the kingdom over to Solomon (1 Kgs. 2). To affirm this supposition, Book II ends with the words, “The prayers of David son of Jesse are ended” (72:20). With the close of Book II, David moves into the background of the story of the Psalter.

Book III (Pss. 73–89) Book III opens with “A Psalm of Asaph” (Ps. 73). Like the sons of Korah, Asaph was, according to the book of Chronicles, a temple singer during the reigns of David and Solomon. Fifteen of the seventeen psalms in Book III are attributed to Asaph and the sons of Korah. Only one psalm, Psalm 86, is attributed to David. The focus of the story of the Psalter is now on David’s descendants, who will determine the future of ancient Israel during the period of the divided kingdom. Community laments and community hymns dominate Book III of the Psalter. The voice of David, the individual, gives way to the voice of the community of faith as it attempts to make sense of all that is happening. Clustered in the middle of Book III are three psalms that incorporate the compassion, the “womb love” (rekhem), of God in their words. In Psalm 77, an individual lament, the singer asks: “Has God forgotten to be gracious? Has he in anger shut

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up his compassion [rekhem]?” (77:9). In Psalm 78, a wisdom psalm, we read, “Yet he [God], being compassionate [rakhum], forgave their iniquity and did not destroy them” (78:38). In 79:8, the psalmist asks God to “not remember against us the iniquities of our ancestors” and to “let your compassion [rekhem] come speedily to meet us.” In addition to the concept of God’s “womb love,” Psalms 77 and 79 evince another prominent theme in the Psalter, that of remembering and forgetting. The verbal root zakar (“remember”) occurs no less than sixty times in the Psalter, while the verbal root shakakh (“forget”) occurs some thirty-five times. The psalmists recount God’s remembrance and call on God to remember (8:4; 25:6, 7; 74:2, 18; 78:39; 89:47; 102:12; 111:4, 5; 135:13); the singers recall their remembrance of God (42:4, 5; 65:3; 77:7, 11; 119:52, 55; 137:6; 143:5); and they recount the people’s remembrance of God (22:28; 78:35, 42; 83:5; 106:7; 112:6; 137:1; 145:7). In like manner, the psalmists recount God forgetting and they call on God not to forget (9:12; 10:12; 42:9; 44:24; 74:19, 23; 77:9); they protest that they have not forgotten, while reminding themselves not to forget (12:1; 31:12; 44:17, 20; 103:2; 119:16, 83; 137:5, 6); and they speak of forgetting God to and about others (9:17, 18; 10:11; 50:22; 78:7, 11; 119:139). Psalm 88, the next to last psalm in Book III, is an individual lament, but a lament like no other in the Psalter. Psalms of lament typically consist of five elements: (1) an invocation, in which the psalmist calls on the name of God; (2) a complaint, in which the psalmist tells God what is wrong; (3) a petition, in which the psalmist tells God what the psalmist wants God to do; (4) words of trust, in which the psalmist outlines the reasons for trusting that God can and will answer the psalmist’s petition; and (5) words of praise, in which the psalmist celebrates the goodness and sovereignty of God. Psalm 88 is almost wholly composed of the element of complaint (88:3–18). Invocation (88:1, 13, 14) and petition (88:1–2) are brief lines within the song; words of trust and words of praise are missing completely. A royal psalm, Psalm 89, follows. As Psalm 88 is a lament like no other in the Psalter, so Psalm 89 is a royal psalm like no other. It begins as do other royal psalms, praising God for the good provisions to the king of God’s choosing. But the psalm takes a sudden turn in verses

38–39: “But now you have spurned and rejected him; you are full of wrath against your anointed. You have renounced the covenant with your servant; you have defiled his crown in the dust.” As stated above (see Historical Backgrounds), in 587 BCE the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and took a major portion of Judah’s population into captivity in Babylon. The nations of Israel and Judah were no more; Davidic kingship was ended; the people were exiled from their homeland. In the story line of the Psalter, Book III ends with the laments and questions to God: “How long, O YHWH? Will you hide yourself forever? How long will your wrath burn like fire? . . . YHWH, where is your steadfast love of old, which by your faithfulness you swore to David?” (89:46, 49). The psalm singers mourn God’s broken covenant with David and bemoan the taunting of their neighbors. Is there any hope of survival for the community of faith?

Book IV (Pss. 90–106) Book IV opens with “A Prayer of Moses, the Man of God.” It is the only psalm in the Hebrew Psalter ascribed to Moses. Its words are a plea to God for mercy: “Turn [shub], O YHWH! How long? Change your mind [nakham] concerning your servants” (90:13, my trans.). Moses had asked God to shub and nakham concerning the Israelites during the golden calf incident (Exod. 32:12), and now in Psalm 90 Moses makes the same request of God. Moses’ request forms the crux, the turning point in the story of the Psalter. The Israelites are in exile in Babylon; their heartfelt desire is to return to Jerusalem. God threatened to destroy the people in the wilderness when they crafted an image of gold to worship in place of God; Moses persuaded God to change God’s mind. Perhaps Moses could persuade God once again. The Targum titles Psalm 90 “A prayer of Moses the prophet, when the people Israel sinned in the desert.” Moses is a prominent figure in Book IV of the Psalter, referred to seven times (90:1; 99:6; 103:7; 105:26; 106:16, 23, 32). The only mention of Moses in the Psalms outside of Book IV is in Psalm 77:20. In Psalm 90 Moses intervenes with God on behalf of the people, as he did in the time of the wilderness wandering. Just as the people did not have a human king while they were in the wilderness, so now, in their present situation,

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they will not have a human king. The Israelites in exile in Babylon cannot return to the days of King David. They can only move forward. Enthronement psalms, psalms that celebrate YHWH as king over the people rather than a king of the Davidic line, lie at the center of Book IV of the Psalter (Pss. 93; 95–99). Psalm 91, an individual hymn of thanksgiving, uses a number of avian metaphors to describe the protective characteristics of God. God delivers from the snare of the fowler and covers the psalmist with pinions; under the wings of God the psalmist finds refuge (91:3– 4). And in verses 11 and 12, the psalmist states that God will “command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you will not dash your foot against a stone.” Language in the Hebrew Bible about the protective wings of God bespeaks an image of the God of Israel that transcends cultural and gender boundaries (see the discussion above under Images of God). Two psalms at the end of Book IV recount the history of God’s dealings with the community of faith throughout its history. The first, Psalm 105, is a community hymn; the second, Psalm 106, is a community lament. Psalm 105 recalls for the people how God provided for, protected, and sustained them in various circumstances (105:7–11, 37–45). Psalm 106 reminds the people of their lack of gratitude to the God who provided for, protected, and sustained them (106:7, 24–25, 28–29). The people in exile in Babylon are faced with a choice, one based on history: accept God’s good provisions, and you may be able to return to the land of promise; reject God’s good provisions, and live with the consequences. Book IV ends with a simple petition to God: “save us .  .  . and gather us from among the nations” (106:47). As stated above (see Historical Backgrounds), in 539 BCE the Persian army, under the leadership of Cyrus II, captured Babylon, the capital city of the Babylonian Empire. In the following year, Cyrus issued a decree allowing captive peoples to return to their homelands, to rebuild, and to resume their religious practices. But the repatriated peoples would remain part of the vast Persian Empire, subject to Persian law. For the Israelites, Cyrus’s decree meant that they could rebuild their temple and continue their religious practices, but they could not restore their nation-state under the leadership of a king of the line of David.

Book V (Pss. 107–150) Book V of the Psalter opens with Psalm 107, a community hymn celebrating God’s graciousness in delivering the community of faith from exile in Babylon. The psalmist says: “Let the redeemed of YHWH say so, those he redeemed from trouble and gathered in from the lands, from the east and from the west, from the north and from the south” (107:2–3), words that seem to be an answer to the plea of the psalmist in 106:47. The psalm continues with the stories of four groups of people who are rescued by God from life-threatening situations, together representing, perhaps, the “redeemed of YHWH” of verse 2: a group of wanderers, lost in the desert, who finally arrive at their destination (107:4–9); prisoners who are set free (107:10–16); “sick” persons who are healed (107:17–22); and sailors who are saved from shipwreck (107:23–32). Verses 33–42 outline the beneficence that the sovereign God can bestow upon the community of faith: the people may dwell in safety, establish a town, plant a vineyard, reap a harvest, be blessed with children and cattle, be defended against the enemy, and have their future secured. The psalm closes with the words, “Let the one who is wise [hakam] heed these things, and the hesed ones of YHWH will attend” (107:43, my trans.). The psalm ends with wisdom words; and wisdom psalms and wisdom themes and words are an integral part of Book V. Four wisdom words that are introduced to the reader in Psalm 1 occur frequently in Book V: ’ashre, translated variously as “happy, blessed, or content,” occurs eleven times (e.g., 112:1; 119:1, 2; 127:5; 137:9; 144:15); derek, translated most often as “path,” occurs twenty-six times (e.g., 110:7; 119:1, 27, 59; 128:1; 138:5; 139:4; 143:8); rasha‘, “the wicked,” occurs twenty-one times (e.g., 109:2; 112:10; 129:4; 139:19; 141:4, 5, 10; 147:6); and tsadiq/ tsidqah, “righteous/righteousness,” occurs in reference to humanity sixteen times (e.g., 112:3, 6; 140:13; 141:5; 143:2; 146:8). Another wisdom concept, the fear of the Lord, is referenced some fifteen times in the book (e.g., 111:10; 115:11; 118:4; 128:1, 4; 145:10; 147:11). In answer to the chaos and confusion of destruction, exile, and repatriation, (Woman) Wisdom is reintroduced and will remain prominent throughout Book V. Beginning with Psalm 108, David, who has been virtually absent from the Psalter since his final words in Book II (72:20), returns in the

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psalmic superscriptions. Psalms 108–110; 122; 124; 131; 138–145 are “of David,” and they form a frame around a group of psalms that are used in various festivals in Jewish life: • Psalm 113–118, the Egyptian Hallel, is recited during Passover. • Psalm 119, a wisdom acrostic about Torah piety, is read during the Feast of Pentecost. • Psalms 120–134, the Songs of Ascents, are used during the Feast of Booths. David leads and the people join in to praise and give thanks to the God who created, sustained, protected, and guided them throughout their history. Psalms 111 and 112 are two brief acrostic compositions that occur just before the grouping of festival psalms. The first, Psalm 111, is an individual hymn of thanksgiving; the second, Psalm 112, is a wisdom psalm, and speaks of “delighting” (khapets) in the works and commandments of the Lord (111:2; 112:1). Recalling Psalm 1’s admonition to the reader to “delight” (khapets) in the Torah, the words of Psalms 111 and 112 bring that delight full circle and prepare the reader for Psalm 119, the massive wisdom acrostic whose 176 verses celebrate Torah, not as specific rules and regulations (see Freedman, in “Woman Wisdom,” above), but as a way of life that brings contentedness (’ashre, 119:1, 2). The psalmist states in verse 165: “Great peace have those who love your torah; nothing can make them stumble” (my trans.). Those who embrace the Torah, now tangibly present as Woman Wisdom (cf. Sir. 24:23 and Bar. 4:1), will have found a means for maintaining right order in the world and a right relationship with God. Psalms 123 and 131 contain compellingly feminine metaphoric language of God. The singer of Psalm 123 says to God, “To you I lift up my eyes” (123:1), just as the eyes of servants (look) to the hand of their master [’adon], so “the eyes of a maid servant [look] to the hand of her mistress [gebirah]” (123:2). God is likened to a benevolent mistress who cares for those who serve her. While such imagery is refreshing to those who argue against a strictly male concept of God, the imagery may be construed as oppressive to those who find themselves in positions of servitude. An image such as this is best understood in its historical context (that initial frame into which we place our own

reading of a given psalm), where class lines were clear, servitude was the norm, and abuse was common. A mistress (gebirah) who looked after the well-being of her servants, who honored their humanity, was one to whom the servants could look. Psalm 131, one of Book V’s “framing” psalms of David, presents an image of God much like that found in Psalms 22 and 71. The psalmist declares that vainglorious thoughts do not occupy her mind, but that, “I have calmed and quieted my inmost being like a sated child [gamul] upon its mother. Like a sated child [gamul] upon me is my inmost being” (131:2, my trans.). The verbal root gamal is used in other places in the biblical text to describe the completion of the weaning of a child from the mother’s breast, an event that usually took place when the child was about three years old (Gen. 21:8; 1 Sam. 1:22–24). If we understand “weaned” as the meaning of the verb, then the metaphor suggests a child who no longer cries out in hunger for the mother’s breast, but who seeks out the mother for her warm embrace and nurturing care. The verb, however, might also describe a suckling child who is well fed and fully satisfied, resting peacefully in the mother’s embrace. Both metaphors are a powerful image of one who finds calmness and quiet in the embrace of God. The last psalm of David in Book V, Psalm 145, is a masterful alphabetic acrostic that celebrates the kingship of God over the community of faith and over all creation. But how will God be king? The role of the king in the ancient Near East was to provide for those who were less able to provide for themselves (e.g., Pss. 72:2–4, 12–14, 16; 107:35–41). How will God, who is not a human king, provide for the needs of those who “are falling” and are “bent down” (145:14, my trans.)? How will God “give them their food in its time” and “satisfy for every living thing its desire” (145:15–16, my trans.)? How will God be near to “all who cry out to him” (145:18, my trans.) and fulfill “the desire of the ones who reverence him” (145:19, my trans.)? Without a human king, Israel would have to become a nation of kings, reflecting what some describe as a “democratization” or a “communitization” of kingship. In the end, the message of the Psalter is that we are to acknowledge YHWH God as sovereign, but each of us, regardless of gender, class, ethnicity, or political persuasion, is called to be the hands

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and feet, the listening ear and the embracing heart of the sovereign God. The concluding doxological psalms (Pss. 146–150) bring the praise of God to its climax with the words of Psalm150:6: “Let everything that breathes praise YHWH! Praise YHWH!” What is the shape of the book of Psalms? Its five books narrate the history of ancient Israel, the history recorded in the books of Samuel, Kings, Chronicles, Ezra, Nehemiah, and a number of the prophets. Books I and II (Pss. 1–72) chronicle the reigns of kings David and Solomon; Book III (Pss. 73–89) tells of the dark days of the divided kingdoms and their eventual destructions; Book IV (Pss. 90–106) recalls the years of the Babylonian exile, during which the community of faith had to rethink its identity as the people of God; and Book V (Pss. 107–150) celebrates the community’s restoration to the land and the sovereignty of God over them. Ancient Israel—emergent Judaism—survived in the many worlds of which it found itself a part in the course of its history because it found in its past a way to make sense of the present and future. And a major key to that survival was to embrace and follow the path of Torah, equated in the postexilic period with Woman Wisdom.

Bibliography

Brenner, Athalya, and Carole Fontaine, eds. Wisdom and Psalms. 2nd series. A Feminist Companion to the Bible. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Brown, William P. Seeing the Psalms: A Theology of Metaphor. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. deClaissé-Walford, Nancy. Introduction to the Psalms: A Song from Ancient Israel. St. Louis: Chalice Press, 2004. Freedman, David Noel. Psalm 19: The Exaltation of Torah. Biblical and Judaic Studies 6. Winoma Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1999. Gunkel, Hermann. An Introduction to the Psalms: The Genres of the Religious Lyric of Israel. Translated by James D. Nogalski. Mercer Library of Biblical Studies. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1998. McCann, J. Clinton, Jr. “The Book of Psalms: Introduction, Commentary, and Reflections.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible: A Commentary in Twelve Volumes, edited by Leander E. Keck, 4:639–1280. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. Sanders, James A. From Sacred Story to Sacred Text. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

Proverbs Christine Roy Yoder

Introduction The book of Proverbs is for the ordinary of days. Proverb after proverb, page after page, it invites us into an ancient and ongoing conversation about what is good and wise and true in life. How can we discern right from wrong in a world of fiercely competing claims? What values do we treasure and why? What makes for strong families and just communities? What characterizes a good neighbor, loving partner, or trusted friend? How do we understand money, the role of integrity, and the power of speech? And how do we teach it all to our children? Proverbs takes up such questions as part and parcel of the reverent life. It acknowledges the ordinary as the arena in which we develop our moral character and work out our faithfulness day after day. And it commends for the journey wisdom born of the experiences of generations who have gone before us—poetry wrought and recited time and again by the people of God. Not all of the book’s assumptions and insights will resonate as true for us across the chasm of centuries and different worldviews. And the fact that the book was crafted principally to educate and enculturate young men presents certain challenges to women readers. But proverb after proverb, page after page, Proverbs inspires and requires of us fresh reflection about our lives, our communities, and our world. This collection of ancient Israel’s wisdom is ascribed to Solomon, the second and last king of the united monarchy and the quintessential sage of Israel. The book is part of the biblical Wisdom literature that includes Ecclesiastes, Job, Wisdom of Solomon, and Sirach. In the Jewish Bible, Proverbs is found between Psalms

and Job among the Ketuvim (“Writings”). Proverbs likewise follows Psalms in the Protestant and Roman Catholic canons, but it precedes Ecclesiastes instead of Job. And in the Eastern Orthodox canon, Proverbs follows the Prayer of Manasseh and precedes Ecclesiastes. The coupling of Proverbs with Ecclesiastes in these latter instances is presumably because both books identify Solomon as their author. Solomon’s name lends authority to Proverbs. Tradition tells that Solomon’s wisdom was granted by God, surpassed that of all others, and was celebrated and sought by world leaders of his day (1 Kgs. 3–11). At the same time, Solomon’s larger-than-life status as a patron and author of wisdom cautions against interpreting claims of his authorship as historically reliable. Like David with the psalms and Moses with the law, Solomon is identified conventionally with wisdom. The compilation of Proverbs occurred over centuries. Chapters 10–30 are presumably the oldest sections of the book, consisting largely of originally oral folk proverbs that the “sages,” namely, counselors and educators associated with the royal court, gathered and edited, starting perhaps as early as the time of Solomon (mid-tenth c. BCE). Reference to “the officials of King Hezekiah of Judah” (25:1) suggests this work continued in the late eighth to early seventh centuries BCE, possibly as part of Hezekiah’s religious and political reforms. Finally, the framing units of Proverbs 1–9 and 31 were added in the early postexilic period (late sixth to early fifth centuries BCE) as the community struggled to rebuild in the aftermath of the Babylonian exile. The book thus reflects Israel’s wisdom as

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interpreted and arranged by privileged men— often at significant moments when the community was claiming or reclaiming its values.

Literary Forms and Content The book contains hundreds of proverbs. A “proverb” is a statement of an apparent truth that is based on human experience and endures in the life of a community over time. The term encompasses a wide variety of speech, from one-line statements to extended poems. In Proverbs, the most prevalent form is the twoline proverb; the first line makes an observation or claim that the second line develops, contrasts, or motivates. While a proverb’s brevity and parallel structure convey precision, its details captivate and complicate. Abundant are vivid metaphors and similes, and frequent is the use of wordplay, alliteration (repetition of the same or similar consonant[s] in a line or group of lines), assonance (repetition of the same vowel), ambiguity, irony, humor, and so on. Each proverb has several possible meanings and may “mean” differently, depending on who says it and how, to whom, and in what circumstances. That is, proverbs are contingent claims, not static and universal moralisms. The wise, then, need to know not only the proverbs, but also how to read the world so that they use the proverbs rightly. Superscriptions or titles organize the proverbs into sections, each of which has a distinct character. Proverbs 1–9, “the proverbs of Solomon,” includes long didactic poems by a father to his son(s) that serve as a prologue to the book as a whole and introduce wisdom personified as a woman and her negative counterpart, the “strange” woman or personified folly. Proverbs 10:1–22:16, also “proverbs of Solomon,” is composed mostly of two-line proverbs and develops many of the same themes. Two shorter sections are attributed to “the wise” (22:17–24:22; 24:23–34), the first of which is an artful adaptation of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope,

a late-second-millennium-BCE text that presents thirty instructions of Amenemope to his youngest son. Proverbs 25–29, “proverbs of Solomon” edited by Hezekiah’s officials, focuses on the royal court and government. The two sections that follow are ascribed to the otherwise unknown foreigners Agur (30:1–33) and the mother of King Lemuel (31:1–9). And the book ends with a tribute to “a woman of substance” that is in the form of an alphabetic acrostic, a poem in which lines begin with the letters of the Hebrew alphabet, in order. Reading individual proverbs that are gathered into a collection invites additional interpretation. Features like catchwords, metaphors, or sounds that animate one proverb may extend to create units of two or more (e.g., 11:10–11; 13:7– 8). Elsewhere, a thematic thread or inclusio, the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning and ending of a unit, may invite reading a group of proverbs together (e.g., 3:13–18; 10:1–5). These connections highlight how proverbs may comment on one another and, as such, generate a larger conversation across the book. Proverbs may also be read as a literary whole. Remarkably similar portraits of two women, personified wisdom (Prov. 1–9) and “a woman of substance” (31:10–31), frame the book, suggesting they should be identified with each other. The reader of Proverbs begins in the position of a silent son urged by his father to love wisdom and accept the invitation to her household (Prov. 1–9), and becomes an esteemed adult who lives there (31:10–31). The sections of Proverbs in between contribute to this “growing up” in various ways, including a progression from Israelite to international wisdom, an increasing variety and complexity of literary forms, heightened debate and contradiction between proverbs, and an expanding moral purview from household to cosmos (Brown; Yoder). Proverbs thus forms readers by its content and arrangement, and invites reflection about the pedagogies and processes of moral formation in our own time.

Comment Family Wisdom (Prov. 1–9) A prologue announces that the book aims to impart wisdom (1:2–7). Thick with vocabulary

essential to that endeavor, the prologue defines wisdom primarily in relational terms. Wisdom requires that everyone, the young and the wise alike, listen to instruction and accept discipline.

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Wisdom is about “righteousness, justice, and equity” (1:3b; all translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine), terms that together refer comprehensively to ethical relationships between individuals and communities. And wisdom begins with and is most fully expressed as “fear of YHWH” (1:7), namely, reverence for and obedience to God that motivates virtuous behavior and fosters well-being. Proverbs intends to shape moral persons and communities, to inspire moral will and teach moral skills for the sake of a good and just common life. The instruction begins in the household (1:8–9:18), the setting most associated with women in the ancient world. A father is the teacher here, as was common in ancient Near Eastern wisdom texts, but he signals the mother’s important role in the children’s education by referring to her twice and commending her instruction (1:8; 6:20). Readers, regardless of our identities, assume the position of a silent son who is on the brink of adulthood (“Hear, my son,” 1:8). That the father presumes access to resources and the need for financial guidance (e.g., 3:9–10; 6:1–5) suggests the family is relatively privileged, perhaps affluent or moderately wealthy members of an urban commercial class. Thus this family wisdom, which may at first appear generally applicable due to its anonymity, has a particular upper-class and patriarchal worldview. The parent describes the world as marked by moral polarities: wisdom and foolishness, righteousness and wickedness. Choices have immediate, predictable, often life-or-death consequences. The youth must find the “way” or “path” of wisdom amid conflicting and compelling appeals for his attention by street gangs (1:8–19), wicked people (2:12–19), the “strange” woman (7:13–20), scoundrels and fools (6:12– 19). The father warns the youth repeatedly to stay away from such company, lest they influence him, and at the same time implores the youth to seek and embrace the wisdom of God, family, nature (“go to the ant!” 6:6–8), and the community—wisdom he depicts as mutually reinforcing. (Later sections of the book reveal contradictions and conflicting points of view within wisdom.) The parent takes seriously in his teaching the embodied nature of the youth. He works to engage and form the whole person, demonstrating a more holistic view of the human than the crisp, modern, Western distinction between

the rational and the emotional. Language that is attentive to the body abounds. The parent appeals to the senses (“hear,” “look,” e.g., 1:8; 3:21). He encourages the expression of emotions and desires directed “rightly,” such as love for wisdom and “fear of YHWH,” and he warns about the perils of affections directed “wrongly,” such as hatred of knowledge and joy in mocking others (e.g., 1:7, 22, 29). He connects wisdom with physical health (3:3–7; 4:20–22). And he insists that people’s actions testify as loudly as words about their character (e.g., 4:20–27; 6:12–19). Although the parent presupposes the male body throughout, women readers may affirm his conviction that formation must tend to the whole person, and that experience, emotions, and desires are vital ways that people map the world and themselves in it. Included in the parent’s effort to direct the youth’s desires rightly is a plea to rejoice in the “wife of your youth” (5:15–20). The metaphor of water for her, as with the female lover in Song of Songs (4:12, 15), suggests both her considerable value—water is precious, particularly in a desert climate such as Palestine—and her unmatched ability to slake her husband’s thirst, to quench his sexual desire. Repeated use of the possessive pronoun and images of water channeled or contained underscore the husband’s exclusive claim to her (she is “your cistern . . . your well . . . for yourself alone”). As is common in patrilineal cultures, the father assumes that a husband has charge of his wife’s sexuality, much as her father did before her marriage. Should the husband neglect her, the result is sexual and social chaos—waters “scattered outside” and flowing “in the city squares” (5:16). The parent thus implores the youth to delight in his wife, to so “quench” his thirst with her breasts and/or lovemaking (the Hebrew contains a pun) that he “staggers” about as if intoxicated (5:19). Two women stand at the heart of the parent’s instruction: wisdom (1:20–33; 3:13–18; 4:5–9; 7:4–5; 8:1–9:6, 11) and the “strange” woman or folly (2:16–19; 5:1–14; 6:20–35; 7:1–27; 9:13–18). They stand literarily shoulder to shoulder; poems about them alternate across these opening chapters and culminate in an extended description of each that together forms a diptych in Proverbs 7–9. Captivating and complex, wisdom and the “strange” woman are approached best with critical caution. The women are male projections. They are dialectical opposites who embody and perpetuate

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certain stereotypes of women as either wholly good or wholly bad. And the women frame the young man’s world. His choice between them makes him either a beneficiary or, due to no fault of his own other than stupidity, a victim. The parent’s pedagogy thus offers no immediate respite to women. Rather, it serves as a reminder and caution—such gender assumptions and mythic conceptions of women are woven deeply into Western culture and persist today (Newsom). But that is not the end of the story. Personified wisdom refuses to remain captive to female stereotypes. Her description in Proverbs in many ways defies them. And, unlike the “strange” woman who for the most part exits the stage after Proverbs 1–9 (22:14; 23:26–28) and receives little attention in later Wisdom literature, wisdom strides with increasing boldness across time, texts, and testaments, captivating the imaginations of many and taking on a robust life of her own. She becomes identified in Judaism with Torah (Bar. 3:9–4:4; Sir. 24:23–34), and in Wisdom of Solomon she is the “spirit of Sophia”—the breath of the power of God (Wisd. Sol. 7:7–10:18). Kab­ba­ lis­tic writings of medieval Judaism drew from depictions of her to portray the Shekinah, the female element in divinity, as did the Talmud and midrash to depict Knesseth Yisra’el, the personification of the community of Israel. Early Christians described the person and work of Jesus Christ using language and imagery associated with wisdom (e.g., John 1:1–18; Col. 1:15–20; Heb. 1:1–3). And some theologians evoke her to describe the Holy Spirit. In short, she is a remarkable female figure who has been neglected or downplayed far too long in the religious life of Jews and Christians—despite such persistent and compelling testimony to her significance. The “Strange” Woman The father introduces this woman as “other” without specifying exactly what makes her so. In one breath, he calls her an “outsider” (zara) and a “stranger” or foreigner (nokriyya, 2:16). She is somehow outside socially accepted categories, whether ethnic, legal, social, or sexual. Her ambiguous identity suggests she represents many different “strange” women, all of whom the father contends will threaten the youth’s well-being. She is another man’s wife (6:24–35; 7:19–20), a woman who breaks her covenant

and devalues religious obligations (2:17; 7:14– 15), a woman dressed “like” a prostitute (7:10), and a loud fool who wanders and does not know it (5:6; 9:13). The poetry dances between such diverse images of her that they blur. In keeping with the stereotype of “bad” women, the “strange” woman has remarkable powers of persuasion and sexual allure that she uses to entrap men. The parent uses erotic and ambivalent metaphors such as honey and oil to describe her “smooth” words (5:3). He likens her to fire, an enduring symbol of the suddenness, intensity, and power of lust (6:27–29). He warns that she “hunts” the young man (6:26) and tricks him into thinking he alone is the object of her desire: “I have come out to meet you . . . to seek your face . . . and now I found you” (7:15). And, unlike in his descriptions of wisdom, the parent observes her beauty, her eyelashes that “capture” the youth (6:25). Everything points to the woman’s relentless pursuit of the youth who, in a moment of folly, all too quickly becomes her victim. Indeed, her invitation reduces him instantly to an animal rushing heedlessly to the slaughter (7:22–23). He is “fresh meat”—only her latest victim among many. And he does not even know he has been caught until his wound is fatal (cf. 5:7–14). Interpreters debate the origins of the “strange” woman. Some contend that she reflects a foreign goddess. Others point variously to “real” women like foreign devotees of Ishtar-Astarte, foreign or native prostitutes, Israelite women who prostitute themselves to pay a vow, adulterous wives, or women outsiders generally. Several recent studies argue that, because Proverbs 1–9 likely dates to the early postexilic period (late sixth to mid-fifth centuries BCE), the parent’s polemic about her may resonate with Ezra and Nehemiah’s campaign against intermarriage with foreign or “strange” women (Ezra 9–10; Neh. 10:30; 13:23–27). If so, the “strange” woman is a reminder of the vulnerability of women and children, especially those seen as “outsiders,” when communities are or believe themselves to be in peril. Wisdom Wisdom personified as a woman is breathtakingly complex. She speaks as God or a prophet, taking her stand in the busiest places of the city in the thick of everyday bustle and calling out to the naive, scoffers, and fools to heed her instruction, lest disaster befall them

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(1:20–33). She is a teacher who promises to reveal all that she knows, all that she is, and provide generously for those who seek her (e.g., 1:23, 33). She is a “tree of life,” a mythological image in the ancient Near East (3:18). In the Hebrew Bible, the tree is found elsewhere in Genesis 2–3, where cherubim and a flaming sword guard it after Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the garden. Here not at all “off-limits,” the tree as wisdom may be grasped—not as a means to everlasting life, but for health, prosperity, and joy (3:13–18). Wisdom is a most desirable bride who bestows a garland and crown, signs of nobility and marriage, on her beloved (4:5–9; 7:4–5). She speaks what is right and true. She empowers all who govern rightly (e.g., 8:15–16). And she prepares for everyone (“all who live,” 8:4) a luxurious feast and builds a seven-pillared house, a number that signifies wholeness (9:1– 6). Like the precious gems to which wisdom is frequently compared, each poem about her catches the light a bit differently, revealing new facets of her power and splendor. Wisdom’s authority springs from her existence prior to God’s creation of the cosmos. The parent indicates this first briefly in 3:19–20, where wisdom is the means by which God created the world. She is woven into God’s handiwork. Wisdom herself then emphasizes the point in 8:22–31, the pinnacle of her selfrevelation and the most debated text in the book. There she is explicit and repetitive about her preeminence, using various prepositions (e.g., “before,” 8:25), negative expressions (e.g., “when there were no,” 8:24), and phrases (e.g., “at the beginning,” 8:22a). She further asserts her presence during God’s creative work: “I was there” (8:27). She was at God’s side “daily,” before God “at all times” (8:30–31). Wisdom leaves no room for disagreement. From the beginning, she was. And she was always in the company of God. Wisdom is mysterious about her origins, however. Questions begin with 8:22a: “YHWH created [qanah] me” (NRSV). The verb has a wide range of meaning. Most commonly it means “to buy or acquire,” prompting some to translate “YHWH acquired me” and to construe wisdom as coeval with God (cf. Job 28:23– 28). But the verb may also mean “to create or give birth,” particularly when God is its subject. Wisdom’s later assertions that she was “brought forth” (8:24–25), a verb typically associated with childbirth, suggests that God “birthed”

or “created” her. Both senses of the verb are possible. The uncertainty continues in 8:23a. The Hebrew, “I was ‘poured out’ [nasak],” may refer to the pouring of oil to anoint a king. If so, God appointed (and anointed?) wisdom to her position in the very beginning. Some interpreters argue, however, that the verb is better understood as “to weave or form” (sakak), as in the “knitting together” of a child in the womb. Interpreted this way, God “formed” wisdom. Wisdom’s use of such cryptic language, especially when more precise verbs are available, suggests the details of her beginning lie beyond words. The multiple metaphors she evokes— birthing, acquiring, anointing, creating—point variously to what is otherwise inexpressible. Wisdom’s role in God’s creative activity is similarly cloaked in mystery. Her announcement “I was at God’s side [’amon]” (8:30) has confounded interpreters for millennia. The term ’amon most likely means “artisan,” “faithful or trusted [one],” or “child.” Although not without complications, the latter meaning is perhaps most compelling in that it requires no emendation of the Hebrew and resonates with the metaphors of birthing or creating in the surrounding text and the image of wisdom rejoicing or playing before God and on earth with humanity (8:30b–31). The translation is by no means certain, however. What is clear is that wisdom is pure joy. Her words bind God’s delight in her with her delight in creation and humanity: “I was delight day by day, rejoicing before YHWH at all times, rejoicing in YHWH’s inhabited world. My delight is in humanity” (8:30b–31). That her merriment is at once before God and in the world means that she is at “the center of a matrix of relationships”—a vital bridge between God, humans, and the world (O’Connor). To love her and to accept the invitation to wisdom’s table is to awaken to the interconnectedness of God’s creation, to align with and participate in God’s ongoing work in the world, and, as a result, to flourish. Learning so conceived is far from being burdensome or tedious. It is a joy-filled, love-inspiring, playful relationship with knowledge, God, and the world. And wisdom offers that relationship to everyone, not solely a privileged few (8:4). As with the “strange” woman, interpreters continue to debate what images or roles of women inspired the personification of wisdom. Some point to ways she exhibits characteristics

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of goddesses in other ancient Near Eastern cultures such as Ishtar, Ma‘at, or Isis. Others propose that she is an independent expression of God’s wisdom. And some highlight how wisdom manifests roles and activities of actual women. In the end, personified wisdom likely reflects multiple and varied positive images of women, both divine and real.

From the Household into the World (Prov. 10:1–22:16) Proverbs 1–9 culminates at a crossroads. The youth hears the voices of wisdom (9:3–6) and folly (9:16–17) beckoning him home for supper, each with initially identical invitations (“you who are naive, turn in here,” 9:4, 16). Wisdom and folly, it seems, are not always distinguished quickly. Will the youth choose to feast in secret on stolen water and bread? Or choose the house of wisdom and step across her threshold into the next major section of the book (10:1–22:16)? The wise reader encounters a starkly new literary landscape. Proverbs 10:1–22:16 consists primarily of two-line proverbs, each of which stands on its own and appears, at least initially, disconnected to the proverbs that precede and follow it. Disorienting at first, the arrangement fosters the development of moral imagination by shifting the responsibility for making sense of the proverbs from the parent in Proverbs 1–9 to readers. Lack of prioritization among the proverbs requires careful consideration of each one and when it might be applicable. Readers further discover that, absent the father’s firm mediation, conflict and contradiction exist not only between the wise and foolish, but within the community’s wisdom. Divergent proverbs occur side by side or nearly so without qualification. For example, some proverbs consider wealth an unqualified good (e.g., 10:15, 22; 14:20) while others regard it as a liability (11:4, 28); some attribute poverty to laziness (e.g., 10:4; 20:13) while others attribute poverty to violence, extortion, and deceit (e.g., 11:1, 16; 13:23). This interweaving of countering claims—none of which the sages discount or trivialize—teaches that wisdom does not hold only one perspective on wealth or poverty or, for that matter, on most things. As women and minority groups have long insisted, different experiences yield different insights that can benefit the whole community. And wise people study them all.

Proverbs 10:1–15:33 Although the youth has left the childhood home of Proverbs 1–9, the importance of family continues. Prevalent use of antithetical proverbs in this section reinforces the father’s morally bifurcated worldview. And a central concern is the building and maintenance of an honorable household. The sages insist that the well-being of women and men hinges on the well-being of their families; the fate of a household is coupled to the character and conduct of its members. So the sages urge finding a good spouse. Women are deemed wise when they build up the home (like wisdom herself, 9:1–6) or foolish when they tear it down “with [their] own hands” (14:1). Celebrated here for the first time in Proverbs, a “woman of substance” (cf. 31:10–31) is said to promote her husband, whereas a “shameful wife” destroys him like “rot in the bones” (12:4). The honor and joy of both parents depends on the discipline and behavior of their children (e.g., 10:1, 5; 15:20) even as the glory of children is the parents (cf. 17:6). (Whereas parents in the ancient Near East assumed the use of physical discipline with their children [e.g., 13:24], many parents today reconsider the practice in light of contemporary wisdom.) Indeed, a good home is so fundamental that the sages underpin it theologically: God destroys the house of the proud but defends the property markers of the widow, one of the most vulnerable members of society (15:25). Far from downplaying concern for home and family, proverb after proverb emphasizes the primary importance to men of what has long been the domain of women. Women may also attain honor, the sages observe, by their “attraction” (hen, a term that refers to physical beauty and/or graciousness). Proverbs 11:16, which presents some interpretive difficulties, compares such an attractive woman with men who seize and hold onto wealth by means of violence. The proverb may be a cynical observation that women use beauty and men use “muscle” to get ahead in the world—a sentiment reminiscent of the father’s caution about the “strange” woman’s eyelashes that threaten to “capture” the youth (6:25). The proverb may also contrast one woman whose good character earns her public honor with many men whose brutality gets them only money. One thinks of such women as Ruth, Esther, Abigail, and, in Proverbs, a “woman of substance” (31:10–31). Finally, implicit in

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the proverb may be the assumption that while women may attain and enjoy honor, wealth is a reward of men. Women were rarely owners of property in the ancient world, and whatever wealth they accrued usually transferred to their husbands. Only a few proverbs later, the sages make the arresting comparison of a bejeweled pig with a beautiful woman who has forsaken her good sense (11:22). Her choice to behave foolishly—perhaps she flaunts her good looks and relies on her charisma—makes her appearance disconcerting. The sense is that beauty without wisdom is wasted and may even be destructive. After all, a pig is led to slaughter by a ring in its nose (Davis, 80). Proverbs 16:1–22:16 Many of the themes addressed in 10:1– 15:33 continue, but antithetical proverbs are now mixed with a greater diversity of wisdom genres, including synonymous and synthetic proverbs, “better than” proverbs (e.g., 16:8, 32; 17:1), rhetorical questions (e.g., 17:16; 18:14), and the introduction of “not fitting” proverbs (e.g., 16:29; 17:7). The variety requires increasing dexterity from readers. It also affords greater opportunity for nuance and the expression of relative values. The sages acknowledge more readily that things are not always what they seem (e.g., 16:25; 17:28; 18:17). And they weigh competing values—arguing, for example, that it is better to eat a dry crust of bread in quiet than feast in a household torn apart by fighting (17:1; e.g., 16:8, 16, 19). This engagement of the more “gray” realities of life, of the messiness of navigating in the world when things are not clearly wise or foolish, good or bad, can be a welcome resource for women making difficult choices in a male-dominated society. The circle of moral concern widens, and, with it, the sages pay more attention to navigating conflict and preserving social harmony— frequently over individual interests and desires. In addition to family, there is greater emphasis on friends, who are occasionally favored over family (e.g., 17:17; 18:24). And readers engage an increasingly diverse cast of characters, such as personal enemies (16:7), nobles and princes (17:7, 26; 19:6, 10), warriors (16:32; 21:22), lenders (22:7), and hagglers (20:14). Particularly noteworthy is the king, who steps to the forefront in 16:10–15 and remains significant in the book thereafter; indeed, his appearance

prompts interpreters to call this the “Royal Collection.” Various proverbs continue to extol the value of a “good” wife, who is called a gift from God (18:22; 19:14). Far less desirable is her counterpart, the “contentious wife.” A series of three proverbs increases the distance between the reader and the wife, underscoring the importance of avoiding her at all costs. The first compares her quarreling to the irritating, steady drip of a leaky roof (19:13). The second takes the reader up on the roof and back into a corner, saying it is better to live there, alone and exposed to the elements, than in the house with her (21:9). And the final proverb transports the reader into the desert, a place of wildness and solitude that the sages claim is preferable, even in its danger, to the misery of her quarreling (21:19). Perhaps the sages intend some humor here. But they never ponder what might prompt a wife to be so contentious with her husband, nor do they balance these proverbs with others that urge a woman to get as far away as possible from a quarreling, abusive man.

Engaging the Wisdom of Other Cultures (Prov. 22:17–24:34) From wisdom identified explicitly as Israelite (“the proverbs of Solomon,” 1:1; 10:1), readers move to internationally inspired instructions: the first of these two sections attributed to the “wise,” 22:17–24:22, is an artful adaptation of the Egyptian Instruction of Amenemope. That the transition occurs rather seamlessly in the Hebrew suggests that movement between Israelite and foreign wisdom is rather ordinary. The sages assume that their work requires critical engagement with the wisdom of cultures—an assumption that directs their attention outward and presses the question, to whom should we be listening now? At the same time, because the sages rework Amenemope in various ways, they teach that the borrowing of traditions and texts is not done mechanically but critically, mindful of one’s contexts and purposes. Attentiveness to the world’s wisdom becomes even more explicit at the end of Proverbs with two other sections that are or are made to appear foreign—the wisdom of Agur (30:1–33) and of King Lemuel’s mother (31:1–9). Renewed use of direct address (e.g., “my son”) and attention to the household and family spark a sense of déjà vu. This revised foreign

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wisdom reads much like Proverbs 1–9. But the reader is addressed this time not only as a child in the family home, but as a young man responsible for building and tending a household, a neighbor and a citizen, a commoner, a messenger, a present or potential member of the royal court, and a military leader. The youth appears poised to assume new roles and responsibilities—most of which were exclusive to men in ancient Israel. For the first time in the book, there is guidance about how to eat at a ruler’s table (23:1–5) and to recognize a reluctant host (23:6–8), along with extended warnings about excessive drinking, eating, and overwork (23:4–5, 20–21, 29–35). Perceived threats to the youth’s well-being and advancement are characterized as obstacles on his path, including the “strange” woman who appears again and is described as a “deep pit,” a “narrow well,” and a thief (23:26–28). Resonant are poignant appeals for moral courage and action. The sages point to God’s attention to and investment in the human situation to motivate compassion and justice, particularly for the sake of those in peril: the poor and afflicted for whom God pleads (22:22–23), the orphans for whom God is the redeemer (23:10–11), and those “unjustly taken away to slaughter” for whom God looks for rescuers (24:10–12). The sages confront those who strive to get ahead—here they are young men—with the harsh realities of injustice and suffering. They cannot avoid it, minimize it, or deny knowing about it. Indeed, the sages interpret human suffering in cosmic, historical, and global terms; everyone—God, your ancestors, peoples, and nations—stands on the side of the vulnerable and wronged (22:28; 23:10–11; 24:24). The sages hold out hope that those rising into positions of power will act boldly on behalf of the powerless.

On Government and Power (Prov. 25–29) The royal court takes center stage in these proverbs that are attributed to Solomon and transmitted by scribes in the court of Hezekiah (ca. 715–687 BCE). Indeed, some interpreters argue that portions of Proverbs 25–29 were used to educate aspiring young men for royal office. Although the audience need not be so limited, many of the proverbs address how to navigate wisely in an increasingly complex moral arena that includes kings, nobles, bosses, enemies, gossips, sluggards, and liars.

Prominently discussed are the characteristics and behaviors that best “put [oneself] forward” (25:6) in a patriarchal world. While the young man’s world keeps expanding, proverbs that mention women remain circumscribed to the family and household. The sages reiterate the importance of honoring one’s mother and father, this time including prohibitions against stealing from one’s parents and rationalizing it (28:24), and companioning prostitutes instead of pursuing wisdom (29:3)—a contrast reminiscent of the youth’s choice between folly and wisdom in Proverbs 1–9. The sages again condemn lenient parenting (29:15). And the “contentious wife” returns. The sages intensify the storm imagery associated with her (25:24; 27:15; cf. 19:13) and add, in a way that remains cryptic, the metaphor of oil that like wind cannot be grasped (27:16). The sense seems to be that attempts to hide or hold on to her (restrain her?) surely fail. Finally, a proverb about the stewardship of resources includes provision for female household servants (27:27). For the first time in Proverbs, the sages name the precariousness of power and government. Injustice can be bought for a mere morsel of bread (28:21). The upright can be led astray (28:10). What had been an idealistic portrait of the king (e.g., 16:10–15) yields to repeated caution about wicked rulers who, like roaring lions or charging bears, trample the poor (28:15), callously and ignorantly extort from their people (28:16; 29:4), and let transgressions go unchecked (29:16). The damage is far-reaching: the king who entertains lies emboldens wicked officials (29:12), and whole communities cry out and go into hiding (28:28; 29:2). Notably, the hallmark of corrupt leadership here is economic injustice. Government is good and endures when it protects and provides for the poor and vulnerable (29:4, 14)—a standard very much alive and debated today.

The Cosmic Scope of Wisdom (Prov. 30) The sages’ insistence that wisdom requires the engagement of other peoples becomes explicit with the next two collections of the book (30; 31:1–9). Agur is a stranger. His name and that of his father, Yaqeh, are not Hebrew, and neither of them is mentioned elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. Agur is likely from Massa, a north Arabian tribe descended from Ishmael’s son Massa

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(cf. Lemuel, 31:1–9). Agur also speaks in a genre previously unmentioned in Proverbs—an “oracle,” a term that occurs most commonly in the prophetic formula “oracle of YHWH” or “thus says YHWH.” The phrase “the oracle of the man” (30:1b) is found only in the introductions to the oracles of Balaam (Num. 24:2–3) and the last words of David (2  Sam. 23:1). The latter may suggest that Agur is a frail man approaching the end of his life. Agur heralds divine power and mystery. With thick brush strokes, his four questions paint the vastness of God’s creation, sweeping vertically (heaven to earth) and horizontally (“all the ends of the earth”) and naming each of the four elements—fire (heaven), air, water, and earth (30:4; cf. Job 38–41; Isa. 40:12–14). His use of five different epithets for God in as many verses emphasizes God’s mystery: El (“God”), Qedoshim (“Holy One”), Eloah (“God”), YHWH (the personal name of the Deity), and Elohay (“my God”). It is as though he grasps to name God, the source of wisdom, and finds no single name for God sufficient. Each epithet sparks fresh reflection about God’s nature and work in the world. Agur’s instinct, which resonates with that of many women, is to broaden his theological language rather than limit it, so that he might better know and name God. The response to God’s greatness is, for Agur, a posture of humility—a hallmark of the wise (e.g., 15:33). He names his weariness in the search for wisdom. He describes his understanding as lacking or limited (“brutish”) and observes that there are many things he cannot do or comprehend (30:4, 18–19). He prays simply for the “bread of my portion,” or what is sufficient. The request recalls God’s provision of manna in the wilderness (Exod. 16) and anticipates the “portions” offered by “a woman of substance” (31:15) and the “daily bread” of the Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:11; Luke 11:3). Agur aims to preserve social order. He leaves no room for anyone, including women, to challenge or resist the status quo. This is perhaps most evident in his description of the world “upside down,” a common trope in the ancient Near East (30:21–23). He argues that the earth cannot bear the weight of social upheaval— when men and women of relatively low social standing assume positions of power without adequate preparation or appropriate humility. Among others, Agur points to the “hated”

woman who marries, perhaps a reference to the “contentious wife” or to a woman who moves from a less to a more favored status in a polygamous household (e.g., Gen. 29:31; Deut. 21:15–17). The maidservant who dispossesses her mistress also upsets the domestic order, as in the cases of Sarai and Hagar (Gen. 16, 21), Rachel and Bilhah (Gen. 30:1–23). However one reads the proverb, whether as serious but hyperbolic social critique or as humorous commentary, it legitimizes the social order as grounded in creation itself. Yet women may find traction in Agur’s view that humanity’s moral purview is the whole creation. He blurs distinctions between humans and the natural world. He ascribes humanlike qualities to creatures, such as the leech with “two daughters,” presumably its anterior and posterior suckers (30:15), and the ants and badgers who are “peoples” (30:24–28). He compares himself and the king to animals (30:2, 31). He animates earth and fire, and describes the barren womb, an ancient symbol for a woman’s inability to fulfill her biological and social functions, as being as insatiable to create life as Sheol, the underworld, is to consume it (30:16). He tells of birds swooping in to punish children who dishonor their mother and father—a graphic proverb about the natural world acting to preserve communal order (30:17). And he ponders the mysterious “way” of the eagle, the snake, the ship on deep waters, and a man “with” or “in” (the preposition may mean either) a “young woman” (the term refers to women of childbearing age, 30:18–19). Although Agur presumes the status quo, he manifests wonder and underscores how similar humanity is to the natural world, how creaturely people are, and how wise the smallest and least powerful creatures can be.

The Wisdom of a Queen Mother (Prov. 31:1–9) Addressed directly as King Lemuel, readers assume the throne not to the sounds of pomp and circumstance but to stern rebuke by the queen mother: “What (is with you), my son?!” (31:2). Hers is the only instruction attributed to a king’s mother known from the ancient Near East. Her appeal to the mother-child relationship recalls the book’s initial context of the household (Prov. 1–9); whereas a father’s

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instruction opens the book, a mother speaks near its conclusion. Apparently no one, not even the king, outgrows the need for discipline. With regard to both alcohol and women, the queen mother urges Lemuel’s self-restraint. He dares not relinquish to drink his good judgment and commitment to justice. And he dares not relinquish to women his hayil, a term that refers variously to strength, wealth, property, and ability (31:3). Perhaps the queen mother worries that the king’s wives or concubines, many of whom were likely given to him as part of political alliances, may “seduce” him to act in ways contrary to the good of the kingdom. Perhaps she worries that too much sex will deplete him of vitality and wisdom—a myth that persists even today. Whatever the case, much like the father in Proverbs 1–9, the queen mother perceives women as potential threats to her son’s success. She has apparently internalized the fear and its underlying stereotype of women. Her warning calls to mind David, whose reign unraveled after he pursued Bathsheba and orchestrated the murder of her husband (2 Sam. 11:1–12:15), and Solomon, whose downfall is attributed in part to his many marriages to foreign women (1 Kgs. 11:1–13).

A “Woman of Substance” (Prov. 31:10–31) Picking up the term hayil (31:3), Proverbs ends with the portrait of “a woman of substance” (’eshet-hayil). Men with hayil, like Lemuel and Boaz in the book of Ruth (2:1), are honorable and affluent. They may be kings, landowners, or those who serve the community with courage and loyalty, such as in the military. They are pillars in their communities—just like the woman celebrated here. The poem is a sequential and complete alphabetic acrostic; each new line begins with the next letter of the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet. This suggests that this is an “A-toZ” description of such a woman. That said, the poem features her many activities and attributes in no apparent order apart from an introduction (31:10–12), an enumeration of her qualities and deeds (31:13–27), and concluding praise (31:28–31). It reads much like an impressionistic painting. Viewed up close, the brushstrokes seem haphazard, but from a step or two away dots and splatters merge to become the cumulative image of a wise and valiant woman.

Shared themes and vocabulary indicate that “a woman of substance” should be identified with personified wisdom in Proverbs 1–9. The two women who frame the book essentially coalesce. Both women are hard to find and are more precious than jewels. Both have a house and a staff of young women. Both provide food, prosperity, and security. Both are known at the city gates and bestow honor on their companions. Both are physically strong and loathe wickedness. Both extend their hands to the needy. They laugh. And both teach; their identities and instructions are associated with “fear of YHWH.” The nature and extent of these parallels indicate that readers who first met wisdom in the city streets (Prov. 1–9) now greet her again—no longer as a silent son but as a mature, wise young man, arguably her husband, whose prominence is celebrated as one of her many accomplishments (31:23). This is what life looks like for those who accept wisdom’s invitation to dwell in her household (9:1–6). Most women regard the “woman of substance” as a mixed blessing. Aspects of her depiction reinforce the values and customs of a patriarchal culture. The poet objectifies her, describing her as something to be found and purchased. She has a “price” higher than that of other expensive items, perhaps a reference to the value of her dowry or a bride-price paid by the groom to the bride’s family (31:10). And she is desirable for the “loot”—the imported delicacies, real estate, money, and status—she brings her husband (31:11–12). Moreover, she embodies not one woman but the desired aspects of many. The idealized portrait assumes, among other things, that the woman is heterosexual, married, and a mother. It is no wonder, then, that while some women say they know a “woman of substance,” far more consider her a “superwoman”— another unrealistic and dehumanizing depiction of women created to entice and promote the values of men. Yet coupled with Proverbs 1–9 and its praise of personified wisdom, this celebration of a woman and her everyday enterprises—her so-called “women’s work”—envelops a book intended for men about living wisely in the everyday. Her attributes, commitments, and skills are its frame. What is more, because the woman is identified with wisdom and “fear of YHWH,” “women’s work” is set apart and named as the beginning, indeed the standard, of faithfulness. Whether bartering in the

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marketplaces, weaving, trading, feeding and clothing others, planting vineyards, mixing wine, or burning the midnight oil, the labor of women is here elevated, theologically legitimated, and claimed as the preferable means of moral and theological instruction of the whole community. It is nothing less than “God talk.” Proverbs thus leaves us with another captivating and complex portrait of wisdom as a woman—one that would be reclaimed, repainted, and renamed by sages for generations to come. Bibliography

Brown, William P. “The Pedagogy of Proverbs 10:1–31:9.” In Character and Scripture: Moral Formation, Community, and Biblical Interpretation, edited by W. P. Brown, 150–82. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002.

Davis, Ellen F. Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Songs. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2000. Fox, Michael V. Proverbs 1–9. Anchor Bible 18A. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ———. Proverbs 10–31. Yale Anchor Bible 18B. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. Newsom, Carol A. “Women and the Discourse of Patriarchal Wisdom: A Study of Proverbs 1–9.” In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by Peggy L. Day, 142–60. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989. O’Connor, Kathleen M. The Wisdom Literature. Message of Biblical Spirituality 5. College­ ville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1988. Van Leeuwen, Raymond C. “Proverbs.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1997. Yoder, Christine Roy. Proverbs. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009.

Ecclesiastes Jennifer L. Koosed

Introduction Ecclesiastes contains the musings of a figure who at first purports to be the son of David (presumably King Solomon), but later his royal façade cracks to reveal a more likely identity, that of a court official or scribe living in the period under Persian rule. The name “Ecclesiastes” derives from the Hebrew Qohelet, an unusual word that resists precise translation. Grammatically, it is the feminine form of the verb qhl, “to assemble” or “to gather.” The word may be a title meaning something like “the assembler.” In Greek, the word ekklēsiastē means a member of a citizens’ assembly; therefore Ecclesiastes could be translated “citizen.” In the New Testament and early Christianity, ekklēsia becomes a particular assembly—that of the church. Consequently, Martin Luther proposed the anachronistic der Prediger (“the Preacher”) as a translation for Qohelet. A wide variety of other options have been suggested, including regarding the word as an anagram, a proper name, or an otherwise cryptic pseudonym. Because of the traditional ascription of authorship to Solomon, Ecclesiastes can be found in the Christian canon between Proverbs and Song of Songs, also purportedly Solomonic texts. In the Jewish canon, Ecclesiastes is found in the third section of texts, called the Ketuvim (“Writings”) among the five Megilloth (“Scrolls”). The Megilloth are the biblical books read in their entirety during certain Jewish holidays. Qohelet is read during the fall festival Sukkot (Booths). The text does not speak in a coherent unified voice; indeed, Ecclesiastes is a book of contradictions. Much of Ecclesiastes is about

the vagaries of life, fate, and the failures of wisdom. Yet other passages uphold a connection between wise conduct and a good life, a hallmark of traditional wisdom. On the one hand, there is no benefit to righteous living; on the other hand, God’s rule and God’s commandments are affirmed. On the one hand, the book is deeply pessimistic; on the other hand, the book recommends and rejoices in certain pleasures. For Ecclesiastes, since death comes for all without distinction, death renders human endeavors meaningless. As the contents are contradictory, the structure is unclear. Certain themes are repeated throughout the text by refrains such as “vanity of vanity, all is vanity,” “chasing after wind,” and “under the sun”; these refrains lend the book a kind of unity. However, the text is otherwise an eclectic mix of poetry and prose, short pithy sayings and long, extended meditations, firstperson narration and third-person comment. Although the traditional ascription to Solomon would mean that the text was written in the tenth century BCE, most modern scholars agree that the text can be no earlier than the Persian period because of the presence of Persian loan words and grammatical constructs from late biblical Hebrew. The preponderance of economic words and worries in Ecclesiastes may further support a Persian-period date, given the importance of money in the Persian economic system. However, there is still wide scholarly disagreement about the exact date of the book, with proposals ranging from early in the Persian period up to the time of the Maccabean revolt. A median date of late Persian or 243

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early Hellenistic period—sometime between 400 and 200 BCE—is the most widely held view. The speaker identifies himself as male and assumes a male audience. There are women present in the text as slaves, concubines, mothers, wives, and grinders of grain, but they are objects in the experiments of Ecclesiastes or incidental to his meditations. When the

speaker turns to address women more specifically, he reviles them for a lack of wisdom (7:26–28). Such an unmitigated condemnation of all women has earned Ecclesiastes the appellation of misogynist. However, upon further examination, the gender ideologies in the book of Ecclesiastes are more complex than they first appear.

Comment Introduction of Speaker and Themes (Eccl. 1:1–11) Despite the declaration that Ecclesiastes is king in Jerusalem, the speaker is probably best described as a sage or teacher, perhaps a midlevel official in the provincial administration. The royal persona of Solomon is assumed, perhaps to situate the text within the Wisdom corpus. Even though the book is classified as Wisdom literature, its wisdom is not of a traditional type. The first words of Ecclesiastes signal the break with any pious platitude or conventional faith: “‘Vanity of vanities,’ says the Teacher, ‘vanity of vanities! All is vanity’” (1:2). The word “vanity” occurs thirty-eight times in the book and is its primary theme. It is an ambiguous and enigmatic word that carries connotations of nothingness, ephemerality, and even absurdity. The poem that follows further explores this theme: work confers no advantage, generations come and go, the cycles of the earth continue, nothing is satisfying, nothing is new. Finally, the most acute reality for Ecclesiastes: those who die are not remembered (1:11).

A Test of Pleasure (Eccl. 2) The royal persona continues into the second chapter. The speaker decides to conduct an experiment of pleasure that only a king could arrange. He acquires more and more possessions, including houses, vineyards, livestock, slaves, and concubines. The human property is listed and assessed in ways equivalent to the animal and material property. Slavery as an institution is assumed; women can be amassed like any other possession. Hedonistic behavior is ultimately condemned by the speaker, but not out of a moral critique that such behavior—and the acquisition of wealth necessary

to enable it—exploits other people. Rather, wealth accumulation and hedonistic pursuits are condemned because, after death, there is no control over who inherits or how that person conducts himself (2:12, 18–21). Why toil your whole life to build an empire that will be mismanaged once you die? Why toil your whole life to build a name for yourself when it will be forgotten once you are put in your grave? The only remedy is to enjoy what one has in the present moment (2:24, see also 3:12–13, 22; 8:15).

A Time for Everything (Eccl. 3) Chapter 3 opens with the famous poem of the times, where certain oppositional activities (twenty-eight in all) are said to be appropriate in their own season (3:1–8). This poem begins a series of meditations that question the value of the hierarchies implicit in dualistic thinking. Dualism is never neutral—one pole is always invested with more value than the other. But here Ecclesiastes proclaims equal the value of all activities and emotions. Even the ethical distinction between the righteous and the wicked (3:16–17; see also 7:15–18, 9:1–2) and the ontological distinction between human and animal (3:18–21) are challenged by this radical thinker, because death comes for all in the end. Although Ecclesiastes does not extend his reevaluation of dichotomies to sex and gender, there are affinities between his challenge and feminist critique. Feminism begins with the dismantling of the fundamental binary oppositions between male and female, masculine and feminine. If the differences and distinctions between human and animal can be questioned because both die equally, cannot we also question the differences and distinctions between men and women? They are as ephemeral as the wind.

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The Tears of the Oppressed (Eccl. 4:1–3) Ecclesiastes assumes institutions organized by class and gender hierarchy, yet he also acknowledges the injustice of the oppression of the weak by the strong. The speaker notes that many toil in misery and tears, exploited by the mighty, and that this aspect of the human condition is evil (see also 5:8, 8:9). In the speaker’s recognition that powerful people harm those who lack any protection or recourse, and that such situations are unjust, there is an inchoate critique of hierarchical power structures, particularly those that are economically exploitative. Again, the speaker fails to extend his critique to issues of sex and gender, but feminist critics share his basic concern with hierarchies and the abuse of power they produce.

The Advantage of Relationship (Eccl. 4:7–12) In addition to finding pleasure and contentment in eating and drinking, Ecclesiastes also extols the virtues of companionship. In many ways, “two are better than one” (4:9) for Ecclesiastes: they help each other in economic pursuits, when accident or treachery befalls; and they protect each other against the cold of the night. The speaker highlights these homosocial bonds, and there is even a hint of the homoerotic as the two male companions huddle together throughout the night to produce heat. The value of relationship is a cornerstone of feminist ideology as well, although the type of male bonding commended by Ecclesiastes has been regarded with suspicion because it can exclude and devalue women.

Women Are without Wisdom (Eccl. 7:23–29) Ecclesiastes speaks highly of the relationship between men, but also of the relationship a man can have with his wife (9:9). He makes frequent reference to mothers and wombs, grounding human existence in them (4:14). But when he turns his attention to women’s ability to act wisely, he makes a misogynistic statement: “I found more bitter than death the woman who is a trap, whose heart is snares and nets, whose hands are fetters; one who pleases God escapes her, but the sinner is taken by her” (7:26). Ecclesiastes continues, “One [wise] man among a thousand I found, but a [wise] woman among all

these I have not found” (7:28). Some have sought an explanation for these verses by emphasizing the definite article—a particular woman is condemned, perhaps the adulterous woman or Dame Folly from Proverbs. Others have speculated that the writer is beset by personal troubles and disappointments, frustrations and fears. Regardless of the reason, the sexism of the passage is obvious and indefensible. Despite the speaker’s efforts to exclude women from wisdom, there are strange eruptions of the feminine in the text that undermine its general sexist tenor. These oddities derive from the fact that Hebrew nouns, pronouns, and verbs are gendered in ways that cannot be communicated in English translation. As mentioned previously, Qohelet itself is a feminine name, although every other indication is that the speaker is male. In addition, around the very verses condemning all womankind as dangerous traps for unwary men, there are grammatical errors in gender—verbs that should be masculine are feminine (7:27). Perhaps the most pervasive intrusion of the feminine through the grammar of the text is wisdom herself. Wisdom is a feminine noun; since Hebrew does not have a gender-neutral third-person-singular pronoun (“it”), the book is replete with the pursuit of her and a longing for her at the same time that it avers that she is absent in women. The gender ideologies in the text deconstruct themselves.

The Epistemology of Observation and Experience (Eccl. 9) Chapter 9 opens with the speaker summarizing, “All this I laid to heart, examining it all” (9:1), and several primary themes of the book are then repeated in this chapter. One of the hallmarks of Wisdom literature in general and Ecclesiastes in particular is the pursuit of knowledge through observation and personal experience. Other more traditional routes of learning such as Torah, religious institutions like temple and priesthood, and the example of past Israelite heroes are absent from Ecclesiastes. Instead, what the eye sees and what the heart considers form the foundation of knowledge, a knowledge rooted in the body. Words concerning “eyes” and “seeing” occur fifty-six times, and the word “heart” appears forty-two times—each more frequently spoken than the word “vanity,” the book’s central theme.

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Chapter 9 continues: death is the great leveler; there is no difference between the righteous and the wicked; all is vanity (9:1–6). Confronted with such meaninglessness, Ecclesiastes recommends the everyday pleasures of living: eating bread, drinking wine, wearing clean clothes, fixing one’s hair, loving one’s wife (9:7–10). The implied author and audience are both masculine, but the seeds of certain feminist perspectives are also present in the valuing of the body’s experience and the pleasures found in the domestic sphere. According to both feminism and Ecclesiastes, there is no objective reality; rather, all knowledge is embodied and subjective.

The End of the Matter (Eccl. 12:8–14) After reiterating the central theme, “Vanity of vanities . . . all is vanity” (12:8), an epilogue enjoins the reader to fear God and to keep the commandments. These verses are frequently attributed to a later redactor, because they appear to domesticate the more radical aspects of the book. However, Ecclesiastes is poised between despair and faith throughout the text, and sometimes taking “hold of the one, without letting go of the other” (7:18) can be more transformative than unmitigated rebellion. In

the end, Ecclesiastes may offer a word of advice to feminist activists. Espousing a revolutionary feminist agenda runs the risk of dismissal; working within sexist systems to reform these systems runs the risk of co-optation. Revolution and reform must work in tension and in tandem, often deliberately defying or subverting conventional notions of consistency, in order to transform the world. Bibliography

Brenner, Athalya, and Carole Fontaine, eds. Feminist Companion to Wisdom and Psalms. 2nd series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998. Crenshaw, James. Ecclesiastes. Old Testament Library. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987. Fox, Michael V. A Time to Tear Down and a Time to Build Up: A Rereading of Ecclesiastes. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Koosed, Jennifer L. (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book. New York: Continuum, 2006. Seow, Choon-Leong. Ecclesiastes. Anchor Bible. New York: Doubleday, 1997.

Song of Songs J. Cheryl Exum

Introduction The book’s Hebrew name, “Song of Songs” or “The Greatest Song,” is a superlative like “king of kings,” the king above all other kings (Ezek. 26:7) or “holy of holies,” the most holy place (Exod. 26:33). In English the book is known as the Song of Songs, the Song of Solomon, and Canticles. It appears in the Megilloth, or “five scrolls” (Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther) in the Jewish canon. In the Christian canon it is last among the wisdom books (Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs) and precedes the Prophets. In the title (Song 1:1), which is later than the poem itself, the phrase “which is Solomon’s” could be a way of lending antiquity and authority to the poem by suggesting Solomonic authorship, or it could indicate that Solomon is the dedicatee, or that the Song is connected with Solomon in some way (like the use of “of David” as an editorial superscription to many psalms). The Song offers no clue to the date, place, or circumstances of its composition or the identity of its author (the poet’s success in creating lovers who are universal figures and in depicting love as not bound by time or place is what makes identifying the historical context of the Song so difficult). The traditional attribution of the book to Solomon probably derives from references to Solomon in the poem (1:5; 3:7, 9, 11; 8:11–12) and his reputation as the composer of songs (1 Kgs. 4:32) and owner of a large harem (1 Kgs. 11:3). Speculation about the date of composition ranges from the time of Solomon (tenth c. BCE) to the Hellenistic period (fourth to second centuries BCE). Some scholars see the Song as a collection, in which case the various love poems

in it would come from different authors and different times; however, the repetitions of smaller and larger units, the recurring themes and imagery, the lovers’ distinct and consistent attitudes toward love, and the poetic strategies regularly employed to immortalize love argue in favor of unity. The strategies the poet uses to show, and not simply say (8:6), that love is as strong as death include the illusion of immediacy, the impression that, far from being simply reported, the action is taking place in the present, unfolding before the reader; conjuring (and allowing to disappear), that is, the way the lovers materialize and dematerialize through speech in an infinite deferral of presence; the invitation to the reader to enter into a seemingly private world of eroticism, made easier by the presence of an audience within the poem of whom the lovers are aware and with whom they are in conversation (the women of Jerusalem); presenting the lovers as representing all lovers by making them composite or types of lovers rather than any specific lovers; blurring distinctions between anticipation and enjoyment of love (and thus between past, present, and future), which gives love an ongoing and timeless quality; and the resistance to closure, the lack of a tidy conclusion, so that the poem, like love itself, will not come to an end. The Song of Songs is unique as the Bible’s only love poem and for the picture it offers of the relationship between women and men (though its open-endedness allows it also to be read in terms of same-sex relationships and divine-human relationship). Here we encounter mutual desire and satisfaction, not a male point of view only, and a positive attitude toward a 247

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woman actively seeking to gratify her desire. Like any literary text, however, the Song is not a window through which the reality of the past can be transparently read. One cannot use the Song of Songs as evidence of what people in love at some particular time in the past felt or how they acted. We do not know whether or not the situation—love, a one-to-one relationship—allowed a certain freedom from social constraints, or whether the genre (love poetry) or the social setting (private rather than public life) accounts for the Song’s unique portrayal of mutuality in love, but in any event the song testifies to a worldview that included a vision of romance in which importance was attached to mutual desire. Without the Song, we could be tempted to conclude from the rest of the Bible that desire was constructed as male and as dangerous, something to be repressed or controlled—as we see in the laws governing sexual relations, the advice of Proverbs to young men, and the “lessons” taught by the examples of heroes like Samson and David, led astray by their libidos. The Song attests to the availability of romantic ideas and ideals within the larger culture, and it also may have played a role in perpetuating them. The Song looks at love and longing from both a woman’s and a man’s point of view, and it does so by relying entirely on dialogue, so that we learn about love through what lovers say about it. The dialogue format creates the impression that we are overhearing the lovers as they speak, and observing their love unfold. The lovers’ voices are in harmony; each desires the other and both rejoice in the pleasures of sexual intimacy. But the poet has also given the lovers distinct perspectives. The differences in the way the poet portrays the female and male lovers reveal the poet’s exceptional sensitivity to differences between women and men. These differences inevitably reflect cultural assumptions about gender differences and roles, although the poem challenges many of these assumptions as well. The lovers delight in each other and in the sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and tangibility of the world around them, making

the Song a feast for the senses. A third speaking voice belongs to the women of Jerusalem, a kind of woman’s chorus, who function as an audience within the poem and whose participation in the lovers’ erotic encounters facilitates the reader’s participation. The Song is a lyric poem, not a dramatic one, and, though there are some dramatic moments in the woman’s speeches, we should not expect to find in lyric poetry the kind of linear unfolding of events that produces a plot. Rather, the Song meanders; it repeats themes, images, phrases, and sometimes whole sections. Although the Song does not progress in a linear fashion, the fact that the lovers each have their own distinctive way of talking about love and its effect on them encourages us to feel we know them and enables us to build a picture of them. The poem begins and ends with short speeches in which the voices of the woman, the man, and, occasionally, the women of Jerusalem intermingle (1:2–2:7; 8:1–14). In between—although the structure is not rigid—are two cycles of long speeches, in which the woman speaks, then the man, with the woman interrupting his speeches at the end (2:8–3:11 and 4:1–5:1; 5:2–6:3 and 6:4–7:13; in these speeches too we sometimes hear a brief response from the Jerusalem women). Could the Song have been written by a woman? Would the male editors and scribes, whose activity in producing the Bible was guided by social and religious agendas, have preserved intact an erotic poem they knew to have been written by a woman? Men would have had greater opportunity than women to be educated (an education that included Mesopotamian and Egyptian love poetry, since the Song clearly shows their influence), but this does not rule out the possibility of a woman having composed the Song. Nor does it exclude the possibility that the poet drew on traditional materials, some of which were the products of women’s culture. Indeed, love poetry, given its emphasis on a woman’s point of view and its association with the domestic sphere, may have been a genre to which women made a special contribution.

Comment Speaking about Love (Song 1:2–2:7) These opening verses, by disorienting the reader with a seemingly dizzying array of

speakers, abrupt scene changes (king’s chambers, vineyards, pastureland, Pharaoh’s stables, leafy bower, wine house), and variously identified lovers (royal figures, vineyard keeper,

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shepherds) alert us to the artifice of the Song, its status as a literary production. We are not in the world of real lovers or real events. The lovers are personae created by the poet, whose own voice we never hear. It is they who speak the poem, and each other, into existence, and through whom the poet explores the nature of love. In this poetic world, normal rules of time and space are suspended. Present, past, and future merge. The lovers effortlessly traverse a poetic landscape of palaces, gardens, cities, mountain ranges, wild places, cultivated vineyards, pastureland, and the vast steppe, but, for all their references to familiar and exotic places, where are they when they speak? Nowhere (that is, only on the page before us), and thus anywhere. Who is speaking in these verses? There are only three identifiable speaking voices in the poem, and there is no reason to posit additional speakers. The voices are those of a man, a woman, and the women of Jerusalem (literally, “daughters of Jerusalem,” that is, the female inhabitants of Jerusalem). Although it is not clear in most English translations of the Song, it is usually easy to determine whether a man or a woman is speaking, because Hebrew uses different forms for masculine and feminine nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, and pronoun suffixes. Are the voices we hear those of different women and men or of the same couple? It is not a question of either/or. The lovers are not identified with any particular people or historical time. Appearing simply as themselves (without identification) or in different guises (multiple identities as royalty or simple folk, as in these verses), they represent any and all lovers. The Song begins (and ends) with a woman’s voice. Not only is the attention the woman receives in the Song unique in the Bible; so too is her characterization, for there is no other female character in the Bible whom we get to know so well through her intimate and innermost thoughts and feelings. She expresses her sexuality as freely as the man does. Without any introduction—out of nowhere, so to speak— the first words of the poem voice her desire (“let him kiss me”) and present us with a love affair already in progress. There is no indication that the woman and man are married, although they are lovers, at least on the level of erotic suggestiveness or double entendre. Of the two lovers, it is only the woman who engages in self-description. Her declaration “I am black and beautiful” invites the gaze, while, at the same time, she tells the women

of Jerusalem to disregard her darkened skin, which is the result of labor in the sun—perhaps because it marks her out as different from the pampered city women of Jerusalem. Song 1:6 portrays a patriarchal social situation, in which the woman is under the control of her brothers; however, apart from this reference to “my mother’s sons” (rather than “my brothers”), male family members play no role in the Song. Why the brothers are angry we are not told. If “vineyard” is used symbolically of the woman (“my own vineyard I have not kept”), as it is in 8:12, she does not seem to be successfully controlled by her brothers. The man describes the woman in 1:9–10, something he will do repeatedly in the Song, and they engage in mutual praise in 1:12–2:4. As the lovers seem to be enjoying intimate pleasures, the woman speaks to the women of Jerusalem (2:5–7), telling them how love affects her. She is “faint with love” or “lovesick,” a condition whose cause and cure, the loved one, are the same. She places the women under oath not to awaken love until it wishes, for love has a will of its own.

The Woman’s First Speech (Song 2:8–3:11) The woman expresses her desire and explores her feelings for her lover, and his for her, through stories in which she and he both play roles, as themselves or in fantasy guises. Here she tells three. In her first story (2:8–17), she conjures her lover up by bringing him closer and closer from afar until he is peering through the windows of her house. In a conventional picture of courtship, the man, whose freedom of movement and social autonomy are underscored by the comparison to a gazelle bounding over the mountains, comes calling on the woman, who is inside the house. In this domestic setting, which is the sphere typically associated with women, she seems to him to be inaccessible, like a “dove in the clefts of the rock” (2:14). He calls to her, inviting her outside to witness the arrival of spring, but what he really he wants is to see her (2:14). Events seem to be taking place in the present: the man is leaping, bounding, standing, peeking, and speaking. Although these verses give the impression that a woman is quoting actual words her lover said to her, what we really have here is the poet telling us what the woman is telling us that the man is saying. Whether or not she lets him see her is not reported, but in

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2:15–17 she does respond to his request to hear her voice. If foxes represent amorous young men, and vineyards in bloom symbolize young women who have reached sexual maturity, the rather cryptic words “Catch us foxes, little foxes, spoilers of vineyards, for our vineyards are in bloom” (my trans.) could be understood as opposing the freedom of movement and sexual freedom a man enjoys to a woman’s more socially restricted position and desire to “catch” a man. In 2:15, the woman characterizes the way women and men look at love differently, the former from the perspective of the vineyard, which must be protected, and the latter from the perspective of the fox, casually enjoying a romp in the vineyards. In the next verse, however, she observes that matters are different for her and her lover. Their relationship is exclusive and mutual. He is not to be found in just any vineyard; he grazes among the lilies. Grazing among or upon the lilies strongly hints of enjoying the delights of lovemaking, with the lilies serving as a symbol of the woman herself (cf. 2:1; 6:2–3). In 2:17, the woman seems to be sending her lover away, back over the mountains from whence he came, but not if “cleft mountains” is a veiled reference to her person, like “mountains of spices” in 8:14. This possibility is strengthened by the fact that, when the phrase “until the day breathes and the shadows flee” appears again in 4:6, it is clearly the woman who is being referred to as “mountain of myrrh” and “hill of frankincense.” In her second story (3:1–5) her behavior does not conform to the social norms we can construct from the rest of the Bible. Here she takes the initiative, seeking her lover in the city streets and wasting no time with the watchmen she encounters, until she does, in fact, grab hold of or “catch” him (the same word as in 2:15). She brings him to her mother’s house, the woman’s domain in which she will possess him. In terms of the social context of the Song— though not of the poem itself, whose subject is eros, not social reality—the desired outcome for a woman in this situation is marriage (as 8:1 indicates, she is not, as things are in this society, in a position to kiss him openly). In her third story (3:6–11), the woman envisages a wedding and a wedding day on which King Solomon’s marriage is publicly celebrated, with the king crowned by none other than his mother. Is she really thinking about King Solomon or about her kingly lover, coming to her (again from

afar) in all his splendor, and in joy? It makes sense to see this story as a fantasy about her lover, whom she once again conjures up, this time not bounding over hills to reach her house (2:8–9), but in Solomonic guise, crossing the steppe in a magnificent palanquin that draws closer and closer until its royal occupant can be seen. This is not to say that 3:6–11 represents the lovers’ marriage in anything more than an indirect way, however, for marriage is never mentioned in the text apart from this reference to Solomon’s wedding.

The Man’s First Speech, with Responses by the Woman and the Jerusalem Women (Song 4:1–5:1) Although only the woman describes herself, the man does tell us about himself indirectly, for his characteristic way of talking about love is to look at the woman and to tell her what he sees and how it affects him. Unlike the woman, he does not tell stories. She quotes him speaking to her, but he never quotes her. Instead, he creates a picture of his lover for us through the gaze. He describes what he sees in a series of striking and sometimes, for moderns, bewildering images. We follow his gaze as he progressively builds up a picture of her, bit by bit, until she materializes on the page before us. Her effect on him is overpowering (“you have captured my heart with one glance of your eyes,” 4:9; my trans.). He who gazed upon her and very deliberately catalogued her charms in 4:1–5 is thunderstruck when she looks at him. Significantly, the man does not just look. He is profoundly affected, and he tells her so. He intends to make his way to her, “the mountain of myrrh and the hill of frankincense” (4:6), and he calls her to come to him. He expresses his awe of her by imagining her on remote mountain tops among lions and leopards (4:8). It is interesting to note that he does not associate her with the domestic security of the house, as she had presented him doing in 2:10–14, but rather with formidable wild animals whose inhospitable abode she shares. Both these images convey the idea that he perceives her as inaccessible, but her inaccessibility is more daunting in his version. Putting himself in the picture he constructs of her is not unlike her telling stories in which both he and she are characters. Neither lover constructs the other without being

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affected themselves—without becoming part of the story or entering the picture. In 4:12–15, the man goes on to picture his lover as a luscious garden, full of exotic plants and spices, and a plentiful source of erotic pleasures. This description is different from the one vividly picturing selected parts of her body, one by one, in startling metaphors, with which he began. Not only is it more intimate and erotically charged, but also the man is less interested now in an inventory of his lover’s features than in what she represents for him: a bountiful feast of erotic delicacies. As though unable to keep quiet any longer, because her desire is kindled by his fervent expressions of desire, the woman interrupts the man’s speech in 4:16 to invite him to his garden. Her invitation (“Let my beloved come to his garden,” 4:16) and his reply (“I come to my garden . . . I gather . . . I eat . . . I drink,” 5:1) are complementary expressions of desire gendered in terms of a cultural version of love as something a woman gives and a man takes. The woman is a garden whose fruits are ripe for the plucking. She invites her lover to come to his garden, an image in which she assumes the role of recipient, waiting for his visit. Entering the garden, gathering, eating, and drinking its produce symbolize male sexual activity, as do grazing (1:7; 2:16; 6:2, 3; the man himself grazes; he is not pasturing a flock as some translations have it) and tending or spoiling vineyards (2:15; 8:11–12). Importantly, in terms of the relationship between the sexes in the Song, the man takes the fruits of love only at the woman’s invitation. The man addresses the woman as “bride” and “sister bride” in 4:8–12 and 5:1. The Song of Songs is not about marriage, but in subtle ways it could be said to anticipate it (as in 3:6–11). The woman is not literally a “bride” in the Song, nor does the term “sister” imply that the couple is related (as, e.g., when Abraham claims that Sarah is his half sister in Gen. 20). Lovers call each other “brother” and “sister” in Egyptian and Mesopotamian love poetry, and the Song, which draws on these poetic traditions, also uses “sister” as a term of endearment (see also Gr. Esth. 15:9; Tob. 5:21; 7:15; 8:4, 21). It is a real question (and one that readers must answer for themselves) to what extent the man’s descriptions fetishize the woman’s body or if all this looking at the woman’s body is objectifying. Having one’s body appreciated

by one’s lover may not be intrusive or embarrassing, but we are dealing with a text where the reader is privy to intimate looking and love talk. Is the Song, then, voyeuristic, since the poet presents these bodily descriptions not just for the lovers’ pleasure but for that of the poem’s readers? The women of Jerusalem, the audience within the poem who also look and whose look the lovers are aware of, authorize the reader’s look. How successful this poetic strategy is in making the Song seem less voyeuristic is, however, a question that ultimately only a reader can answer. The descriptions are intimate, suggestive, and often explicit, but, at the same time, the metaphors function as much to hide the body as to display it. The fact that the man puts himself in the picture when he describes the woman he loves allows looking to appear less voyeuristic and more erotic. Even more important is the fact that the woman looks at the man’s body and describes it in intimate detail too (5:10–16). Traditionally women are looked at and men do the looking. If the woman were only the object and not also the subject of the look, the Song would be a very different text indeed, with a high degree of gender imbalance. Though she looks only once—while looking at and describing her is the man’s primary way of talking about love— the female lover’s gaze prevents looking in the Song from being totally one-sided. Perhaps their looking involves an element of objectifying, or perhaps the poet portrays the lovers’ vulnerability by having them distance themselves from the object of their desire, using imagery to obscure the reality of the beloved, even while they mean to erase any distance. In any case, looking in the Song is mutual, even if different for the woman and the man. The final word belongs to the women of Jerusalem, who encourage the lovers to eat and drink themselves drunk on caresses.

The Woman’s Second Speech (Song 5:2–6:3) As in her first speech, the woman tells a story in which her lover comes courting and she goes out to seek him in the city streets. Earlier the initiative was hers (3:1–5); this time she acts in response to an encounter he seeks to initiate (5:2–6). Through putting words in his mouth when she tells stories in which he courts her, she controls the way we view him: as a lover who comes courting by day and by night, and

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who woos her with sweet words—and as a somewhat elusive lover she must seek, but one who is never difficult to find. Again we see that there is no restriction on the man’s movement. He appears suddenly, and just as quickly he seems to disappear into the night. Her story can be read on two levels. On the literal level, the man is outside the woman’s chamber at night, seeking admittance. He departs before she can get up to let him in, and she goes in search of him. On the erotic level, through double entendre, these verses can be read as suggestive of sexual intercourse—not a stage-by-stage description where body parts and fluids can be matched to indirect references, but an overall suggestiveness of sexual intimacy created by the pace, the imagery, and the choice of words. For example, the verb “open” never has an object in these verses; there is no door, as some translations have it. And so “open to me” (5:2), “I arose to open to my beloved” (5:5), and “I opened to my beloved” (5:6) clearly have sexual overtones. In 6:1–3 the woman reveals that she knows where her lover is—in his garden among the lilies; that is, with her, in the exotic garden of 4:12–5:1, which is coterminous with the woman’s body. The revelation at the end of her speech that she did not need to look for him at all has some bearing on the interpretation of 5:2–7. It cautions us against an overly literalistic reading of these verses as if they needed to be explained as an event in the life of the lovers or a dream. The woman’s story in 5:2–6:3 is, first and foremost, one of many instances of the Song’s blurring of the distinctions between longing and gratification, desire and its satisfaction, and a dramatic illustration of how the poet uses roundabout language to imply sexual intimacy. Readers should rightly be disturbed by the beating of the woman by the watchmen (5:7). In 3:1–5 the city guards neither helped nor hindered; here their actions are unjustified, even if the woman’s behavior is unconventional. It is hard to imagine that the poet wants to humiliate a character otherwise so sympathetically portrayed, who speaks on behalf of the poet’s vision of love as mutual delight and pleasure. Perhaps the poet wants to show that lovers are willing to take risks and to undergo suffering for love’s sake. Nevertheless, it is a woman whom the poet represents as abused by men in a role of authority. Her lover does not brave

hardship for her sake, and even if the poet had portrayed him as doing so, it is hard to imagine a man experiencing the kind of treatment the woman receives here. The situation seems to reflect the social mores and expectations of a patriarchal society, in which men enjoyed a social freedom that women could not expect to share. Surprisingly, other than recounting it briefly, the woman has nothing to say about this experience, and, undeterred by it, she immediately turns to the women of Jerusalem to ask them to tell her lover that she is lovesick (“faint with love,” 5:8). If the man seems at times to be an elusive lover (1:7–8; 3:1–5), perhaps it is because we see him from the woman’s point of view, going where he pleases, while she is more often associated with a domestic setting (but cf. 4:8). Her anxiety about seeking him and not being able to find him might be attributed to the fact that traditionally the discourse of absence is carried on by women, who wait at home while men venture out into the world. When the Jerusalem women ask the woman what is so special about her lover (5:9), she easily enough conjures him up by describing his body, part by part, as he so often does of her. Presumably the poet represents the different ways men and women speak about each other in terms of the prevailing cultural ideals of male and female beauty and desirability. The woman draws on images of hardness and solidity, as well as value, to describe the firm muscular body she treasures: rods of gold for his hands, an ivory bar for his torso, marble pillars on gold pedestals for his legs. If his imagery is more vivid and animated than hers, hers is more relational than his. An important difference between their descriptions of the other’s body is that she is describing him to others, whereas his descriptions are represented by the poet as spontaneous outbursts inspired by the sight of her. She is not looking at him when she describes his body, which may help to explain why her reaction to his body is different from his to hers. He deals with her body in parts to cope with her devastating presence. She treats his by parts to cope with his absence and to conjure him up through the evocative power of language.

The Man’s Second Speech, with a Response by the Woman (Song 6:4–7:13) As in his first speech, the man speaks metaphorically about his lover’s body. He describes

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her twice (6:4–10 and 7:1–9), the second time picturing parts of the body not normally exposed to view. In the verses in between, it is not clear who goes down to the nut garden (6:11). Perhaps it is the woman, since she is called to “return” in 6:13, either by the women of Jerusalem or the man (in which case the “we” would include the Jerusalem women—and, of course, readers—in the gaze). The lovers describe differently what it is like to be in love. Whereas the woman speaks about being in love and how she experiences it (“I am faint with love” or “I am lovesick,” 2:5; 5:8), the man thinks in terms of conquest, of power relations. Unlike the woman, who expresses her feelings subjectively, he does not say, “I am overwhelmed,” but rather describes the way he feels as something she has done to him: “You have captured my heart” (4:9); “Turn your eyes away from me, for they overwhelm me” (6:5, my trans.). As a man, he is used to feeling in control. Now love makes him feel as though he is losing control. He is powerless to resist; his autonomy is challenged. He welcomes this, to be sure, but these feelings are disconcerting. Lingering over the details of his lover’s body, part by part, provides the man with a way of dealing with the powerful feelings she arouses in him. He is awestruck; she is lovesick. As a woman, she is used to a world in which men are in control, and to a version of love according to which women surrender to men. Her autonomy is not challenged, because she does not have the kind of autonomy a man has (even though she is the most autonomous of biblical women). She is not in awe of him; she longs passionately for him and cannot do without him. The man is poised to take what he desires in 7:7–8, where he likens the woman to a date palm he will climb and her breasts to clusters he will lay hold of. But he takes what he desires only by invitation, and the invitation is forthcoming in 7:10–13, where once again the woman breaks in to the man’s speech to respond to his ardor with an invitation to lovemaking. Her words are reminiscent of those he used in 2:10–13: “Come, my beloved, let’s go out to the open field. . . . Let’s go early to the vineyards. . . . There I will give you my love” (my trans.). Here too, even when she takes the initiative in initiating a rendezvous, love is pictured as something she gives and he takes.

Speaking Again about Love (Song 8:1–14) As it draws to a close, the Song returns to the mode in which it began, with a series of shorter speeches by the woman, the man, and, in 8:5, the Jerusalem women. As in the opening section, the transitions from one topic to another are more abrupt. Social restraints on the woman’s freedom to display her affection are indicated by her wish that her lover were like a brother, whom she could kiss openly without censure (8:1). She speaks of bringing him to her mother’s house, and goes on to describe love in patently erotic terms as something she will give and he (by implication) will take. Both the woman’s mother and the man’s mother are mentioned, and, compared to seven references to the mother in the poem (1:6; 3:4, 11; 6:9; 8:1, 2, 5), there is no mention of the father. Men’s roles in the family are pushed into the background. Song 8:6–7 is crucial for understanding what the poet of the Song of Songs is trying to achieve. These verses stand out from the rest of the Song as the only time in this love poem that readers are told anything about the nature of love in general. The poet places these words, like everything else that is said in the Song, in the mouth of one of the characters in the poem, for the poet is too good a poet to preach to readers directly about love. Here in these verses, near the poem’s end, the woman speaks to her lover, not about their love, as she has up till now, but about love itself. Now we are told what the poet has been showing us all along in this poem about mutual desire, sensual pleasure, and sensory delight, where love is experienced as astonishing, overwhelming, confident, undeterred, and committed. Love, says the woman, is strong as death. She does not claim that it is stronger, for the poet is well aware that real lovers die. But, preserved on the page, the vision of love described in the Song of Songs will live on so long as the poem is read. Of course, not all readers will choose to identify with the lovers or to accept the poem’s invitation to share in its vision of love. There are resistant readers as well as ideal ones. Song 8:6–7 may be the climax of the poem, but it is not the last word. In Song 8:8–12, the lovers each tell a story in which they speak metaphorically about themselves and their beloved (the woman in 8:8–10 and the man in 8:11–12). Both stories begin in a way that seems to be

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irrelevant: “We have a little sister . . .”; “Solomon had a vineyard . . .” Both the sister and Solomon’s vineyard are foils that allow the speakers to say something about themselves. She says that, unlike the girl in her example, for whom preparations will be made when she reaches marriageable age, she needs no such attention, since she (a fortified city) has already surrendered to her lover. He says that his vineyard (the woman) is worth more than Solomon’s (perhaps an allusion to Solomon’s vast harem), and he alone will tend it. The woman describes preparations made when a girl reaches marriageable age, the time when she will be “spoken for” (8:8–9). This is a subject that would have greatly concerned women in a society where women were under the control of their fathers or other male relatives before marriage, where marriages were usually arranged, and where the virginity of the bride was an important issue. In such circumstances, what role do matters of the heart play? The woman avers that these familial and societal concerns do not apply to her, since she has already reached womanhood and offered herself in surrender to her lover. To be “like one who brings [or “finds”] peace” (8:10) is a military allusion signifying surrender. A city that surrenders does not have its walls besieged, since it opens its doors. The woman is both a wall and a door (like the little sister in 8:9), but in her case the door has been opened so that her lover can take possession of the city. In a sense, she has been spoken for (not necessarily formally, since that is not really the issue). The man confirms their mutual commitment by declaring that she belongs to him: she is his very own vineyard, worth more than any vineyard a king

might possess. Like the woman, he speaks along gender-determined lines. He thinks in terms of competition with other men, and the imagery he draws upon—vineyards, hired workers to tend them, and payment for the produce—belongs to the sphere of economic livelihood. The Song of Songs does not end with a sense of closure. Instead, the man’s request to hear his lover’s voice (8:13) and her reply in which she sends him away and allusively calls him to her at the same time (he as a gazelle and she as the mountains of spices upon which he will cavort, 8:14) point the reader back to the beginning. In effect, the Song circles back upon itself, for only when the woman seems to send her lover away can the poem begin again with the desire that gives rise to the ardent exclamation, “Let him kiss me with the kisses of his mouth!” Bibliography

Black, Fiona C. The Artifice of Love: Grotesque Bodies in the Song of Songs. London: T. & T. Clark, 2009. Brenner, Athalya, and Carole R. Fontaine, eds. The Song of Songs: A Feminist Companion to the Bible. 2nd series. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000. Exum, J. Cheryl. Song of Songs, A Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005. Fox, Michael V. The Song of Songs and the Ancient Egyptian Love Songs. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Landy, Francis. Paradoxes of Paradise: Identity and Difference in the Song of Songs. 2nd ed. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2011.

Isaiah Patricia K. Tull

Introduction Among both Christians and Jews, Isaiah is one of Scripture’s most well-loved and often-quoted books. It is also one of the most compositionally complex, reflecting historical settings that span Judean history from the time of Assyrian domination in the late eighth century through Babylonian times and deep into, if not beyond, the era of Persian rule that began in the late sixth century. Canonically Isaiah stands as the first of the fifteen “writing” (or more accurately, “written”) prophets. It is many times longer than the three other prophetic books originating in the eighth century BCE, Amos, Hosea, and Micah. Isaiah is also the earliest of the three “major” prophets, preceding Jeremiah and Ezekiel by more than a century. The book’s prominence is reflected in the history of its interpretation. No other prophetic book is more often quoted in the Christian New Testament or in the Dead Sea Scrolls of the Jewish sectarian Qumran community, and no other book appears more frequently in the Jewish annual lectionary and no other Old Testament book more often in contemporary Catholic and Protestant lectionaries.

The Prophet’s Message Isaiah is the Bible’s only eighth-century Jerusalemite prophet. He evidently enjoyed ready access to Kings Ahaz and Hezekiah. A sophisticated poet with an educated grasp of Israel’s traditions, he is well known for his insistence that Jerusalem’s elite bear deep ethical responsibility for those they govern. Prominent in the prophecies generally attributed to Isaiah

himself, as well as in those that, following in his legacy, became part of his redacted book, are the paired expressions mishpat (justice) and tsedakah (righteousness), a hendiadys (that is, a pair of words linked to form a single idea) most accurately translated today as “social justice.” Like Amos a few years before him, Isaiah insists that to be God’s people, Israel is not only to engage in ritual worship of YHWH, Jerusalem’s God, but to adhere to behavioral demands consistent with YHWH’s plans for Israel. According to Isaiah, God’s care extends not simply to the king and his minions, but especially to the vulnerable, the “orphans and widows,” the poor, and others who stand outside the halls of power. A major theme of Isaiah 1–39 is the futility of human greatness, exposed as arrogance. Pride, whether belonging to oppressor nations or to individuals or classes of people within Israelite society, would inevitably be thwarted by God, who “has a day against all that is proud and lofty” (2:12). Isaiah was especially appalled by those who utilized the legal system to enrich themselves and to cheat the needy (10:1–2). People and even whole societies heedless to the demands of justice would not stand, but as God’s own enemies were bound for destruction. Amos, speaking a generation earlier, had issued his warnings to the rulers of the northern kingdom while the nation was still strong and the threat of Assyrian conquest lay beyond the horizon. Isaiah’s prophetic career began as international instability grew. Early in his adult life he saw Israel and Aram threaten to remove the Davidic king Ahaz from his throne, only themselves to collapse before Assyria’s 255

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war machine. From that point until the near destruction of Judah by the Assyrian king Sennacherib in 701 BCE, Isaiah saw the stable community of YHWH’s worshipers shrink from two kingdoms to a mere city-state. He accepted the grave task of interpreting for his contemporaries in ethical and theological terms the disasters witnessed in his generation. Thus Isaiah attempted to justify the destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel and to warn Jerusalem that the same fate could well befall them if they remained deaf and blind to the just demands of their God.

The Prophet’s Legacy Isaiah’s reputation as a prophet, far from suffering from his dire predictions’ failure to be fulfilled in his lifetime, appears instead to have been enhanced by Jerusalem’s near destruction in 701 and by the evident grace of Jerusalem’s survival. In the late seventh century, when Babylon usurped Assyria’s role of regional domination, and soon after this Jerusalem succumbed to Babylon’s attack, Isaiah’s reputation as an authentic prophet grew. Though it seems evident to many scholars that his legacy had already begun to take on a life of its own during the Judean monarchy (particularly, according to some, during the reign of King Josiah), other prophets’ concerns with Jerusalem’s future during and beyond the Babylonian exile became attached to Isaiah, expanding his book from the original prophecies that can reasonably be attributed to him into a much longer book, as further prophetic extensions were added both immediately adjacent to his original writings (now found primarily in parts of Isa. 1–11 and 28–32) and in compositions appended to these sections. Though the redactional composition of Isaiah is highly complex and its details remain disputed, scholars for over a century have spoken of the book’s primary divisions as First Isaiah (Isa. 1–39), Second Isaiah (Isa. 40–55), and Third Isaiah (Isa. 56–66), with all of Isaiah’s own words occurring within First Isaiah. Broadly speaking, the inception of First Isaiah may be associated with the period of Assyrian hegemony, Second Isaiah with the end of Babylonian control, and Third Isaiah with Persian reign, beginning in the late sixth century BCE. This division, however, is accurate only to a limited degree. In actuality, the temporal

settings reflected in most of the book are far more complex. For instance, within First Isaiah are found many redactional extensions that are, if datable at all, often attributable to Persian times or perhaps, according to some, as late as Hellenistic times—that is, fully as late as anything appearing in chapters 40–66. In addition, literary genres found in Isaiah 1–39 include not only poetic prophecy, but prophetic prose, first- and third-person narratives and narrative snippets, hymns, dirges, and protoapocalyptic writing. In addition to expansions within chapters 1–32, seven chapters appended to these (Isa. 33–39) seem designed to conclude this portion and to join it, more or less, to what follows. In its latest redactional layers, Isaiah 1–39 appears to have been massaged to cohere more closely with latter parts of the book, especially its final chapters. Isaiah 40–55 consists of more self-contained and literarily continuous poetic sections associated with the end of the Babylonian exile. By contrast, chapters 56–66 appear to comprise a compilation reflecting various viewpoints, settings, and concerns, arranged in an envelope structure around the central chapters, 60–62, in which close ties to the themes and language of Second Isaiah are found. What makes the book coherent, if not unified, is therefore neither authorship nor temporal context. Rather it is geopolitical-theological concern. In one way or another, the entire book of Isaiah focuses attention on the continuing but troubled relationship between the city of Jerusalem and Jerusalem’s God YHWH and on the question of righteousness, both divine and human, within this relationship. Many other nations beyond Judah populate the book, and it is finally not a Jerusalemite king but Cyrus the king of Persia who is called God’s anointed, or “messiah” (mashiakh, 45:1). Nevertheless, Jerusalem remains central in the imaginations of the several prophets, exegetes, and editors who contributed to Isaiah’s formation. Jerusalem is portrayed as a flawed city, once righteous but no longer so, which endures severe punishment from God in order to attain moral and ethical purity, to become the righteous city in which God delights. Having endured destruction and reconstruction, Jerusalem is intended for a glorious future as the world’s center, the home of YHWH’s temple, the destination of nations who seek to learn the ways of peace.

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Jerusalem’s Gendered Portrayal Within this story line of Jerusalem’s relationship to God lies the source of much feminist ambivalence. On the one hand, Isaiah of Jerusalem is portrayed as a fierce defender of society’s disadvantaged and as a fearless spokesperson to Jerusalem’s elite, even to its kings. The poetry of Second and Third Isaiah likewise shows deep concern with divine justice and human righteousness. At the same time, the primary imagery through which these concerns are conveyed is troubling. As in other prophetic literature, particularly Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, God is envisioned as an enraged and violent parent, a neglectful and abusive husband, and a fierce warrior and avenger who will not hesitate to afflict punishment, even collective punishment, on those perceived as violent or evil. Jerusalem is portrayed not only in the figure of the king and the collective male leaders, but most prominently as a female figure, Daughter Zion (also Daughter Jerusalem, Virgin Daughter Zion, Royal Zion, Messenger Zion, and Captive Daughter Zion), who is subject to punishment and redemption as God’s wife and the mother of Jerusalem’s chil-

dren. Other cities and whole countries likewise appear as vulnerable females subject to vicious attack by male humans or by God. The gendered roles in Isaiah’s imagery must be weighed in context. Even though much of the poetry containing this imagery was produced after similar metaphors appeared in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, the use in Isaiah is subtler, less overtly pornographic than in these other books. This does not make it acceptable, but it does suggest that Isaiah’s authors may have exercised restraint in a context in which such imagery was taken for granted. Second, and more importantly, the imagery is not static, but contains promising elements that unsettle any notion that God is ontologically male and that the feminine is truly powerless. For instance, pictures of God as a birthing and cherishing mother stand alongside feminine imagery for Zion, and at points, Zion is assigned active and assertive roles. Third, and most crucially, even if the imagery does not sit well with contemporary women, more theological value can be derived from the tenor, or target, of these metaphors than from their flawed vehicles: the point of these messages is justice.

Comment First Isaiah (Isa. 1–39) Familial Imagery (Isa. 1:1–31) Isaiah’s first chapter, which previews many of the major themes to follow, illustrates the issues highlighted above. The topic is Israel’s rebellion against God, which has already resulted in divine violence, violence through which the prophet hopes Jerusalem will learn God’s ways and “cease to do evil, learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow” (1:16b–17). Doing so will result in prosperity, but refusal will lead to destruction. The opening lines portray the nation as rebellious children who, despite severe corporal punishment, refuse to shape up. As the metaphor yields to its tenor in verse 7, it becomes clear that it concerns destruction by a foreign army, most likely Assyria in 701. This destruction is understood by the prophet as divine punishment for a rebellious nation. Daughter

Zion enters the discourse in verse 8 as a devastated city surviving alone. The poetry proceeds in verses 10–20 to straightforward rejection of ritual sacrifice unaccompanied by social justice. In verse 21 the metaphor of female Jerusalem resumes. Here she is briefly portrayed as a prostitute welcoming murderers, though emphasis lies not on this image but on the turpitude of the city’s leaders. Calling them enemies, the prophet threatens vengeance that will result in the removal of dross and alloy, purifying Jerusalem. In calling the people God’s rebellious offspring, Isaiah invokes a family code such as Deuteronomy 21:18–21, in which disobedient sons are subject to capital punishment. Even though by divine grace Jerusalem survived the first wave of punishment, continued rebellion will invite further violence. Though contemporary people would seek a more this-worldly chain of cause and effect, the idea that a nation’s actions have consequences for good or ill is not

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far from our own. More specifically, an unjust nation is weakened from within, diminished in the face of external threat. But when, as in this chapter, the practice of physical familial violence is normalized and attributed to the divine-human relationship, it reinforces the notion that parental violence, even to the point of the “bruises and sores and bleeding wounds” described in verse 6, is an acceptable and even faithful practice. Similarly, displacing Jerusalem’s male leaders’ sins onto its female personification deflects attention from the greed of powerful men, pointing fingers instead at female sexual ethics, reinforcing a vision of women as fundamentally saints or whores, and allowing readers to forget that women were not the immediate cause of the city’s injustice but were among its victims. Thus, as is often said of rape trials today, victimization recurs where justice belongs. A redemptive hermeneutic for this chapter and others like it in Isaiah would be simply to find the tenor in the midst of the metaphor, and to drop the vehicle, calling attention to its dangers. Isaiah called Jerusalem to just social practices and warned that the city’s survival depended on the repentance and reformation of its leadership. Readers can do equivalent work, seeking just practices in Scripture’s interpretation. In fact, Scripture’s future as viable theological resource may depend on this. Sexualized Social Evil (Isa. 3:12–4:6) Isaiah 3 continues to reflect on the corrupt elite of Jerusalem. Two groups are targeted. Verses 1–12 describe the removal of male leadership and the resulting chaos, while 3:16–4:1 describes the coming disgrace of wealthy women and of the city itself. In both sections, a list details the losses and a vivid closing cameo scene illustrates the desperate straits of individuals pleading with one another for rescue. Between these two stands the straightforward divine accusation that hovers over the entire section: “What do you mean by crushing my people, by grinding the face of the poor?” (3:15). In 4:2–6, a prose piece of later origin offers hope for Zion’s survivors. The section catches the interest of feminists for several reasons. First, a textual problem in verse 12 has led to dispute over the exact complaint and whether or not it concerns female leadership. Second, the future degradation of Jerusalem’s wealthy women is described in

verses 16–24 in highly sexualized terms, and in verse 26 the city itself returns as a woman. Third, even in the midst of a redemptive saying in 4:4, Jerusalem’s guilt is once again depicted in terms of sexualized female imagery. The debate over verse 12 can quickly be seen by comparing the New Jerusalem Bible with the NRSV. NJB follows the Septuagint, which reads the Hebrew word not as “women” (nashim) but as “extortioners” (noshim), and refrained from altering me’olel (“abuse”) to ‘olalim, “babes” (see also in this regard v. 4): “O my people, their oppressors abuse them and extortioners rule over them!” This is significant, because the complaint in surrounding verses is not of female leadership but of the deeds of people identified consistently by masculine pronouns. The ridicule and threats directed toward women in 3:16–4:1 may be put into perspective by Amos 4:1, which accuses elite women of engaging in indirect oppression by reveling in, and calling for, spoils of injustice. Such phenomena are not gender-bound, but are found wherever members of a society knowingly, or blindly, benefit from the unjust practices of their contemporaries, such as by buying “conflict diamonds” or clothing produced in sweatshops. The problem here, however, is that the language is sexualized, suggesting not simply the divine removal of luxury items but, in the context of violent conquest, rape. Such personal and bodily abuse as is threatened against Jerusalem’s women moves far beyond the threats to male leaders in 3:1–7, projecting unspeakable violence against members of society whose privilege is only tenuously bestowed, as 4:1 illustrates well. The comment in 4:4 that God will wash away “the filth of the daughters of Zion” and cleanse “the bloodstains of Jerusalem,” extraneous to the spirit of surrounding verses, follows this trajectory of sexualizing social evil and projecting it disproportionately upon women. Such a practice by male writers, less threatened by either personal violence or social marginalization, is particularly offensive. It is possible, however, to reject the imagery and still hear the judgment against consuming the spoils of oppression. A Series of Accusations (Isa. 5:8–30; 10:1–4) That it is the elite men of Jerusalem who are the actual targets of Isaiah’s criticism becomes clear in the most explicit of the prophet’s

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accusations, a series of “woe” oracles detailing such atrocities as greedy accumulation of real estate at others’ expense, drunken disregard of God’s ways, defiant taunts against prophetic warnings, and deceptive doublespeak, calling evil good and good evil. This last accusation (5:20) is worded as a biting triple chiasm that stands in the dead center of a chiastically arranged series of accusations, highlighting its fundamental nature. To use words to deceive, and under cover of deception to promote evil, is the sin underlying many others. The final woe, delayed until 10:1, denounces those who use the legal system itself as an instrument serving injustice, writing oppressive statutes to despoil widows and prey upon orphans. Such abuse will not go unpunished by the enraged divine protector of society’s vulnerable. “God Is with Us” (Isa. 7:1–17) One of Isaiah’s best-known sayings is contained in this passage: “Look, the young woman is with child and will bear a son,” quoted in Matthew 1:23 in relation to Jesus’ birth. Yet the context of the saying in Isaiah is a conversation between the prophet and Ahaz, not about the coming of the Messiah many centuries in the future, but rather the pressing threat of invasion by Israel and Aram. In context, the prediction of birth and of the child’s name is presented by Isaiah as a sign to Ahaz, pledging divine intent to deliver the king from danger. Thus the child’s name Immanuel, “God is with us,” becomes a key element of the message. Ambiguity concerning the young woman’s identity, however, has lent itself to Matthew’s adoption of this verse, along with a great many other Hebrew Bible passages, to suggest that Jesus’ birth is consistent with God’s acts in Israel’s history. Debate over the young woman’s identity appears as early as Justin Martyr’s Dialogue with Trypho in the early second century and continues till today. While contemporary scholars recognize that Isaiah cannot fairly be read as attempting to comfort Ahaz with a sign that would only become visible more than seven centuries after his death, they still debate whether the woman mentioned by the prophet is Ahaz’s queen; or the wife of Isaiah, who appears briefly in the next chapter; or simply a young woman in the vicinity who serves to signify that within a few months the political situation will be so much altered that the child can jubilantly—or perhaps expectantly—be named

“God is with us.” The woman who names her child Immanuel stands in the story as a model of faithfulness, in contrast to Ahaz’s refusal to accept Isaiah’s reassurance. A Female Prophet (Isa. 8:1–4) Whether or not Immanuel was Isaiah’s own child, Isaiah’s other sons’ names reflected political realities of the time of their birth. The son who accompanied him to his encounter with Ahaz was called Shear-jashub, “a remnant will return” (7:3). Whether the remnant is of Judah or of its threatening enemies, and whether the emphasis lies on promise (“indeed a remnant”) or threat (“only a remnant”) is left ambiguous (see also 10:21–22). In 8:3–4 Isaiah’s naming of another son Maher-shalal-hash-baz (“spoil is hurrying, plunder is hastening”) is accompanied by an explanation related to the expectation that Assyria would soon be plundering Judah’s enemies. Almost parenthetically, the mother, presumably Isaiah’s wife, is called the “prophet” (nevi’ah, feminine form of navi’, “prophet”). Past interpreters have suggested she gained this title by being Mrs. Isaiah, though no evidence exists for such usage. No known prophecies are attributed to her, and she is one of only five women of the Hebrew Bible to carry this title; see Miriam (Exod. 15:20), Deborah (Judg. 4:4), Huldah (2  Kgs. 22:14), and Noadiah (Neh. 6:14). Not one eyebrow is raised as these women’s vocations are mentioned, and the words of three of them are recorded (Exod. 15:21; Judg. 4:6–9; 5:2–31; and 2 Kgs. 22:15–20). The presence of female prophets in ancient Israel suggests that it is quite likely that at least some of the contributors to prophetic books were women. Leadership Promoting Safety (Isa. 10:12–12:6) While Isaiah perceives Assyria as God’s “rod of anger” against ungodly Judeans (Isa. 10:5), he amply criticizes overweening violence wherever it is found. Assyria is not in control but is merely an instrument, the ax or saw, the rod or staff in divine hands (10:15). Echoing threats in chapter 2 against the proud, the prophet foretells that “the tallest trees will be cut down, and the lofty will be brought low” (10:33). Threats against foreign arrogance will reappear in chapter 14. Immediately, like the new growth of a sapling when the forest canopy opens, a shoot is described growing from the stump of Jesse,

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that is, the royal Judean house (11:1). The poetry’s mood changes altogether, as leadership endowed with “the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge,” and awe for the Divine is described (11:2). This new ruler, unlike those criticized in previous chapters, will not judge by appearances or hearsay (11:3, see NJB), but will decide with equity for the needy and poor. Leadership promoting just dealings for all is then imagined as a sphere where not only humans but even wild animals set aside ravenously violent instincts, where the young of all species—the lamb, the kid, the small human child—will coexist safely with the mighty. A world in which small babes are safe is also a world of refuge and safety for their mothers and for all who are physically and socially vulnerable. In the vision of the prophet, this is the world to which God’s corrective actions, however ruthless, are meant to lead. Close on this vision, in chapter 12, a hymn of praise invites all, including Daughter Zion herself, to sing for joy to the Holy One of Israel. Horrors of War (Isa. 13:1–22) A new section of the book commences with the superscription in 13:1, which aims the two poems that follow toward Babylon and its ruler. This is of course puzzling, since it was not Babylon but Assyria that was being discussed immediately prior, and that will reappear in 14:25. In Isaiah’s time Babylon was not the tyrannical threat it later became, but a distant ally. Yet here Babylon stands at the front of a series of poems—and some prose—dealing in a variety of ways with surrounding nations. The material’s diversity indicates that the pieces have been gathered from various sources, including but not limited to the prophet himself, to create a montage concerning the nations, a montage analogous to those found in Jeremiah 46–51 and Ezekiel 25–32. Space does not allow for the feminist analysis of all these chapters that might be beneficial. Most important to point out, however, are images that dominate chapters 13 and 23. Isaiah 13 describes an unnamed army mustered by God for battle. Scholars debate when it was written and whether Babylon was its original victim. Prominent in the literary artistry of the chapter, and contributing to its horror, is the roving, almost cinematic perspective from which the audience is invited to observe the action.

This, combined with conventionalized language that depersonalizes both the attackers and the attacked, distances readers, inviting an almost voyeuristic fascination with unfolding doom. As the attack commences, readers are bombarded with a staccato of imperative verbs: “raise a signal . . . cry aloud . . . wave the hand.” In verse 4 we discover that it is God who is mustering this army of virtually superhuman warriors. The scene shifts suddenly in verse 6 to the battle’s victims. Several images highlight women’s vulnerability. In verse 8, soldiers are seized with pangs like those of a woman in labor, caught in pain and fear more forceful than they can manage. In verse 16 all that is most vulnerable is violated: infants are dashed to pieces, houses are plundered, and women are raped. In verse 17, God is named as the one who incited this attack by Medes, foreigners who “have no mercy on the fruit of the womb” and who “will not pity children.” The violence of this forecast of Babylon’s fall, however it originated, little resembles what reportedly happened when Cyrus actually entered the city. Such horrific hope invites reflection on the status of physically weaker members of even strong nations. The tone is not mocking, but chillingly matter of fact. It may stand as a reminder that war’s tragic victims are inevitably society’s most physically vulnerable, the very women and children in whose names aggressive nations sometimes claim to fight. It also reminds us that war destroys first the elements of a society that give it human meaning: our beloved offspring (who are babes to their mothers, whether still in their arms or already bearing arms), hope for the future, security, safety. It reminds us that no civilization, however powerful, is secure enough to claim immunity to what it might inflict on others. In the end, with the book’s characteristic penchant for ironic reversal, “Babylon the glory of kingdoms” will become like the overthrown Sodom and Gomorrah (13:19), habitat friendly only to the most marginal of creatures. This theme of the divine defeat of all arrogance is repeated in the following chapter, in the artfully narrated celebration of a tyrant’s demise. Insults for Tyre (Isa. 23:1–18) The oracle concerning the city-state of Tyre on the northern Mediterranean coast is the final oracle concerning an individual nation, preceding four chapters that broaden concern to the

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nations in general. It appears in the form of a lament for a devastated city and its destroyed harbor. Commentators have overlooked the violent sexual imagery and innuendo that inhabit nearly every verse of this chapter. Like Jerusalem and other cities, Tyre and its sister city Sidon appear here with feminine pronouns and verbs. Barren women (23:4), violated women (23:12), and fallen women (23:16) populate the poem. Tyre was in the beginning a successful businesswoman, “the merchant” of nations (23:3). But now its watery harbor is an empty womb. Once exultant and expansive, once the “bestower of crowns, whose merchants were princes, whose traders were the honored of the earth” (23:8), Tyre has now come to shame, mocked as an aging and forgotten prostitute, desperate to turn a trick. A conclusion that is almost certainly appended suggests that after seventy years Tyre “will return to her trade, and will prostitute herself with all the kingdoms of the world” (23:17). Her wages will not be for herself but will supply food and clothing for “those who live in the presence of YHWH” (23:18), presumably Jerusalem’s priests. Why this lament over Tyre should have been so overfilled with demeaning imagery is not known. It certainly coheres with the tradition of imagining cities as female figures, suggesting destruction as rape and pornographic disgrace, and shows particular knowledge of Tyre as a sea trader. As disturbing as the poem itself is the inattentiveness of commentators to its sexual dimensions. But Tyre’s descent from merchant to merchandise, whose suffering in the end benefits holy men, all too closely parallels today’s news. More than a million young women, and even girls, are enticed from home every year by the promise of jobs, or sold by impoverished families, and find themselves violently forced into foreign brothels, the earnings from their suffering benefitting captors, their stories hardly ever known or told. Becoming more aware of inattentiveness to such imagery in Scripture may awaken feminist readers to the widespread tragedy of sexual trafficking that continues to flourish underreported today. Limited Divine Hospitality (Isa. 25:6–12) Not all discussions of foreign nations in Isaiah are so dispiriting. Isaiah 25 offers one of the best loved of all portraits, one which Christians often associate with eucharistic liturgies. God is pictured as hospitably preparing

an eschatological banquet, a fine feast of rich food and wine for all people, swallowing up death forever, wiping tears from every face, and receiving grateful praise from those who have waited so long (25:6–9). The imagery of God as the cook and server of delicacies and drink contrasts sharply with that in the previous chapter, in which at God’s word the whole earth was laid waste, mirth was stilled, wine dried up, and desolation left. Comfort is to be found on this mountain with a God of tender mercy and consolation. Yet all is not well for everyone, even in this passage. Midway through verse 10, the passage begins describing humiliation for Moabites, who will be “trodden down in their place as straw is trodden down in a dung-pit.” By chapter’s end, Moab’s high fortifications are cast to the ground. Especially given the inclusive nature of previous verses, this exceptional condemnation comes as a surprise. Interpreters generally agree that these disgruntled verses were appended later. They may well reveal the struggle among redactors for control of this large book’s message. As this section makes clear, visions of hospitality so winsomely portrayed in preceding verses emerge only with effort, and only provisionally. No matter how deeply hospitality is valued, it is nevertheless easy to carry an exception, one grudge against a single enemy, whether real or imagined, who embodies projected evil. It is not clear that Moab existed as a nation by the time these verses were composed. Perhaps it represents the one unforgettable affront to generosity, the one stumbling block in reconciliation’s path, a stark but safe reminder of our own tribalism. Agricultural Imagery (Isa. 27:2–5; 28:23–29) Embedded in the final chapter of this section is a piece of revisionary exegesis performed on an earlier, probably Isaianic, prophecy. The revision suggests that at least one heir to his tradition was not satisfied with Isaiah’s assessment of God’s work with Israel. In Isaiah 5:1–7, God was portrayed as a vintner who had established his vineyard with lavish care, only to find the vines growing inexcusably poor grapes. In frustration the owner proposed to destroy the unfruitful vineyard, which symbolized the unjust nation. Isaiah 27:2 returns us to the vineyard. Here, however, emphasis lies not on its initial

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development, but rather on the vintner’s continuous attention to its nurture: “I, YHWH, am its keeper; every moment I water it. I guard it night and day so that no one can harm it; I have no wrath” (27:3–4a). Though certain aspects of these verses remain unclear, what does come through is that the sowing of righteousness is not a once-for-all-time event, one from which God can sit back and await results. Rather, it is a continuous feedback loop of nurture and correction, an ongoing creative process rather than an abandoned experiment. Passages such as this one point beyond the prophetic metaphor of divine rage to a more patient and pedagogical philosophy of human transformation. Somewhat akin to this, though still weighing in on the side of punishment, is another agricultural metaphor in the following chapter, one that many attribute to Isaiah himself. The poem in 28:23–29 draws from farming practices at the beginning and end of the agricultural season to explain the nature of divine correction. A field’s plowing (found in Mic. 3:12, e.g., as a metaphor for war’s destruction), far from being purposeless or excessive, prepares the ground for fruitfulness. The threshing of grain during harvest is likewise carried out carefully, each species threshed by the method that will produce its best result. Grains such as wheat and barley must endure more strenuous threshing than delicate plants such as dill and cumin. If human farmers choose their methods carefully for best results, the same can be said of the God from whom they learn. Human affliction is seen, not as reckless or vindictive, but purposeful. Modern readers may debate whether a loving God causes human suffering, and whether all human pain is truly instructive, while still deriving much-needed hope that even unjust suffering can sometimes, by divine grace, yield a fruitful harvest. True Nobility (Isa. 32:1–8) Isaiah 32 follows four chapters in which the prophet criticizes the leadership in King Hezekiah’s day for endangering their nation by rebelling against Assyria, while trusting in Egypt for support. As rendered in the NRSV and other prominent translations, verse 1 opens as if predicting a future ruler: “See, a king will reign in righteousness.” Several recent commentators, however, have claimed that the grammar indicates that this is not a prediction but, rather, a description of how a righteous king ought to

reign and of the social order that would result. If a king rules with righteousness and justice, protecting subjects like a refuge from the wind and shelter from the storm, ethical faculties among all will be restored: good vision, hearing, understanding, and speech will accompany justice in the land. Then, in contrast to a land where good is called evil and evil good (5:20), truth will be evident to all: fools will no longer be considered noble, but true nobility will be seen for what it is.

Second Isaiah (Isa. 40–55) The sixteen chapters that begin with “Comfort, comfort my people” comprise a complex but thematically continuous piece focusing on Jerusalem’s restoration as the Babylonian era ended. The prophet is self-effacing and barely visible, but certain aspects of the poetry have led some to speculate that it was written by a woman. Positive feminine imagery for God and Zion and a democratizing vision of human leadership combine to support this supposition, along with the absence of gendered language denoting the prophet. The genre of direct divine address prevails, speaking primarily to three discernible entities. Two of these personify the people as a whole. Daughter Zion, the female personification of Jerusalem, may represent those who continued to reside in Judah, who are otherwise invisible in these chapters. A masculine singular addressee called Israel, or Jacob, emerges as a speaking subject, sometimes identified by God as “my servant.” A masculine plural audience interspersed throughout most clearly corresponds to the book’s actual addressees. These are represented as God’s collective servant and as exiled children, called to return to comfort their mother Zion. Thus the poet attempts to finesse constructive roles for returning exiles in relation to God and Jerusalem. Lamentations, most likely composed by Jerusalemites, had envisioned the exiled as unjust leaders, whose iniquities caused the destruction and who had been dismissed to their fate by God (Lam. 4:13–16). Second Isaiah attempts to repatriate exiles by recasting them as Zion’s missing and mourned children, poised to fulfill the ancient role of God’s servant alongside venerable forebears such as Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. Daughter Zion first appears in chapter 40 as a herald of good news to Judah’s other cities.

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Intermittently throughout chapters 40–48 God speaks to and of Israel, both in singular and in plural forms, identifying the community as “my servant,” and beckoning them to accept their vocation as God’s chosen nation. In Isaiah 49:1, this servant Israel begins to speak. From this point on, sections devoted to the servant alternate with sections addressing Daughter Zion. A feminist reading of Second Isaiah must attend to the gendered roles it establishes for Daughter Zion and for Israel. It should also attend to a degree of flexibility in gendered roles for God, who is portrayed in one verse as a mighty warrior and in the next as a tender shepherd of ewes, in one verse as a soldier and in the next as a woman giving birth, in one as a God who has forgotten and in the next as a mother who will never forget her own. A Prologue (Isa. 40:1–11) Though the warrior God predominates in prophetic literature and is hardly absent in Second Isaiah, God appears here as the tender comforter of Zion, the city of whom it had been said, “she has no one to comfort her” (Lam. 1:2, cf. Lam. 1:9, 16, 17, 21). Zion herself is beckoned to climb to the heights to announce to surrounding cities God’s approach, reestablishing herself as an active participant in redemption. Readers do not actually see Zion fulfilling this calling, however, and she disappears for the next eight chapters while Israel’s character is explored. “My Servant” Israel (Isa. 41:8–16; 42:1–9; 49:1–7; 50:4–11; 52:13–53:12) Beginning in chapter 41, Israel is proffered a reenvisioned role as God’s servant. The relationship between Israel and the servant was obscured for decades by Bernhard Duhm’s theory of four servant songs in chapters 42, 49, 50, and 53, discontinuous with their contexts. But throughout the complex argument that commences in 40:12, Israel is repeatedly called God’s servant (41:9; 44:21; 49:3). Scholars debate the exact terms, whether “servant” refers to all Israel, ideal Israel, or individual role models in Israel. However, poetry that pictures cities climbing mountains and delivering messages is not meant to be precise, but soaring and visionary. The Israel being addressed is the one that still thinks, “My way is hidden from YHWH, and my right is disregarded by my God” (40:27). The poetry aims to change

Israel’s mind about itself and its God. Thus the reigning question is not “Who is the servant?” but, rather, “What is Israel’s role?” Though Israel is addressed as a masculine singular figure, the nation consisted of both male and female thinkers, actors, and role models. Just as the grammatical masculine plural is used to address both men and women in Israel, so here, we are correct to imagine not simply males but females being collectively and individually beckoned as God’s servants and friends, with all the attendant roles: justice bringers (42:1, 3, 3, 4), agents of freedom (42:7), witnesses to God’s deeds (43:10), restorers of Israel and lights to the nations (49:6), intercessors and healers (53:4, 5, 12). God as Warrior and Birthing Mother (Isa. 42:13–14) In Isaiah 40:10–11, God is envisioned first as a returning warrior and then as a tender shepherd, displaying two sides of divine love for Israel. Similarly, in Isaiah 42:13–17 God’s going forth to battle is pictured in two images that at first glance contrast dramatically. In verse 13 God “goes forth like a soldier, like a warrior stirring up fury,” shouting, roaring, and prevailing. But verse 14, in divine first-person speech, introduces a different image, that of a mother in labor. In previous prophetic literature, warriors were compared to women in labor to underscore their helplessness under attack. But here emphasis lies on the strenuous power of a woman giving birth. Like warrior, like woman, God cries out, gasping, panting. What God births is not stated here, but in a first-person address in Isaiah 49:15: God is the breast-feeding mother who can never forget her daughter Zion. Personified Daughter Zion (Isa. 47:1–15; 49:14–50:3; 51:17–52:12; 54:1–17) Babylon’s fall is imagined throughout Isaiah 41–48, climaxing in chapter 47, where Daughter Babylon herself is taunted. Once tender and delicate, she will now sit throneless in the dust. She will be forced to hard labor, her nakedness uncovered. Arrogant Babylon, who assumed she would never know suffering such as she has inflicted, will now be widowed, bereft, and helpless. Babylon’s fall parallels the suffering she once inflicted on Daughter Zion (see, e.g., Lam. 1:1). This vision foreshadows Zion’s rise. Throughout chapters 40–48 Zion has been silent and virtually invisible. When she speaks

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again in chapter 49, she will still be mired in disbelief, a disbelief paralleling that of Israel in 40:27. After nine chapters of reassurance to Israel, after Israel has finally in 49:1–6 begun to find his voice, Zion delivers her only speech in Second Isaiah, the occasion for all that will be said to and of her in coming chapters: “But Zion said, ‘YHWH has forsaken me, my Lord has forgotten me’” (49:14). Although Daughter Zion spoke quite a bit in Lamentations, describing her fate, and although she appears intermittently throughout the rest of Isaiah up to the final chapter, and although she is asked to speak or told she will speak (40:9, 49:21, 52:9, 54:1), this is the last thing she is actually portrayed as saying. Her speaking part resumes in the apocryphal book of Baruch (see Baruch). This speech opens the door for God’s reassurances, now addressed to her, comparing divine remembering with that of a nursing mother, and forecasting the return of children too numerous to house, processions of children borne in the arms of foreign powers. Casting the city’s condition as barrenness (rather than poverty, hardship, lack of safety, disease, social chaos, templelessness, or any of the other actual problems a city attacked some fifty years before may be facing) allows the poet to offer the solution most advantageous to the program of repatriation: what Zion grieves is its exiles, and now they are on the horizon. The prophet continues in 50:1, disputing the divorce metaphor used by Jeremiah to explain divine rejection (Jer. 3:1, cf. 3:8 and Deut. 24:1– 4). This thread will resume in chapter 54, where God is imagined as Zion’s estranged, returning husband. The motif of the city as suffering woman continues in 51:17–23. There Zion, having drunk the cup of divine wrath to the dregs, staggers without guide or comforter. Childlessness is heavily emphasized once again, and she is reassured that this suffering will pass from her to her tormentors. Immediately in 52:1–2 she is told to arise from the dust and clothe herself in splendor, changing places with Babylon (Isa. 47), as she hears the announcement of God’s rule and the shouts of lookouts seeing God returning (52:7–8). Just as the lookouts and then Jerusalem’s ruins sang out in chapter 52, the “barren one” herself is told to sing in 54:1 over the arrival of so many returning children, overfilling the city and spreading to surrounding towns. God

speaks as repentant husband, wooing her again, promising steadfast loyalty, material abundance, and safety from harm. Without disputing the metaphor of Jerusalem as estranged wife or bereft mother that previous tradition provided, Second Isaiah appropriates it, converting old threats into new promises. While the fictitious recipient of this discourse is a woman who is a city named Jerusalem, the actual overhearers are those being positioned as her children, the exiles who have every reason to wonder what kind of reception awaits them in Jerusalem. For feminists the issues in such literature involve, of course, stereotypes of female roles and responses, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the invocation of familial language to cast roles for returning exiles. Realities such as Zion’s own native children still living in Jerusalem are minimized as exiles are invited to enjoy the notion that in moving west they become agents of the city’s redemption.

Third Isaiah (Isa. 56–66) The last eleven chapters, set in Jerusalem after the return from exile, further Zion’s story while developing a variety of themes from previous chapters. Not only does personified Zion continue, but other themes of interest, such as inclusion and justice, both human and divine, are articulated as sharply here as anywhere in Scripture. Most scholars have detected in these chapters a widening schism between those considered the righteous of Jerusalem and those rejected by God, though the exact nature of their differences is debated. Justice and Righteousness (Isa. 56:1–8; 58:1–59:21) Isaiah 56 begins dramatically with a correlation between divine and human righteousness. Humans are called to righteousness because God’s ongoing righteousness is about to be seen. Specifically, divine intentions of inclusion toward faithful eunuchs and foreigners are named, overturning ancient interdictions and upending prejudices. This passage, when taken as Scripture, radiates in all directions—not only to the inclusion of non-Jews, an idea cherished by Christians, but to the full inclusion by God, in God’s temple, of those suffering physical disability and sexual difference. Calls to social justice ring out most clearly in the divine rebuke that begins in chapter 58.

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There the devout ask why God ignores their prayers. But ritual accompanied by violence is unacceptable to God, who describes the desired fast as a fast from injustice: freeing the oppressed, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless. Only through these acts can the whole society prosper and the city be rebuilt. Echoing Isaiah’s own accusations and threats two centuries before, these chapters lament injustice that continues unabated and anticipate a return of divine retribution and redemption. Sacrificed Children (Isa. 57:3–13) It is ironic, to say the least, that after concerted attention to the sad death of Zion’s children and their joyful repatriation, the very next address to Zion would be this one, which falls between the three passages highlighting Zion in Second Isaiah (49:14–50:1; 51:17–52:12; 54:1– 17), and the three triumphant addresses to the city in chapters 60, 62, and 66, in which sons and daughters are once again said to flock toward Jerusalem. Isaiah 57, dark in tone and obscure in referent, calls a female figure, presumably Jerusalem, a sorceress and a whore (see Isa. 1:21 and, with a different word, Isa. 47:9, 12). The language of this passage, following the traditions best known in Hosea 1–3 and Ezekiel 16, is highly sexualized. It accuses first Jerusalem’s citizens and then the personified city itself of slaughtering its own children as human sacrifices. This practice, presumably inherited from the city’s Jebusite past, took place in the Hinnom Valley just outside of Jerusalem, in the latter days of the monarchy, and evidently later as well. Whether Israelite women actually engaged in child sacrifice cannot be known from the Bible: every portrayal is of a man killing his own son or daughter (Gen. 22:10; Judg. 11:39; 2 Kgs. 3:27; 16:3; 21:6) or, in King David’s case, those of others (2 Sam. 21:1–9). Yet accusations in Ezekiel 16:21 and 23:39 and here are of female personifications, displacing guilt from actual men. The rituals underlying this passage are less than clear, but it appears that both human sacrifice and sexual fertility rites are involved, practices prohibited in Judah’s official theology. Jerusalem’s Hopeful Future (Isa. 60:1–22; 62:1–12; 66:7–13) Chapters 60–62 at the center of Third Isaiah echo language and themes of Second Isaiah

most closely. Chapter 60 addresses Jerusalem much as Isaiah 49 had, directing her eyes to see her children coming from afar and, with them, the wealth of the nations. In a strange mix of metaphors, mother Zion herself is told, “you will suck the milk of nations, you will suck the breasts of kings” (60:16). The motif of Israel as the one served and enriched by other nations continues in 61:5–6. Chapter 62 echoes and extends Isaiah 54, reutilizing the marriage metaphor in verses 4 and 5. The prophetic voice in chapters 65–66 gives up on some segments of the population, marking a division between those who continue to rebel and the chosen ones who serve God (see especially 65:8–15; 66:23–24; see also 1:27–28). Maternal imagery abounds as Isaiah closes. First Jerusalem is described as giving birth to her children without suffering labor (66:7–8), because of God’s control over the ways of the womb (66:9). Jerusalem is then described as providing comforting breast milk for all who rejoice in her (66:11). Then the maternal metaphor drifts from the city to God, the mother of its residents: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you [pl.]; you shall be comforted in Jerusalem” (66:13). This is a far cry from God’s first speech in Isaiah, “I reared children and brought them up, but they have rebelled against me” (1:2). Like the changes in the vinedresser’s role from chapter 5 to chapter 27, the role of God as parent is imagined differently, not as disciplinarian but as nurturer. Bibliography

Blenkinsopp, Joseph. Isaiah 1–39: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 2000. ———. Isaiah 40–55: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 2002. ———. Isaiah 56–66: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. New York: Doubleday, 2003. Goldingay, John. The Message of Isaiah 40–55: A Literary-Theological Commentary. London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2005. Leclerc, Thomas. YHWH Is Exalted in Justice: Solidarity and Conflict in Isaiah. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001. Mathews McGinnis, Claire, and Patricia K. Tull, eds. As Those Who Are Taught: The

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Interpretation of Isaiah from the LXX to the SBL. SBL Symposium Series 27. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2006. O’Brien, Julia. Challenging Prophetic Metaphor: Theology and Ideology in the Prophets. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

Tull, Patricia K. Isaiah 1–39. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2010. Tull Willey, Patricia. Remember the Former Things: The Recollection of Previous Texts in Second Isaiah. SBLDS 161. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997.

Jeremiah Kathleen M. O’Connor

Introduction The book of Jeremiah is about trauma, disaster, and survival. Its themes echo and contradict one another to create a poignant symphony of tragedy and hope. Images of women abound in the book, but often in ways that stereotype, belittle, and blame them for the disaster that befalls the nation. Yet if women approach the book critically, they may find that its sufferings mirror their own pain and its hope promises them a different future.

Development and Authorship Because the book contains a mixture of literary materials that seems to lack order or design, the book can overwhelm readers. Poems of Jeremiah intermingle with stories about him and with prose sermons attributed to him. Chronological headings are out of order; verses repeat themselves unexpectedly in different contexts; messages of hope coexist with threats of doom. The result is a literary soup that demands a revelatory recipe, but no simple description of its ingredients is possible. For most of the twentieth century, interpreters believed that the book contained three separate written documents or literary sources, combined by editors who were influenced by the book of Deuteronomy. These sources included poetry of Jeremiah, stories about him by his scribe Baruch, and sermons attributed to him by the editors. Scholarship in the twenty-first century challenges this consensus. Interpretive efforts to understand how the book came to be in a precise way have arrived at an impasse. There simply is

not enough evidence to reconstruct the book’s history of composition in any detail. One interpreter denies involvement of Deuteronomistic editors and ascribes the book largely to Jeremiah and Baruch. A second scholar claims, instead, that anonymous members of the community collected prophetic materials over a long period of time and assigned them to Jeremiah. A third commentator insists that, although Jeremiah’s words lie at the heart of the book, readers cannot recover them because later additions to Jeremiah’s preaching obscure his original words. Despite these and other challenges to earlier views of the book’s origins, consensus does exist that Jeremiah is the product of many hands developed over a long period of time. Rather than focusing on the history of the book’s development, some interpreters now focus on the book’s final form or on the ways the texts may have functioned for its imagined readers. We do know with some certainty that the book did not take its final shape until after the Babylonian Empire assaulted Jerusalem and decapitated Judah in the sixth century BCE. Its introductory verses make clear that the first audience would have been survivors of “the captivity of Jerusalem” (1:1–3).

Historical Context Jeremiah’s prophecy is the product of fiercely troubled times. The events it reflects begin during the reign of King Josiah in 626 BCE (1:2) and end with King Jehoiakin’s death in exile sometime after 582 (52:34). During these years, the nation-state of Judah experienced 267

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turmoil from within and without. Egypt and Babylon vied for control of the country. In 605, Judah finally became a vassal state of Babylon. This arrangement allowed the Babylonians to extort high taxes from Judah, to place a puppet king on the throne, and to interfere in internal affairs. Three times Judah revolted, and each time Babylon invaded (597, 587, and 582). With each invasion, leading citizens and members of the upper classes were deported to Babylon (39:1– 10; 52:1–30). The Babylonian invasion of 587 was particularly disastrous. After a long siege and famine among the populace, the Babylonian army breached the city walls of Jerusalem, destroyed the palace and the temple, deported the king and his family, and killed many of the nation’s ruling classes. By 582 BCE, life in the land had been severely disrupted. Not only were many among Judah’s leaders killed or deported, but also many who remained in Judah, particularly the poor, were displaced from their homes. Economic life was destroyed and daily domestic arrangements severely altered. The people of Judah had undergone a multileveled disaster.

Their survival as a community of believers was in serious doubt. Historical events involving disaster and traumatic violence usually produce harmful effects that can last for generations. Not only did the Babylonian assaults upon Judah destroy the physical infrastructure and undermine political, economic, and religious leadership; they also caused less visible forms of destruction. The book of Jeremiah addresses a community reeling from all of these consequences of disaster.

Structure Despite a lack of order among the book’s smaller units, its large divisions are easily discernible: chapters 1–25, accusations against Judah and Jerusalem; chapters 26–29, 34–45, narratives concerning the prophet; chapters 30–33, little book of consolation; chapters 46–51, oracles against the nations; chapter 52, epilogue from 2 Kings 24–25. Because of the book’s complex structure, the comments are organized according to topics rather than following the order of the chapters.

Comment A typical effect of traumatic violence is that it takes away the power of speech from victims. Extreme violence cannot be taken in by the mind as it happens. Instead, the violent events imprint themselves on the brain and leave victims without words to talk about them. Survivors can become isolated in recurring memories that repeatedly retraumatize them. To survive this violence, they require language, stories, and interpretations to reframe the violence and give it meaning and order. The book of Jeremiah does this in a number of ways. For example, it lifts the violence and terrors of warfare into the symbolic realm. A loose collection of war poems conveys the horrors of war by transposing historical events into the realm of symbolic poetry (4:5–9:22; 13:20–27). The war is symbolic or mythic in the sense that Jeremiah does not tell about historic battles between the armies of Babylon and Judah. In these poems the mysterious “foe from the north” attacks a woman, the Daughter of Zion. And most shocking of all, in the last of the war poems, God rapes the Daughter of Zion

(13:20–27). “Your skirts are lifted up and you are violated” (13:22). “I myself will lift your up your skirts,” says God, “and your shame shall be seen” (13:26). The Daughter of Zion is a mythic title for the city of Jerusalem. Cities were often personified as females in the ancient world. For many contemporary readers, the poem of Zion’s rape is an example of the most egregious sexism. That the poetry portrays God as rapist of the beloved city shocks us. It blames the people for causing the catastrophe, portrays God as abusive punisher, and scapegoats women as sinners deserving of punishment. Indirectly it justifies violence by men against women, by the stronger against the weaker. Yet in light of trauma studies, this appalling poem works as a survival tactic for victims of overwhelming violence. Rape is not only a common instrument of war throughout history; it is also a common metaphor for defeat in war in the Old Testament (e.g., Lam. 1:8–13; Nah. 3:1–7). To experience war is like being raped. Military attack violates a people, destroys their

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physical world, humiliates and dehumanizes its victims. Jeremiah’s poetry of rape provides a good example of how the book’s fire and brimstone helps victims of disaster. The poetry of rape provides language to tell of the violence inflicted on the community, but at a slight distance, as if it were happening to someone else on a stage in the poetic world. The image of rape makes women’s experience in war the lens through which the entire community reflects on the nature of invasion. The poetry of rape helps in another way. It interprets the disaster as the consequence of divine punishment. Again, for modern readers this is untenable, for it places a further burden of guilt upon victims of war. This interpretation blames them for the violence, as it lets God off the hook. Survivors of trauma and disaster, however, require explanation; they need order, cause and effect, or else the universe itself remains a place of terror and chaos where life is not possible. Thus Jeremiah’s poetry of warfare gives meaning, partial and insufficient, to what is often experienced as meaningless. It also testifies that God is still involved with the people, for God has not lost the war to the Babylonian deities. Indeed, God remains in charge of the world and remains related to the people. In this fashion, despite the horrifying nature of the imagery, the rape poem achieves pastoral effects in the wake of disaster. It keeps God alive, provides language to speak of what happened, and insists that order and meaning remain operative. Contemporary readers err if they assume that this depiction of God as rapist is a static or absolute image. Like many other images of God, that of God as punisher is one articulated in a particular context and for a particular purpose, intended to help people go forward. It is an inadequate explanation of disaster, however, because it overlooks and ignores other factors in the invasions, such as Babylon’s aggressive empire building and powerful military, failed leadership among Judeans, and thwarted support from other nations such as Egypt. Nevertheless, despite their limitations, Jeremiah’s images of an abusing, punishing deity can be seen as creative theological and pastoral efforts that hold fast to God in the midst of catastrophe. The problem, though, for women in the imagery remains a critical one. Although Jeremiah’s language is poetic and symbolic, the personification of the nation and city as female in this passage and others must be challenged

in the context of contemporary cultures where women often appear as scapegoats and sex objects and where men assume they have biblical warrant for harming them. Jeremiah’s imagery is multifaceted and needs critical attention when it is used in worship and teaching. Yet throwing out the whole thing because it offends modern sensibilities is to miss how God’s word emerged from its ancient roots in a culture very different from our own.

Jeremiah Another way the book of Jeremiah addresses survivors of the Babylonian disaster is in the figure of the prophet Jeremiah himself. In recent years, interpreters have disagreed about the ability of readers to encounter the prophet in the text. Opinions vary from seeing the text as a reliable report of his life to understanding him as a fictional character. Ancient writers, however, sought to convey the significance of events; to do so, they shaped their material freely and symbolically. The book presents a portrait of the prophet that mixes fact and interpretation inextricably. Though it seems likely that Jeremiah’s words and deeds underlie the text, it is difficult to determine what is historical information and what is interpretation. It is certain, nevertheless, that the community recognized the message of this prophet as a living word. They remembered, cherished, and adapted it as they struggled to survive as a people both remaining in the land and living in hope of return from exile. The book’s purpose was to help the people make sense of their tragedy, recover their identity, and move toward the future as God’s beloved community. Jeremiah’s afflictions are not merely physical. Poems called the confessions (11:18–12:6; 15:10–21; 17:14–18; 18:18–23; 20:7–13) portray him as a prophet besieged by anguish, loneliness, and doubt. The confessions are prayers, written in the first person, that generally follow the same literary pattern as psalms of lament. In the laments speakers complain to God about their sufferings. They beg for God’s intervention in their affairs, and in the midst of their predicaments, they praise God for their anticipated rescue. Jeremiah uses this prayer form to complain bitterly about attacks from his enemies (11:19; 18:19–23; 20:10), about his prophetic mission

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(15:15–17; 17:15–16; 20:7–9), and, above all, about God’s mistreatment of him (12:1–2; 15:18; 20:7). He lays charges against God for the evil he sees around him (12:12). He blames God for the loneliness of his life (15:17) and for the hatefulness of his mission (20:8–9). He calls God a “deceitful brook,” “waters that fail” (15:18), and accuses God of seducing and deceiving him (20:7). Jeremiah’s laments arise from the unique difficulties of his prophetic mission. In the midst of them, he raises an angry fist to God, accuses God of treachery and deceit, and even tries to escape his mission. Yet despite his outbursts of anger and disappointment, the relationship between God and Jeremiah remains intact. Indeed, Jeremiah’s expressions of anger serve as a vehicle of his fidelity. The confessions end by praising God, who “has delivered the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers” (20:13). The connection of the confessions to Jeremiah’s own life is a matter of dispute among scholars, but some think these prayers portray Jeremiah as a symbol of the suffering people. The people too are taken captive, dragged from their land, and deprived of their temple. They are beaten, imprisoned, and face death as a people; like Jeremiah, they cry out to God in anger and despair. In the aftermath, they too would put God on trial for treachery and injustice. Similarly, Jeremiah’s prophetic sign action (deeds that enact the prophetic message) of his celibacy also embodies the fate of the people (16:1–13). God commands him not to marry and to avoid social life in “houses of mourning.” “Under the weight of your hand, I sat alone” (15:17), he laments. Jeremiah’s isolation and failure to marry violate the cultural norms of his society, but symbolically they embody the fate of the destroyed nation. The disaster destroyed domestic and social life. “I am going to banish from this place . . . the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride” (16:9). The story of Jeremiah’s celibacy mimics in the life of one person the fate of many in the society. It offers a way to understand the reality of life after traumatic violence and mirrors back to survivors their pitiful situation. Such a stirring portrait of the prophet is a form of mercy. Finally, the portrait of Jeremiah includes many stories of his captivities (20:1–6; 26; 32; 36; 37–38). Noteworthy here is the pattern the stories follow: Jeremiah is captured, threatened,

humiliated, beaten, and, always, he escapes in unexpected ways. The result is that each account further joins the prophet’s life to that of the people. He experiences their trauma, their captivity, their hopeless sinking into the muddy pit (38:6). His multiple rescues point toward their own possible future. The figure of Jeremiah gathers into the life of one person the fate of all. His life offers them a picture of their losses, their overwhelming suffering, and always also points toward their escape.

Harmful Gender Language The abundance of female imagery in the book creates the impression that Jeremiah was particularly aware of the realities of women. Female figures personify the nation and the city of Jerusalem. Women’s suffering symbolizes the pain of the entire people. Yet Jeremiah’s use of female language is double-edged at best. On the one hand, its presence indicates awareness of women’s painful circumstances. On the other, it uses women as symbols of wickedness, blames them for the fall of the nation, and exploits their experiences by applying them to men. Bride, Adulterer, and Prostitute (Jer. 2:1–4:4) After Jeremiah’s call narrative (Jer. 1), a collection of originally separate poetic and prose passages introduces Jeremiah’s preaching (2:1– 4:4). These passages indict the nation for its sin and infidelity. One of the unifying features of these passages is the motif of woman as an unfaithful sexual partner. Even though some passages feature male figures (2:14–19; 2:26–28; 4:1–4), female images tie the units together in a potent rhetoric of blame in relation to a marriage between God and God’s unfaithful wife. The first poem (2:1–3) shapes readers’ perceptions of what is to follow. The divine husband recalls his wife’s past loyalty. “I remember the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride” (2:2b). Mournfully he recalls their honeymoon in the wilderness, her devotion, and the protection he provided for her. The nostalgic tone of this poem indicates that the marriage is over. Subsequent poems (2:4–13, 14–19) ask what went wrong with the relationship and charge the nation with abandonment (2:11, 13, 17). Accusation intensifies in 2:20–25. This poem transforms the bride into an adulteress and a prostitute. Though the word translated “whore”

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(2:20) probably refers to a promiscuous unmarried woman, the broken bridal relation of 2:1–3 indicates that adultery is the woman’s sin. The former bride has now broken free of her covenant relationship. “For long ago you broke your yoke” (2:20). On every hill and under every tree she “plays the whore” (2:20b). The poet piles images on top of one another in an effort to describe her sins. She is like a “degenerate” vine (2:21). Her infidelity makes her so dirty and defiled that, even with lye, she cannot wash herself clean (2:22). Like a female camel or wild ass in heat, she goes in headlong pursuit of idols (2:23–24). In this line, animal imagery merges with harlot language to label female sexuality as wild, disgusting, and uncontrollable. The woman cannot help herself: “It is hopeless, for I have loved strangers, and after them I will go” (2:25). Her divine husband interrogates her about her rebellion (2:29–32). Cruelly, he tells her that in order to bring her around he has struck down her children. Then he mocks her for her fickleness: “Can a girl forget her ornaments, or a bride her attire?” (2:32; see 4:30). The implied answer to the question is no; such forgetfulness is inconceivable. A girl is far too attached to adornments to forget them, but though women are mightily bound to frivolous things, Israel easily forgets its God. In the following poem, the woman’s promiscuity infects others (2:33–37). She is not content to seek lovers herself; she teaches her harlotry to “wicked women” (2:33). Worse yet, she callously destroys the nation’s poor: “On your skirts is found the lifeblood of the innocent poor, though you did not catch them breaking in” (2:34). In strangely twisted imagery, the poet chooses a woman to portray the nation’s despicable treatment of the poor. Yet in ancient Israel women were often as powerless and as little esteemed as the ill-treated poor. In the next poem (3:1–5), the husband refuses on legal grounds to take back his twicedivorced and rejected wife. According to Deuteronomy 24:1–4, a woman divorced from a second husband cannot return to the first. Their reunion would bring guilt upon the land (Deut. 24:4). Since in Israelite society a divorced woman had little hope of survival, this poem depicts the fate of the nation in terrifying terms. In Jeremiah’s poem, even if the divine husband wishes to take back his wife, the law prevents him from rescuing her.

Other passages continue the metaphor of the unfaithful woman as cause of the land’s contamination. A prose passage (3:6–11) accuses the northern kingdom of Israel of polluting the land with harlotry, but Judah bears even greater guilt. She too played the whore (3:8), and “because she took her whoredom so lightly, she polluted the land” (3:9). For the prophets, the moral quality of human life directly affected the well-being of the land. Judah’s whoring disturbs the flocks, the herds, and the people (3:24), and it brings drought upon the land (3:3; 13:25–27; 14:1–6). In this collection of poetry, the root metaphor is that of marriage as symbol of covenant relationship. Jeremiah did not create this metaphor but borrowed it from the prophet Hosea (1:2–3:19). The sources of both prophets’ language, however, were the institutions of marriage and prostitution in ancient Israel. Married women had few rights, were considered the property of their husbands, and, unlike men, were severely punished for infidelity. Jeremiah’s use of the marriage metaphor, however, is not entirely negative. By describing the covenant in terms of a common human experience of intimacy and love, it makes covenant understandable and appealing. Moreover, it evokes compassion for God by portraying the Deity as vulnerable and injured by human sin. In one poem, God treats women better than the society does, because he urges his divorced wife to return (3:1–5). Yet negative implications of this language overcome its advantages. Jeremiah uses marriage language less to speak of divine-human intimacy than to dramatize the wife’s infidelity. The marriage metaphor exalts men because it uses them alone as appropriate symbols of the Divine. It brands women because it uses them and their sexuality as symbols of wickedness and treachery. Finally, by naming the nation as an unfaithful wife, it shames and humiliates men, indicating that they are no better than a sexually loose woman. Daughter Language Jeremiah also uses women as symbols of evil by personifying nations and cities as women. Personification is a literary device that represents things as people. Because Hebrew nouns for cities and countries are feminine grammatical forms, it is easy for poets to personify them as women. With a cluster of “daughter” phrases, Jeremiah personifies Judah and Jerusalem: “daughter my people” (4:11; 6:26; 8:11,

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19, 21, 22; 9:1, 6; 14:17; my trans.); “daughter of Zion” (4:31; 6:2, 23); “virgin daughter” (31:21; 49:4; NRSV “virgin”); and “daughter” of other nations (46:11, 19, 24; 48:18; 50:42; 51:33). Sometimes these terms intensify blame and accusation. The poet urges the “faithless daughter” to return (31:21–22). God promises to send shepherds to destroy the lovely daughter (6:2–3). “Daughter Egypt shall be put to shame” (46:24). At other times daughter language carries more positive connotations. The father laments the dying of his daughter (8:11, 19, 21–22; 9:1; 14:17; see 4:31). No matter how daughter language is used, however, it reflects a patriarchal world, where a daughter’s value is ambiguous at best (6:26). It arises from the bride-price she will bring or from alliances families might make through marriage arrangements. Even when this language expresses tender regard for the daughter, it conveys a structure of relationship in which males represent God and females again symbolize erring nations and cities. Queen of Heaven (Jer. 7:18 and 44:15–28) The book’s denouncement of women becomes most emphatic in a prose sermon about idolatry (44:15–28). This sermon develops ideas that first appear in Jeremiah’s temple sermon (Jer. 7). There Jeremiah accuses entire families of participating in idolatry by worshiping the queen of heaven. “The children gather wood, the fathers kindle fire, and the women knead dough, to make cakes for the queen of heaven” (7:18). Chapter 44 reinterprets and expands these accusations. It accuses women alone of worshiping the queen, whereas it reduces the husbands’ offense to failure to control their wives (44:15–19, 24–25). Hence, chapter 44 makes women the direct cause of the nation’s collapse (44:20–23, 26–30). Following the pattern of the story of Eve (Gen. 3), the passage claims that death and disaster stem from women’s disobedience. (See below for consideration of positive aspects of this story.) Circumcise Your Hearts (Jer. 4:4) Jeremiah orders the men of Judah to circumcise themselves to God, “Remove the foreskins of your hearts” (4:4). At first glance, this command appears to transform a male ritual into a spiritual event that might include women. It does not. Instead, Jeremiah’s command urges

the circumcised men of Judah to live covenant ritual wholeheartedly. Problematic God Language Jeremiah’s favorite titles for God are male terms that come from the social realities of the ancient world. They include father (3:4, 19; 31:9), judge (12:2–3), king (8:19; 10:7), and most often, YHWH of armies, often translated “Lord of Hosts.” In patriarchal societies these figures could be benevolent or domineering. Whatever their mode of exercising authority, however, they controlled the lives of everyone under them. When Jeremiah uses these titles, they portray God’s authority, justice, and power. The problem for women is that Jeremiah lacks equivalent titles for God drawn from women’s lives. Hence, Jeremiah implicitly teaches that men represent God and women do not. Moreover, these titles reinforce hierarchical human relationships. The book’s frequent portrayal of God as violent punisher of the people compounds the problem (e.g., 5:10, 15–17; 6:12, 19; 8:17; 13:22). God language mirrors human relations, and it implicitly justifies human behavior. Much, but not all, of Jeremiah’s God language justifies violence against women and subordinates them to their human kings, judges, and fathers.

Importance of the Book for Women: Women’s History These criticisms of the book of Jeremiah in relation to women do not tell the whole story. Despite its male-centered perspectives and its harmful prejudices against women, the book also contains literary, theological, and political resources that may benefit women. It provides glimpses of the actual lives of women in the past. It contains poetic imagery that portrays both God and women in a positive light. It includes stories and themes that may comfort women and give them hope for a better future. Behind Jeremiah’s images of wives, prostitutes, divorced women, mourners, mothers, worshipers, and victims of war stand real women. To meet them, even through the smoky veils of ancient literature, reminds contemporary women of their painful history and cries out for a different future for themselves, their sisters, and their daughters all over the globe.

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Mourners (Jer. 9:17–22) At times of death and defeat, women acted as professional mourners, though perhaps primarily within the confines of the home. The mourning women’s task was to weep and wail as an expression of the family’s grief. Their official weeping did not substitute for the tears of others. Its purpose was to aid the expression of grief by setting loose everyone’s tears over the death of a loved one. Jeremiah employs images of professional mourning women to dramatize the tragic fate of the nation and to coax the traumatized people, made mute by grief, to begin to mourn their circumstances and to awaken their own tears. “Consider, and call for the mourning women to come; . . . let them quickly raise a dirge over us, so that our eyes may run down with tears” (9:17–18). Jeremiah summons the mourners to weep and wail. But the corpse is not a deceased person; the corpse is the nation. “Teach to your daughters a dirge, and each to her neighbor a lament” (9:20), he urges. “Death has come up into our windows” (9:21). Queen of Heaven (Jer. 44:15–28) It seems certain that Israelite women worshiped the queen of heaven. Women were excluded from full participation in temple worship, and the predominant Israelite conception of God was masculine. The queen provided them with a female deity who offered them protection and prosperity (44:17). The queen’s identity is not clear. She probably combines features of two or more fertility goddesses of the ancient Near East. It is even possible that women understood her to be connected in some way with the God of Israel. If that were the case, they would have intended no idolatry. It is difficult to explain why chapter 44 blames women for this worship, although 7:18 accuses entire families. Perhaps, over time, worship of the queen decreased among men and grew among women, or perhaps chapter 44 reflects a changed society in which misogyny had increased. From the perspective of women today, the queen’s worshipers of chapter 44 appear in a positive light. They are resourceful, independent women with their own subculture. When they stopped worshiping the goddess, they “lacked everything” and “perished by sword and famine” (44:18–19). On the basis of this experience, they became religious agents,

taking worship into their own hands, as are many women today. Child Sacrifice Another form of idolatry that the book criticizes severely is the practice of child sacrifice (7:31–32; 19:5; 32:35). Scholars know neither the extent of child sacrifice nor the role of women in it. Women may have resisted it or enabled it. Either way, the practice is likely to have caused them great fear and suffering. Women’s lives were usually centered on their children, and their status and sometimes even their future depended on them. Childbirth Women in childbirth appear frequently in Jeremiah (4:31; 6:24; 13:21; 20:14–18; 22:23; 30:6; 48:41; 49:24; 50:43). The abundance of childbirth imagery may indicate once again that the prophet was particularly sensitive to women, or it may reveal that childbirth created such fear among men that it could serve aptly as a symbol of the nation’s approaching calamity. What captures the poet’s attention is not the joy of giving birth; it is the panic, pain, and distress of women as labor comes upon them— “anguish,” “a cry,” “gasping for breath, stretching out her hands” (4:31). These aspects of birth can make a frightening impression on men who are within earshot of the birth process but excluded from this sphere of women’s lives. By making childbirth a symbol of death, Jeremiah inverts its meaning (but see 31:8). He applies the pain of women to men, to warriors, and to the nation. Like a woman giving birth, men will be overcome by pain: “Why then do I see every man with his hands on his loins like a woman in labor?” (30:6). Jeremiah appropriates women’s unique contribution to life and applies it to men as a metaphor of death. Women in Wartime Throughout history, women and children continue to suffer acutely during wartime. Jeremiah, however, uses the terrors women experience in war to highlight the disaster that has befallen the book’s readers. War will affect women of every class. Royal women will be taken into exile (38:22–23); wives of landowners will be turned over to enemies (6:12); poor women will survive to face chaotic struggles in Judah during the aftermath of the Babylonian invasion (40:7).

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Widows created by war will represent the reversal of the promises to Abraham and Sarah. “Their widows became more numerous than the sand of the seas; I have brought against the mothers of youths a destroyer at noonday” (15:8). The mother of seven, once deemed blessed, will instead be cursed because war will sweep away her offspring (15:9). With a traditional curse, Jeremiah asks God to make widows of the enemies’ wives (18:21). He prophesies a famine in Jerusalem so extensive that parents would eat the flesh of their children (19:9; 38:9; 52:6; cf. Lam. 2:20; 4:10). For readers, these prophecies name what has already happened to them.

Failed Leadership A feminist reading of the book of Jeremiah needs to attend not only to those passages in which women figure explicitly but also to passages that offer models for women’s struggles. For example, Jeremiah’s critique of failed leadership may offer a model for modern women engaged with religious leaders and institutions who too frequently ignore or deny women’s words, talents, and experiences. Jeremiah’s interventions to aid the survival of trauma victims may aid women who have been raped, assaulted, or dehumanized in any number of ways. During Jeremiah’s time, the community suffered from conflicting claims for its leadership. In poetry and prose, Jeremiah chastises prophets, priests, and kings both for their injustice and for their failure to listen to the word of God (6:13–15; 14:13–18; 20:1–6; chaps. 22–23; 26; 27–28; 36–39). Prophets deceive the people with words of peace when peace is not at hand (6:14; 8:11). A king builds a grand palace and ignores the cause of the poor and the needy (22:13–17). A priest imprisons Jeremiah in the temple and lies to the people (20:1–6). The struggle over leadership became particularly acute during the exile, when kingship was defunct and the exiles needed direction for the future. “Who truly speaks the word of God?” became a vital question. The conflict appears in many of the stories in the latter half of the book and surely reflects the difficulties of interpreting the disaster itself. In chapter 26, priests and prophets sentence Jeremiah to death for his preaching. In chapters 27–28, Jeremiah confronts the prophet Hananiah in a dispute over which of them has the true revelation for the

community. In chapter 36, the king destroys the scroll of Jeremiah’s prophecy and forces him and Baruch to go underground. Perhaps women can take courage from Jeremiah’s relentless fidelity in the face of opposition and persecution.

Suffering The theme of suffering forms a thread that unites the disparate materials of the book. Jeremiah’s sufferings begin in the story of his prophetic call, where God tells Jeremiah that the people will fight against him (1:19). Enemies seek his life (11:19, 21), and even his own family turns against him (12:6). A priest beats him and puts him in the stocks in the temple (20:1–6). Kings reject his prophecy (Jer. 26 and 36), threaten his life, and imprison him (Jer. 37–38). Although he was rescued from death twice—by Ahikam, a member of the nobility (Jer. 26), and by Ebedmelech, a court official of African descent (Jer. 38)—his career ends tragically. Some of his own people force him, against his wishes, to flee with them to Egypt (Jer. 43). As a symbolic figure Jeremiah embraces suffering of many kinds. The artistry of the book named after him captures suffering of women across the ages. Although he is God’s chosen spokesperson, he meets rejection and pain at every turn. In this way he can encourage and even comfort women and men who suffer in related ways, actual or more distant. The confessions of Jeremiah may also serve as a model for the outcry of all women who find their words rejected by religious authorities, their bodies battered and abused, wondering if God has abandoned and betrayed them. With Jeremiah, suffering women can cry, “Why is my pain unceasing?” (15:18). And like Jeremiah, women’s expressions of anger and doubt reveal their fidelity to the God who “delivers the life of the needy from the hands of evildoers” (20:13).

Lamentation and Weeping Grief, lamentation, and weeping pervade the book. Rachel weeps for her children (31:15); the mourning women weep for the nation (9:17– 19); even animals and the earth weep (9:10). Jeremiah weeps because God’s flock has been taken captive (13:17). God commands Jeremiah to cry out, “Let my eyes run down with tears night and day, and let them not cease, for the

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virgin daughter—my people—is struck down with a crushing blow” (14:17). Even God weeps in this book. In two poems (8:18–21; 9:1–3) the weeping figures of Jeremiah and God become indistinguishable: “O that my head were a spring of water, and my eyes a fountain of tears, so that I might weep day and night for the slain of my poor people” (9:1). This merging of the two figures is a poetic device to show that the prophet speaks and acts for God. God cries out, “My joy is gone, grief is upon me, my heart is sick” (8:18). “For the hurt of my poor people I am hurt, I mourn, and dismay has taken hold of me” (8:21). God is not distant from the people’s suffering in these poems of weeping; God identifies with them. The people’s pain is God’s pain. In seeming contradiction to the God who punishes and destroys, the God of these poems laments and weeps with the people. God anguishes over the people’s fate like a mother yearning to save her children from their selfdestructive ways. “Shall I not punish them for these things?” (5:9, 29). She wonders how she has failed them: “Have I been a wilderness to Israel, or a land of thick darkness?” (2:31). Jeremianic themes of weeping and lamentation call upon common human experience, but in some cultures, it is women who are particularly familiar with weeping and grief— grief for their children, for their loved ones, for themselves, for the world. Jeremiah’s weeping may help women recognize and express their own unnamed grief, and perhaps it may help them place their sufferings before God, not a God who threatens and punishes, but a weeping God who takes up women’s pain and weeps with them.

Hope (Jer. 30–33) Only shreds of hope appear in this book to counterpoise the deep river of devastation, grief, and despair that pervades most of it (3:14–18; 12:14–17; 16:14–15; 17:24–26; 22:2–4; 23:5–8; 24:4–7; 29:10–14; 42:7–12). In a collection of prose and poetry called “the little book of consolation” (Jer. 30–33), joy overtakes grief, singing replaces weeping. The book of consolation gathers up many themes of destruction and death sounded elsewhere in the book and reverses them to proclaim healing and new life. Poems in this unit feature women in positive

ways. The poems include women explicitly among the returnees and present them as symbols of the restored society. Wholeness Restored (Jer. 30:8–31:6) The prophet sets forth a dream world that completely reverses the reality in which his captive audience lived. His promises are designed to set them on the tiptoes of hope. On some future day God will remove the yoke of bondage from their neck (30:8) and bring them back from the places to which they have been scattered (30:10–11). God will heal the incurable wound of the outcast woman Zion (30:12–17): “For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says YHWH, because they have called you an outcast: ‘It is Zion; no one cares for her!’” (30:17). Poems in the book of consolation circle around the theme of return. One promises that after the humiliation of defeat, God will restore the nation’s honor and turn weeping into merrymaking (30:18–22). “Out of them shall come thanksgiving, and the sound of merrymakers” (30:19). The nation will increase and prosper (30:19), and their rulers will come from their own people (30:21). In another poem, virgin Israel will take her tambourines and “go forth in the dance of merrymakers” to celebrate the rebuilding of the nation (31:4). This poem compares virgin Israel to Miriam and the women who sang and danced with tambourines after the escape through the sea (Exod. 15:21). Once again God sets captives free, and as religious agents women celebrate the event in worship. The Return (Jer. 31:7–14) The new beginning is both certain and imminent. To welcome it, another poem begins with a command to “sing aloud with gladness” (31:7–14). For the first time in the book, north no longer refers to the direction from which the invading armies will come (1:13; 6:22); here it is the place from which the exiles will return (31:8). Unlike the army coming in terror and cruelty, the returnees will come home in a procession of the weak and the vulnerable. They will form a great company of the blind and the lame, women with children, and women giving birth (31:8). In this poem childbirth does not symbolize death but the new life that will repopulate the decimated nation.

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In this paradise, yet to be realized, everyone will share in the joy and abundance of life. The people will “be radiant over . . . the grain, the wine, and the oil, and over the young of the flock and the herd; their life shall become like a watered garden, and they shall never languish again” (31:12). Women and men, young and old, priests and people—all will know comfort and laughter, abundance and satisfaction (31:13–14). The transformed society imagined in these poems provides a social vision that includes everyone, not only in worship but also at the banquet of material life. For everyone will share in “the grain, the wine, and the oil” and the benefits of the “flocks and the herds” (31:12, 5). The society will satisfy the basic human needs of all, and it will be characterized by justice, harmony, and peace. Rachel, Mother of Israel (Jer. 31:15–22) In another poem announcing the return, the comforting of Rachel, mother of Israel, symbolizes that new society (31:15–22). The poem depicts Rachel weeping bitterly for her lost children. Like any mother who loses her children, “she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more” (31:15). God speaks to the bereaved mother, “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; . . . they shall come back from the land of the enemy; there is hope for your future” (31:16– 17). The reader is left to imagine Rachel’s joy at this heart-­stopping news. Her children are not dead. God will bring them back to her. The poem then turns to the child, Ephraim, repentant of his sins and forgiven by a merciful God. God’s attachment to Rachel’s son is as strong as the mother’s own: “I am deeply moved for him; I will surely have mercy on him” (31:20). Since the Hebrew word for mercy comes from the same root as the word for womb, God too is the mother of the people in this poem (see Trible). Rachel’s poem closes with an enigmatic line. God promises to the “faithless daughter” Israel to create “a new thing on the earth: a woman encompasses a man” (31:22). Literally translated, the second line reads, “a female surrounds a warrior,” but its meaning for the poem is not clear. Perhaps it refers to future sexual relationships in which women will be active agents in the procreation of a restored people. Perhaps it speaks of a society at peace so that women will

be capable of protecting warriors. Or perhaps it anticipates role reversals of a different sort. What is clear is that the surprising new role of women symbolizes a changed order of relationships in a reconstituted and joyous society. New Covenant (Jer. 31:31–34) A fundamental aspect of that restored society is that in it everyone “from the least of them to the greatest” will live in covenant relationship. In this famous passage (31:31–34), God promises to make a new covenant with the whole of Israel. This promise refers not to the New Testament, but to a renewal of Israel’s covenant with its God. In the past, Israel had broken covenant repeatedly. In the future, the entire people will live wholeheartedly in covenant relationship. God will make this possible. “I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people” (31:33). Although this passage employs marriage imagery (31:32), it assures the people that God has not abandoned them, no matter what their infidelities. God has been with them through their sufferings and wishes to be one with them in a covenant of mutual knowledge and commitment. Moreover, in this covenant no one can claim special revelation or superior intimacy with God. All will know God from the least to the greatest. Inherent in this vision is an egalitarian claim that challenges religious domination by the chosen few. It contains a resource for women’s hopes of a new order of social relations based on mutuality and interdependence. The new covenant shows another way the book of Jeremiah works to help survivors of the disaster. Traumatic violence typically destroys faith in old traditions; God’s connection with the people is at stake. When Jeremiah speaks of the new covenant, he is reviving the old one that seemed to have been destroyed with Babylonian rule. Here Jeremiah does not simply reimpose the old manner of relationship with God, but draws from it to revive and reimagine new life with God. Humans and the Earth The hierarchical dualism that makes humans sovereign over the earth rather than its partner is not found among the prophets. For Jeremiah, people are part of the earth, and its fate depends on their fidelity. Borrowing language

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of Genesis 1:2, he prophesies the return of the earth to chaos because of human sin (4:23–28; see Jer. 14). God reverses this vision in 31:35–37 by promising never to cast off Israel unless creation were to cease and the heavens could be measured. The way a society treats the earth often correlates with the way it treats women. Traditionally, women are linked with the earth as subordinate to men. Jeremiah’s poetry challenges this assumption. The earth and all its inhabitants are God’s creation and the survival of the individual depends on the whole.

God Language Although the book portrays God primarily in male terms, God escapes the narrow confines of patriarchal imagery in some passages. God weeps, laments, and cries out over the fate of the people (8:19–9:3); God is a healer who restores health to the people (30:17; 33:6); God is a potter who shapes, destroys, and reforms the people so that they are capable of right relationship (8:1–12). God is a mother attached to her child through unbreakable bonds of love (31:20). God is the covenant maker who abhors injustice and religious arrogance (7:1–15) and who seeks covenant relations of mutuality and justice (31:31– 34). These divine images provide women with theological bases to claim a place for themselves within the Jewish and Christian faiths.

Bibliography

Ackerman, Susan. “‘And the Women Knead Dough’: The Worship of the Queen of Heaven in Sixth Century Judah.” In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by Peggy L. Day, 109–24. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989. Bird, Phyllis. “‘To Play the Harlot’: An Inquiry Into an Old Testament Metaphor.” In Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel, edited by Peggy L. Day, 75–94. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989. Diamond, A. R. Pete, Kathleen M. O’Connor, and Louis Stulman, eds. Troubling Jeremiah. JSOTSup 260. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1999. Diamond, A. R. Pete, and Louis Stulman, editors. Jeremiah (Dis)Placed: New Directions in Writing/Reading Jeremiah. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 529. New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2011. Maier, Christl M. Daughter Zion: Mother Zion: Gender, Space, and the Sacred in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. O’Connor, Kathleen M. Jeremiah: Pain and Promise. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2011. Trible, Phyllis. “Journey of a Metaphor.” In Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, 31–59. Overtures to Biblical Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Lamentations Kathleen M. O’Connor

Introduction The book of Lamentations is a heartbreaking cry of pain and grief by the survivors of a war. The book’s sorrow echoes through the wars of the ages and stands as testimony to war’s horror and futility. Women figure prominently in the book’s description of war’s atrocities and serve as symbols of the pain of the people. Because the poetry of Lamentations is particularly artful, it can gather up and give expression to sorrow and loss through the centuries.

Setting and Purpose The Babylonian invasion of Jerusalem lasted from 589 to 587 BCE. In its wake, the city lay in ruins: the palace and temple had been destroyed, many people had been killed, and leading citizens of the city had been deported to Babylon. In the war’s aftermath, the survivors faced bitter memories of the war’s miseries, including a devastating famine that racked the city. Beyond the enormous problems of physical survival, the war created seemingly insurmountable emotional and spiritual dilemmas. To the remnant in Jerusalem it seemed that God had forgotten them, turned against them, or abandoned them forever. The five poems of Lamentations are the people’s heartbroken response to this interlocking set of disasters.

Authorship A long tradition ascribes Lamentations to the prophet Jeremiah. A preface to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the book, names him as its author, and the Septuagint places Lamentations

after the book of Jeremiah in the canon. Like the book of Jeremiah, Lamentations uses the lament form to grieve over the fate of the people. A near contemporary of the prophetic book, in many ways Lamentations evokes the spirit of the “suffering prophet.” It is not likely, however, that Jeremiah is the book’s author, because the language and spirit of its poetry are too different from that of the prophetic book. Furthermore, the Hebrew text of Lamentations makes no mention of Jeremiah, and the Hebrew canon locates the book among “the five scrolls” (megilloth). These are the books of Ruth, Esther, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Lamentations, which are recited liturgically at various religious holidays. Instead of Jeremiah, one or more anonymous authors composed the laments for public recitation by the people. It is possible that survivors recited them at the site of the destroyed temple to pour out their grief over the disasters that had come upon them (Jer. 41:5). Because laments help people to weep over their tragedy and thus release their pain, Lamentations is truly the work of the people. Since women acted as official mourners in Israel, a woman may have been among the book’s authors, but there is no evidence to support this suggestion. The book continues to have a liturgical life in the Jewish and Christian communities. Jews recite Lamentations on the ninth of Ab to commemorate the fall of the Second Temple in 70 CE. In the present day, memories of the Shoah or Holocaust interlace with other horrors throughout Jewish history in the laments on the ninth of Ab. Christians use parts of the book during Holy Week services.

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Literary Forms The primary literary form used in Lamentations is the lament. Laments are liturgical prayers or psalms in which the speakers complain to God about their circumstances and beg for release. The speaker may represent an individual or the community. Typical elements of the lament form appear in each of the five poems of Lamentations: a series of complaints, a statement of guilt, a request for God’s favor, and a petition against enemies. Significantly absent from all five laments, however, are the statements of praise conventionally found in psalms of lament (e.g., Ps. 22:22–31). This omission suggests that the people’s devastation and confusion were so severe that they could not bring themselves to praise God directly. Or perhaps the traumatic violence of the Babylonian period was still so fresh, that language of praise still seemed impossible. Trauma shakes confidence in God and in religious and political institutions. Before full-throated praise can be reborn, people need to give voice to their losses, to grieve them, and to begin to make sense of them. Lamentations engages in that work. Nonetheless, the mere use of a lament is an act of fidelity, because the purpose of the genre is to address God in the midst of inexplicable suffering. Incorporated into three of the laments is another literary form that intensifies the expression of sorrow and despair in the poems. It is the dirge, or death wail, used during funeral processions (1:1; 2:1; 4:1). A “limping” rhythm, three beats followed by two beats, characterizes the dirge. Known as qinah meter, this rhythm occurs throughout the poems of Lamentations, emphasizing the people’s grief at the death of the nation.

Literary Arrangement Beyond the structure of the lament form, the individual laments of the book exhibit further literary structuring not apparent in English translations. Each poem corresponds in some way to the twenty-two-letter Hebrew alphabet.

Four poems (Lam. 1–4) are acrostics, in which the first letter of succeeding verses corresponds to the order of the Hebrew alphabet. Chapter 3 intensifies this acrostic form by devoting three verses to each letter of the alphabet. Although chapter 5 is not an acrostic, it too is an alphabetic poem in that it contains twenty-two lines. These alphabetic designs reveal that the poems are not haphazard outpourings but carefully controlled artistic creations. Their tight structuring creates the effect of confining the experience of overwhelming chaos, thus making the people’s tragedy appear survivable. The use of the alphabet also suggests that the poems contain every possible suffering from A to Z, or, in the Hebrew alphabet, from aleph to taw, as if no more can be added, for the list is total. Careful literary arrangement extends to the book itself. The other four chapters make a frame around chapter 3, the only poem of the book that expresses hope in an extended way (3:21–66). This framing device draws attention to the hope in chapter 3, but that hope is not sustained in the book. The hope merely points to a possible outcome rather than a certainty. But the book is pastoral in the ways it honors the voices of suffering and mirrors pain back to readers. God never speaks directly in the book, leaving space for loss and doubt to find expression without being silenced or denied. Then, healing can begin. Another structuring device is the use of multiple speaking voices. Chapters 1 and 2 present voices of a narrator and a female figure. Chapter 3 introduces a male voice and the plural voice of the community. Chapter 4 returns to the voice of the narrator, and then the community speaks again in 4:16 and continues speaking in chapter 5. The final form of the book, then, creates a polyphony of voices, each trying to cope with and make sense of the overwhelming disaster that has befallen the nation. The voices create an interpretive array of perspectives that no single voice dominates. The voices place demands upon readers to enter the fray and to reflect themselves on the meanings of cataclysm.

Comment Despite the evocative beauty of Lamentations, there are reasons for women to be cautious

when they approach it. Biases against women appear in the book’s imagery and in its structure.

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Ambiguous Gender Imagery The poems in chapters 1, 2, and 4 use a variety of female images to depict Judah and Jerusalem. These images are fluid, weaving in and out of one another to create the impression that several women are present in the poem. Yet the female representations of Judah and Jerusalem merge into one figure, “the daughter of Zion,” who personifies Jerusalem. In these three chapters a narrator speaks about her, and she speaks herself in 1:12–22 and 2:11, 20–22. She is both a sympathetic victim, a scapegoat for the sins of the nation, and a vibrant theological voice in the book. The Daughter of Zion Personification is a literary device that ascribes qualities of persons to things. Since cities and countries are feminine grammatical forms in Hebrew, it is easy to understand how biblical poets came to symbolize cities as females. Perhaps there may even be remnants of the ancient notion that a city had a protective goddess; but if so, evidence that she represents a deity has disappeared in Lamentations. The personification of Jerusalem as the daughter of Zion comes from the name of the mountain in the center of the city upon which the temple was built. Zion was the place where God chose to dwell. The title “daughter of Zion,” therefore, appears at first to provide contemporary women with a female biblical symbol of high dignity. She is God’s beloved daughter. She is an eloquent spokeswoman for the people’s grief, and like many speakers in the psalms, she expresses her sorrow with language of intense feeling (1:16, 20; 2:11). Ultimately she discards the role of victim (Lam. 1) to become God’s adversary, challenging divine mistreatment of herself and her people (2:20–22), and complicating the book’s theology. That the authors of Lamentations would give the daughter of Zion so prominent a role in the book suggests that they were aware of women’s sufferings and valued them highly enough to employ them as metaphors of the community’s pain. Nonetheless, the poetic figure of the daughter of Zion carries nuances that are harmful to women. Although the title “daughter” conveys divine tenderness toward Zion, the term also portrays women as subordinate to the Deity, symbolized as male. Furthermore,

Lamentations (esp. Lam. 1) depicts the daughter as the object of scorn, as the cause of her own suffering, and as a woman who collaborates in her own abuse. The Weeping Woman (Lam. 1:1–11, 17) The book’s opening verse captures the reader’s sympathies by comparing the devastated Jerusalem to a widow. In the ancient world, the term “widow” referred not merely to a bereaved wife but specifically to a wife whose husband’s death deprived her of economic support. She is an innocent victim of circumstances. Lamentations 1:2, however, transforms the innocent widow into a loose woman whose “lovers have abandoned her.” This shift of imagery implicates her in her own suffering. Since she, along with other speakers in the book, represents the nation, the implication is that Judah’s adulterous pursuit of other gods led to its downfall. Subsequent verses feature the daughter of Zion and blame her explicitly for her tragedy. She suffers “for the multitude of her transgressions” (1:5). She has “sinned grievously, so she has become a mockery” (1:8). “Her uncleanness was in her skirts; she took no thought of her future” (1:9). Language in some of the verses brings connotations to the poem not evident in English translations. The Hebrew word for “uncleanness” (1:9) refers to ritual impurity, which could have several origins. Among the possibilities specific to women are uncleanness from menstruation (Lev. 15:19–30) and from adultery (Num. 5:19). Daughter of Zion’s uncleanness arises from adultery, which she commits with careless disregard for the future (1:9). Menstrual uncleanness, nonetheless, is an aspect of daughter of Zion’s shame in chapter 1. Among her enemies she has become a “filthy thing” (niddah, 1:17). The Hebrew word used here has the general meaning of “impurity” but often refers specifically to menstruation. In 1:8, a similar word, translated “mockery” (nidah), may create a pun on niddah. The daughter of Zion’s shame involves her body in another way: “All who honored her despise her, for they have seen her nakedness” (1:8). In ancient Israel, the exposure of the body caused profound disgrace, and stripping may have been part of the punishment of prostitutes or newly taken slaves. In this poem the occasion for the daughter of Zion’s nakedness is not specified, but her degradation and bodily humiliation are clear.

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The Abused Woman (Lam. 1:12–22) In the second half of chapter 1, the daughter of Zion herself begins to speak. Theologically, chapter 1 aims to explain the disaster that befell the community: the sin and infidelity of the people, not God’s failure, brought tragedy. Although modern readers may find this unsatisfactory because it blames the victim for her suffering, it is nonetheless a way to make sense of the disaster. To survive traumatic violence, people require explanation, even a partial one. As the daughter of Zion gives voice to her sufferings, she describes herself in language that today calls to mind the circumstances of battered women. She is abused, beaten, and tortured by the one whom she trusted. She bitterly laments her sorrows and names their source. God inflicted them “on the day of his fierce anger. From on high he sent fire; it went deep into my bones; he spread a net for my feet; he turned me back; he has left me stunned, faint all day long” (1:12–13). The daughter of Zion blames herself for the excesses of her abuser and, like contemporary victims of domestic violence, appears to have no selfesteem left: “YHWH is in the right, for I have rebelled against his word” (1:18). Although she is a piteous figure and a victim of violence, her portrait in chapter 1 places responsibility for her suffering upon her and does little to challenge the view that she deserves what happens to her. To assign responsibility to humans, the poet of chapter 1 uses the metaphors of adulteress and abused woman. As a consequence, the poem symbolically blames women alone for the destruction of the city, and it implicitly teaches disdain for women, even though she represents the whole nation. Most disturbing of all, chapter 1 indirectly justifies abuse of women by portraying God as the abuser. Yet this rhetoric of human responsibility interprets the disaster. It claims that the God of Israel is alive, not defeated by stronger Babylonian deities, and still engaged with the chosen people. In chapter 2, in contrast to chapter 1, female Jerusalem and the narrator of the poem resist this interpretation of the disaster. The narrator observes how extreme her suffering is, takes her side against God, and urges her to beg for leniency (2:19). Here she articulates a theology of resistance, asking God to “look” and “consider” how much pain God has brought upon her (2:20–22).

Gender Imagery in the Book’s Structure The book’s gender biases appear also in its structure. When the authors wish to blame the people or to speak of their humiliation, they use female symbols (Lam. 1, 2, and 4). When they want to speak of hope (3:55–66) and to petition God directly for help (5:1–19, 22), female symbols disappear. In chapter 5, the speaker is not a woman but the collective voice of the community. In chapter 3, the only place of explicit hope in the book, the speaker is male. The NRSV obscures the male voice by translating 3:1, “I am the one who has seen affliction.” This translation implies that the daughter of Zion is still speaking from chapter 2, but the one who announces that God’s mercies “are new every morning” (3:23) and claims that God has “taken up my cause” (3:58) is not daughter of Zion but a “strong man” or “warrior” (geber, 3:1). It is he who represents the emerging Jerusalem, confident of God’s steadfast love (3:22).

Women’s History As symbolic figures, women convey mixed messages in Lamentations, but when the book speaks of real women, it tells of their history in painful and illuminating ways. The book brings into the open hidden victims of war who suffer long after the war’s end. Some verses mention women’s sufferings alongside those of men and other social groups. Young women have gone into captivity with young men (1:18). Both are slaughtered without mercy (2:21). Young girls and elders grieve over Zion’s destruction (2:10). Other verses attend specifically to the plight of women. The male speaker grieves over “the fate of all the young women in my city” (3:51). “Mothers are like widows” (5:3). “Women are raped in Zion” (5:11). But the war’s effects on women appear most sharply in graphic vignettes about the famine. The famine touched everyone (4:9; 2:19), but its impact was greatest on mothers and young children. “Infants and babes faint in the streets of the city” (2:11). Mothers listen to their babies cry for food and watch them die on their breasts (2:12). “Children beg for food, but no one gives them anything” (4:3–4). Unlike the jackals, who “offer the breast and nurse their young,” Israel has become cruel (4:3). Hunger leads to horror when the poems accuse mothers of cannibalism. The speaker of

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chapter 4 reports that “the hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children; they became their food” (4:10). To describe the terrible consequences of divine punishment, the daughter of Zion hurls an accusation at God, “Should women eat their offspring, the children they have borne?” (2:20). Most mothers can imagine no greater horror than that their children would die at their own hands. If women did participate in cannibalism, it was probably not to feed themselves but to feed other starving children. Though the poets may have been aware of women’s pain during these sad events, that is not their chief concern in reporting them. Their primary interest is to show how devastated is a people whose children cannot survive. The cannibalism of which women are accused in these laments, however, may be more symbolic than actual. The authors of Lamentations may have adapted a curse from Deuteronomy 28:53–57 that described what would happen if Israel violated the covenant. If that is the case, the poets have modified the Deuteronomic curse at women’s expense. Whereas Deuteronomy promises that both men and women will eat the flesh of their children, Lamentations reports that women alone fulfilled the curse.

Women’s Prayer Besides offering women glimpses of the painful lives of their foremothers, Lamentations also provides women with a rare female voice in biblical liturgical prayer. Although the daughter of Zion accepts and participates in her own abuse, she also articulates her own pain and ultimately demands that God redress what seems to be divine injustice. She becomes a theologian who gives voice to her experience of God, and surely articulates experience of many in Judah in the aftermath of the invasions. She complains about the way passersby treat her suffering as if it were trivial, urging them: “Look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow” (1:12). She blames God for her suffering (1:13–15). She weeps for her isolation, for the abuse she has received, and for the desolation of her children at the hands of her enemy (1:16). She finally begs God to avenge her against her enemies and to afflict them as she has been afflicted (1:21–22). In chapter 2, she abandons self-recrimination altogether and shouts in

outrage at God for killing the young women and men of the city, for “slaughtering them without mercy” (2:21). Hence, the daughter of Zion’s prayer may help contemporary women in their prayer. The daughter of Zion’s voice evokes the pain of women who have lost their children, who know sexual abuse, who are victims of war and famine. To pray with daughter Zion is to join with the struggles of women around the globe. It is to reject victimhood by embracing the anger that can provide energy to transform relationships. It is to pour out the “heart like water before the presence of YHWH” (2:19). The daughter of Zion insists that if God really saw the plight of her people, God would do something about it. She demands that God “look” and “consider to whom you have done this” (2:20): See “how distressed I am” (1:20). It is as if all this pain occurred because God was careless, but if God saw the affliction of the beloved daughter of Zion, the divine heart would change. Such is the confidence with which she prays. She assumes, as do all speakers of biblical laments, that God values her life and that God will hear and act on her behalf. By praying with her, women may be able to give voice to their pain and despair, and by voicing it, by expressing their anger, they may be able to move beyond circumstances of impasse to announce in their own lives, God’s “mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning” (3:22–23). Bibliography

Berlin, Adele. Lamentations: A Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Lee, Nancy C. Lyrics of Lament: From Tragedy to Transformation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010. Lee, Nancy C., and Carleen Mandolfo, eds. Lamentations in Ancient and Contemporary Cultural Contexts. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2008. Linafelt, Tod. Surviving Lamentation: Catastrophe, Lament, and Protest in the Afterlife of a Biblical Book. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000. O’Connor, Kathleen M. Lamentations and the Tears of the World. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2002.

Ezekiel Jacqueline E. Lapsley

Introduction Many women may rightly not want to read Ezekiel. He is difficult to read at the best of times, and some have even called him a purveyor of pornography and a misogynist. The evidence for these charges consists of sexually explicit imagery in several chapters of the book (esp. Ezek. 16 and 23), with some of it violently abusive of women. Some have wondered why the book is retained in the canon of Scripture at all. There are few, if any, other positive portraits of women in the book to mitigate these serious charges. What can one say, then, about Ezekiel, that does not simply point out and analyze the dangers of its contents (though this kind of analysis is of vital importance)? What might give a woman—or any thoughtful reader, for that matter—pause before passing over this book of the Bible? Below I will suggest that there is more to Ezekiel’s sexually violent imagery than first meets the eye. While fully acknowledging the serious and irrevocable harm that the long history of interpretation of Ezekiel’s sexual imagery has done to real women, one may still wonder, what drives him to compose such sexually violent imagery? What historical, sociological, and cultural forces were in play to make these images symbolically and rhetorically powerful? Exploring these questions may yet yield insights of significance to women, and men, of today.

Dating, Composition, and Structure Ezekiel was a priest and a prophet in the years leading up to and following the Babylonian invasion of Judah in the early sixth century

BCE. When I refer to Ezekiel as the author, I mean either the prophet himself or those in the circle of the prophet’s followers who were responsible for the writing, editing, and final shaping of the book. The material in the book is generally dated to the period 593–571 BCE (though it does not always follow a clear chronological pattern within the book), with the final shaping of the book likely taking place in the mid-sixth century before the exiles returned from Babylon in 538. Having been deported from Jerusalem with the first wave of exiles in 597 (a group mainly composed of the leadership class), Ezekiel had been in Babylon for several years by 593, the date of his inaugural vision of the glory (kabod) of YHWH in chapter 1. The end of Judah as a quasi-autonomous political entity occurs in 587 with the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple, along with further deportations, at the hands of the Babylonians. The book at first seems to yield to interpreters’ relentless desire to perceive coherent narrative structure, and yet the satisfaction is premature. Once one moves beyond the macro level to the details of the text, the resistance of the material to organization becomes stiff: the chapters are often an uneven mix of prose and poetry, sometimes very loosely connected thematically, or not connected at all, with what has gone before. An overall tripartite structure is clear enough, however: there is God’s judgment of Israel, signified by divine absence in chapters 1–24, followed by God’s judgment of the nations in chapters 25–32, and then God’s restoration of Israel, signaled by the return of the divine presence in chapters 33–48. The 283

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judgment against the nations in chapters 25–32 serves as a kind of hinge between the judgment against Israel in chapters 1–24 and the restoration material in chapters 33–48. Yet within this structure there are also overlapping structuring features, including notably Ezekiel’s three visions of the glory (kabod) of YHWH, the first on the outskirts of Babylon (Ezek. 1–3), the second his vision of the kabod departing the temple (Ezek. 8–11), and the third when the kabod returns to the temple in the context of the vision of chapters 40–48. The book begins with Ezekiel’s overwhelming and unprecedented vision of the kabod of YHWH by the Chebar canal outside of Babylon (Ezek. 1–3) and continues with a series of prophetic sign acts (Ezek. 4–5) and judgments (Ezek. 5–7) that announce how God will punish Israel for its transgressions. Ezekiel 8:1–11:25 inaugurates a new section concerning the temple, the abominations that the Israelites have been performing there, and the departure of the kabod of YHWH as a result. Chapters 12 through 24 contain a variety of judgments in prose and poetry, with chapter 18 offering a reflection on generational responsibility and chapters 16 and 23 providing extended allegories concerning young women. In chapter 16, Jerusalem is allegorized as an orphan, adopted, loved, and cared for by YHWH, who then rejects this love, turning to other lovers in adulterous and rapacious sexual behavior. In chapter 23, there are two sisters, Oholah (Samaria) and Oholibah (Jerusalem), who are also portrayed as unfaithful wives of YHWH. Chapter 20 offers an overview of Israel’s history from Ezekiel’s perspective, which is more pessimistic than the perspective of other Israelite writers; there is no earlier “golden age” in Israel’s history for him. After returning again to the economic and ritual sins of the people (Ezek. 22), Ezekiel returns to the intractability of sin in chapter 24 with his image of the filthy pot that will not come clean. After the hinge section of judgment oracles against foreign nations (Ezek. 25–32), Ezekiel announces the fall of Jerusalem in 33:21. With the city now destroyed, the restoration material begins in earnest with a reflection on what constitutes good leadership (the good shepherds of Ezek. 34), the re-creation of land and people (Ezek. 36–37), the protoapocalyptic material about Gog of Magog (Ezek. 38–39) (which, in a creepy way, is meant to be a sign of deliverance for Israel), and then the great final vision of the

temple in chapters 40–48, when the kabod of YHWH returns to the sanctuary in the land, and healing water flows from it to a land and a people made new. Ezekiel takes us through a series of nearly unthinkable thoughts: from the presence of God in Babylon (Ezek. 1), to the absence of God in the Jerusalem temple (Ezek. 10), to the presence of God in a restored temple, in a restored land, for a restored people, in a time that has not yet come.

Theological Issues in Ezekiel The Babylonian incursions of 597–587 provoked an unparalleled theological crisis in Israel’s life, the depth of which is everywhere evident in Ezekiel. The temple was widely understood in a number of Israel’s religious traditions (Zion theology, priestly theology) to be the unique locus of God’s presence in and with and for Israel. It is difficult to overestimate what the destruction of the temple would have meant to Ezekiel and his fellow Israelites: it is tantamount to God’s total abandonment of Israel— Israel whom God had chosen to be a “treasured possession” (Exod. 19:5), with whom God was understood to be in a covenantal relationship of loving and enduring loyalty. For Ezekiel as a priest, the destruction of the temple seems to signify both the end of his own identity (what does it mean to be a priest without the temple in which to serve?) and, more importantly, the end of Israel as God’s covenantal people. The impending destruction of the temple looms over the first half of Ezekiel, and once it is finally announced as a fait accompli (33:21), the tone of the book shifts from judgment to restoration. It is important to understand that, from Ezekiel’s point of view, the judgment of God in the first half of the book, the fierce wrath of God (and it is fierce, indeed—e.g., “You shall be a mockery and a taunt, a warning and a horror, to the nations around you, when I execute judgments on you in anger and fury, and with furious punishments,” 5:15), is not simply an emotional venting on God’s part, an instance of divine failure in anger management, though it may certainly feel that way to modern readers. Rather, for Ezekiel, the wrath of God is the consequence of Israel’s failures to keep the covenantal obligations. Those transgressions are so severe that nothing is salvageable, neither the land, nor human identity—all must be destroyed so that they may be recreated de novo.

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The second half of the book, then, is taken up with God’s re-creation and restoration of Israel as a people in a re-created land, where God will dwell in a new temple forever with God’s people. The language of creation, of both land and people, which saturates chapters 36 and 37, makes sense only when it is understood that, for Ezekiel, human identity and the land itself have been wiped away. Now they are to be unilaterally re-created by God, but from the same “stuff ” of the old Israel, from the same mountains and valleys and desolate towns (Ezek. 36), from the very same bones of the people (Ezek. 37). Ezekiel’s assessment of Israel’s situation is harsh indeed: he examines the long history of covenant relationship with YHWH and deems Israel’s efforts at faithfulness an unmitigated failure. The book reveals YHWH as one who cannot and will not be contained or domesticated, and the consequences of the effort are disastrous both for humanity and for creation. The human condition may be seemingly irremediably broken in Ezekiel, and the divine wrath is arguably nowhere more fierce, but it is also only by divine unilateral action alone that the human-divine relationship can be set aright. In that sense, the book of Ezekiel bears some resemblance to the writings of Paul in the New Testament. The severity of this crisis requires language and imagery and ideas that are out of the ordinary, even offensive. So the bizarre and offensive features of the book should not surprise, for they are part of the attempt to articulate the depth of the crisis at hand—a crisis both bizarre

and offensive. Ezekiel’s language moves at the boundaries of meaning, because the situation he describes moves at the boundaries of what is expressible, even thinkable. Indeed, the book makes claims that, on the surface, seem to be inconsistent: that Israel must take responsibility for its failures, and that due to the irreparably damaged human condition, Israel is incapable of changing its behavior (Lapsley 2000, 78–108). Another paradox lies at the heart of the book as well: where God seems most present, God is absent; and where God appears to be absent, God is present (Kutsko, 150–53). Thus all human efforts to domesticate God will fail. These paradoxes are at the heart of the book’s theological power, for they are finally not contradictions but productive tensions that lead to new insights about God and about human beings. Ezekiel’s worldview is dominated by his priestly identity and concerns. Because the world of the priests is not one in which women have any significant roles, women do not figure prominently in Ezekiel’s book, at least at first. When they do appear in a significant way, it is as the metaphorized target of the divine wrath. Women readers who rightly struggle with Ezekiel’s negative and highly sexualized images of women may wish to consider two different kinds of interpretive moves in reading the book: first, to acknowledge and resist the places where Ezekiel’s imagery and its interpretation have been harmful to women; and second, to consider why Ezekiel uses this offensive imagery to further his theological purposes, and to offer alternative interpretive strategies for dealing with this distressing material.

Comment Divine Presence and Absence (Ezek. 1:1–11:25) In his astounding inaugural vision in chapter 1, Ezekiel has a vision of YHWH, or more accurately, an approximation of YHWH. Ezekiel glimpses God, and yet that glimpse also points away from God; it simultaneously reveals and obscures. Ezekiel 1:28 sums up the vision with a series of distancing expressions: “This was the appearance of the likeness of the glory [Heb. kabod] of YHWH” (emphasis added). The paradox at the heart of the vision—the simultaneous

presence and absence of God—is also one of the central paradoxes and main theological claims of the book itself. For the prophet to encounter YHWH outside of the Jerusalem temple, much less in the alien and hostile land of Babylon, is an extraordinary claim. By reporting this vision Ezekiel asserts that YHWH has neither abandoned Israel to foreign gods, nor has YHWH been defeated by allegedly more powerful foreign gods. A new theme is introduced as Ezekiel’s call unfolds in the next two chapters: the sinfulness of Israel as the core problem that YHWH

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seeks to address (2:3–4). Strangely, whether the people hear or refuse to hear the prophet’s message is irrelevant; but they will know that YHWH has sent a prophet among them (2:5–7; 3:7–11). Knowledge of YHWH, here mediated through the sending of the prophet, is of paramount importance, and Ezekiel comes to see behavioral change itself as of secondary importance, because it can be achieved only after the people understand the identity of YHWH and their own identity in relation to YHWH. The language here is closely related to the socalled “recognition formula”—“they/you shall know that I am YHWH”—found throughout the book (more than seventy times), which also underscores the central theme of the knowledge of God. The kind of knowledge envisioned here is not intellectual, but is rather the people’s acknowledgment of the sovereignty of God. In chapter 3, however, we seem to see an emphasis on individual responsibility. In fact, Ezekiel consistently claims that both are true, and the tension permeates much of the first half of the book: people cannot change their behavior, yet they are responsible for their actions. People require the knowledge of God and of themselves in order to act responsibly, but they do not seem to have this knowledge. In chapter 3 the apparent emphasis on individual responsibility does not have the people’s response in view; rather, it concerns the prophet’s responsibility to fulfill the divine commission. Ezekiel conveys his fierce judgment of Israel in a variety of ways, through bizarre sign actions (Ezek. 4–5), courtroom speech (e.g., 5:5–6), poetic images (e.g., 15:1–5), and of course, his vision of the departure of the glory of YHWH from the temple in chapters 8–11. Throughout the first half of the book the judgment language has a relentlessly terrifying quality, for example, “And because of all your abominations, I will do to you what I have never yet done, and the like of which I will never do again. Surely, parents shall eat their children in your midst, and children shall eat their parents; I will execute judgments on you, and any of you who survive I will scatter to every wind” (5:9–10). The reason for the totality of the language of destruction is because Ezekiel believes that a total destruction of Israel, a form of erasure, a form of death itself, is necessary in order for Israel to have any hope of new life. Ezekiel’s vision in chapters 8–11 is clearly connected to his inaugural vision in chapters

1–3 and his vision in chapters 40–48. Where Ezekiel saw the glory of YHWH in chapter 1 in a foreign land, now he is brought “in visions” to Jerusalem to witness the departure of that same glory from the Jerusalem temple, a devastating event for Israel, and surely for the priest Ezekiel personally. On his visionary tour he is shown “great abominations” taking place in the temple, that is, the unimaginable sight of Israelite leaders performing idolatrous worship within the Jerusalem temple itself. For the most part, those being judged are men, but in 8:14–15 some women sitting at the north gate of the temple are singled out for judgment because they are “weeping for Tammuz.” These are some of the few “real” (as opposed to metaphorical) women who appear in Ezekiel. What are they doing? In the Mesopotamian version of the common ancient Near Eastern myth of the dying and rising god, Tammuz was a god whose courtship and marriage to the goddess Ishtar was associated with fertility and the fruitfulness of the land. When Tammuz dies in the myth, the bounty that the land has produced also comes to an abrupt end. The myth is tied to the seasonal crop cycles in the ancient Near East, with the dry season (summer) coinciding with the “death” of Tammuz, an event mourned by women in cultic rituals. Ezekiel’s concern here is not so much to target women as idolaters—he saves most of his venom for the male idolaters in the chapter—but to provide a sampler of the types of idolatry found, incredibly, within the Jerusalem temple itself. It is worth noting that frequent targets of his judgment, here and elsewhere in the book, are Israel’s leaders (8:11, 12; cf. Ezek. 11; 12; 21; 34), which may suggest that the cult of Tammuz and its women worshipers had particular influence. In a disturbing scene that recalls the slaughter in Exodus 32:26–28 following the golden calf episode, YHWH calls for the slaughter of the old and the young in the city on account of the abominations in the temple (9:4–6). The temple abominations in chapter 8 function like the golden calf episode in Exodus, in that the depth of the crisis is somehow indexed by an immediate need for a slaughter of the guilty. While the people claim that God has abandoned the land and does not see (8:12), the situation is quite the reverse: they will be held accountable for their idolatry and their violence (9:9). The paradoxical claim reappears here: when the people think God is absent is precisely when God is most present.

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At the end of this, his second vision, Ezekiel witnesses a devastating, but now logically inevitable event: the departure of the divine “glory”—the very presence of God—from the temple and from the city of Jerusalem itself (11:22–23). The irony of divine presence and absence is even clearer: where Ezekiel’s inaugural vision offered an overwhelming image of the divine presence in a foreign land, this second vision ends with an overwhelming image of the divine absence from the temple in Jerusalem. Promises of deliverance, or hopeful words of any kind, are few in Ezekiel before chapter 36, which is why these verses in 11:17–20, offered in the midst of extreme judgment and just prior to the departure of the divine presence from the city, leap off the page all the more: “I will gather you [the exiles] from the peoples, and assemble you out of the countries where you have been scattered, and I will give you the land of Israel. . . . I will give them one heart, and put a new spirit within them; I will remove the heart of stone from their flesh and give them a heart of flesh, so that they may follow my statutes and keep my ordinances and obey them” (emphasis added). This promise implies that the people with their current “heart of stone” are incapable of following the law and that divine action is required to change the situation. The promise thus stands in considerable tension with Ezekiel’s repeated claim that the people are responsible for the disaster that is befalling them. The tension between these two claims—that the people are responsible, and that they are incapable of changing their behavior, only YHWH can—is ultimately a theologically productive one in the course of the book. Ezekiel’s most profound claims about the human condition emerge from this paradox.

Signs of the Judgment (Ezek. 12:1–24:27) The material in chapters 12–24 is an uneven mixture of dense allegories and sign actions interspersed with prose accounts of Israel’s history. The metaphorized women in chapters 16 and 23 will be the focus of our attention, but the women prophets in 13:17–23 and the symbolic action involving the prophet’s wife in 24:15–27 will also receive particular attention. As observed above, the primary target of Ezekiel’s withering judgments is often Israel’s leadership. In 13:1–16 he turns his attention to the prophets: God will punish those

(male) prophets who have misled the people into believing that all would be well, “who saw visions of peace for [Jerusalem], when there was no peace” (13:16; cf. 13:10; cf. Jer. 6:14; 8:11). Other prophets, this time specifically women, are also indicted for victimizing the people for their own economic gain (13:17–23). Ezekiel is not usually the first prophet to roll off the tongue when we speak of the Israelite prophets’ interest in social justice, but in fact he repeatedly demonstrates his concern for economic and social justice (see Ezek. 7; 22; 34; several of the oracles against foreign nations, including those against Tyre, Ezek. 26–28; and 45:8–9, 10–12; 46:18). The exact nature of the women’s activity is obscure (we do not know the function of the bands on their wrists, or the veils). In a previous era of scholarship it was common to designate this kind of activity “magic,” as opposed to the religiously sanctioned activities of the Israelite prophets and diviners, but this is no longer a tenable interpretation. Whatever these women were doing, it was similar in nature to other Israelite religious practices, even if somewhat different techniques were used. It is appropriate to see their practice here as prophecy, since that is what Ezekiel calls it (13:17), just as he identifies the male prophets of Israel as purveyors of false prophecy in 13:2. The women also practice divination in 13:23, activities that “orthodox” Israelite religious practitioners also do on occasion. Of course, from Ezekiel’s point of view the women’s prophesying, whatever its distinctive features, is predatory and victimizes the people, and that is Ezekiel’s concern: the women are disregarding the needs of YHWH’s people (referred to five times as “my people”) and are instead filling their own pockets (“Will you hunt down lives among my people, and maintain your own lives?” 13:18). Faithless Women (Ezek. 16 and 23) Chapters 16 and 23 deserve particular attention because of their graphic sexual imagery and abuse of women. Though they are distinct in many ways, the two chapters present similar issues and will be treated together. Chapter 16 is an extended metaphor depicting Jerusalem as an orphan who spurns YHWH’s love, instead becoming a promiscuous prostitute, actually paying lovers instead of the other way around. Chapter 23 names the women in the metaphor, Oholah (Samaria) and Oholibah (Jerusalem),

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and they too are considered adulterers, faithless to their husband YHWH. Both chapters describe in metaphorical fashion Judah’s and Israel’s political alliances with other nations (Egypt, Assyria, etc.). These alliances are, in Ezekiel’s view, acts that reveal the extent to which Israel and Judah radically misunderstand the nature of their relationship with YHWH. In both chapters the metaphorical women are punished with unbearable violence for having sex (i.e., political alliances) with partners other than YHWH: for example, “they shall strip you of your clothes and take your beautiful objects and leave you naked and bare. They shall bring up a mob against you, and they shall stone you and cut you to pieces with their swords” (16:39–40); “They shall cut off your nose and your ears, and your survivors shall fall by the sword. They shall seize your sons and your daughters, and your survivors shall be devoured by fire” (23:25). For any sensitive reader, these are among the most difficult passages to read in the Bible. Recently some scholars (usually women) have drawn attention to the way that the violence perpetrated against these metaphorical women seems to authorize male violence against real women, which is a serious, widespread, and ongoing global tragedy. Addi­ tionally, a few scholars have observed some notable features about the way the metaphors work. Julie Galambush has argued, for example, that in the priestly world that Ezekiel inhabits, the menstrual blood of women is ritually contaminating. Thus he constructs a metaphor of woman-as-polluted-city (the city being YHWH’s wife), which pervades the book. Others consider the ways in which the metaphors invite Ezekiel’s presumably male audience to imagine themselves as the female Jerusalem in the metaphor. The “feminization” of Judah/ Israel depicted in these chapters might be related to real experiences of victimization at the hands of imperial powers during the exile: being overrun by a massive army was emasculating, psychologically and perhaps also literally as well (Patton, Kamionkowski). Having his male audience identify with the sexually abused metaphorical women in these chapters may well be an effective rhetorical shock strategy. As Kamionkowski puts it, in these oracles, the “men have already become women (having experienced military defeat and forced exile), and now are metaphorically represented as a

woman, a collective wife to God. The emasculated warrior becomes a metaphorical wife” (Kamionkowski, 91). Along similar lines, some scholars, like Nancy Bowen, have turned to trauma theory to help better understand Ezekiel’s text. Unlike a prior scholarly generation’s effort to psychologize Ezekiel as an individual, those who use trauma theory seek to understand how his sociohistorical context of war, exile, and disruption, and the specifically identifiable traumatic effects of such events on populations (e.g., posttraumatic stress disorder) may explain certain features of the book that are not otherwise explicable. Reading against that background helps make sense of some of the stranger and more disturbing aspects of the book, including the sexual metaphors in chapters 16 and 23. While Bowen certainly does not dismiss the problematic rhetoric in these chapters and its effects on real women, she uses the analogy of rap music as another way of thinking about it. For many, rap music is ugly and brutal, but Bowen points out that the music simply reflects the ugliness and brutality of a social world of violence, poverty, and racism. Thus “the ugliness and brutality of rap is a form of truth telling” (Bowen, 144). Likewise, Ezekiel’s language of violence and rape is telling the truth about his world, in which assault and violation are part of the usual experience of the powerless, which at this point is Israel’s experience. This rhetorical strategy of gender reversal (the traumatized male audience identifying with the violated females in the metaphors) also has theological implications. Ezekiel believes his audience to be suffering from a spiritual complacency and listlessness, no doubt induced by their traumatized state, which he thinks can be blasted away only by rhetorical strategies that turn their theological assumptions upside down. God is always faithful in chapters 16 and 23, while Israel is always rapacious and inherently unfaithful (16:34), worse even than the nations around her (see 5:7, and 16:27, where the Philistines are ashamed of her!). Through these offensive images, Ezekiel gets his hearers to pay attention to the depth of the problem facing the people, who will not be able to save themselves. Ezekiel uses the language of self-loathing and of shame (16:53–54, 59–61; cf. 6:9; 20:43; 36:31) to speak of the future when the people will see the truth of their history clearly—how

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they abandoned YHWH: “I will establish my covenant with you, and you shall know that I am YHWH, in order that you may remember and be confounded [ashamed], and never open your mouth again because of your shame, when I forgive you all that you have done, says the Lord God” (16:62–63). Distressing as the language of shame is to modern ears, this is Ezekiel’s way of speaking about selfknowledge. Ezekiel uses shame language repeatedly throughout the book in several distinct ways: there is discretion-shame (modesty that prevents one from behaving in certain ways) and disgrace-shame (the shame one feels after the fact; the desire to hide, etc.; see Bowen for this terminology). Both of these are positive types of shame, and in Ezekiel’s view, Israel lacks both of them. Yet it is precisely this lack, and the lack of self-­knowledge that they represent, that have resulted in the present disaster of the exile. The Deuteronomistic Historian seems to have thought of the long history of Israel as a cyclical history, with a number of failed kings, but some successes too (Hezekiah, Josiah). But Ezekiel does not see any spots of hope in Israel’s history or humanity in general. Israel’s history was a disaster from the beginning (see Ezek. 20), and its only hope lies in YHWH to instill in Israel the knowledge of God and the selfknowledge needed for right action, as we will see in chapters 36 and 37 below. Thus Ezekiel uses these sexually explicit extended metaphors to shock his audience into an understanding of the depth of the crisis at hand. As modern readers we must be aware of the ways in which the interpretation of these texts has damaged, and continues to damage, real women. But that should not prevent us from observing what else is going on in them as well. Ezekiel’s offensive language was meant to be offensive to his original audience for a reason: to shock them into realizing the gravity of their own situation; to convince them that they had hit rock bottom, and that only YHWH could save them. The Prophet’s Wife and Other “Real” Women in the Book (Ezek. 24:15–27) Ezekiel’s wife makes a cameo appearance in the last part of the long section of judgment against Israel (Ezek. 4–24). She is not a fullfledged character but functions as a symbolic analogy for the temple in a sign-action that Ezekiel is to perform so that the people will

understand the severity of the coming disaster. Just as Ezekiel is prohibited from mourning the death of his wife (24:16–17), so the people will not be allowed to grieve the destruction of the temple or the death of their children (24:21–27). Why prohibit mourning a loss so deep? The answer is intimately connected to Ezekiel’s struggle to articulate the problem of human nature, and what he views as its inherent defects. Ezekiel understands the people’s passion and desire to be misdirected. The people’s love for the temple is extreme, as the heap of appositional phrases suggests (“the pride of your power, the delight of your eyes, and your heart’s desire,” 24:21). Their passion should not have been directed so excessively to the temple itself, to the exclusion of the one who resides in the temple. First the prophet’s, then the people’s, mourning rituals are prohibited because they represent human efforts to overly control the experience of grief. The people will be reduced to animallike groaning and “rotting” (NRSV softens to “pine away”) in their iniquities because, in Ezekiel’s view, the Israelites’ tendency to make order out of chaos, symbolized here by the mourning rituals, leaves no room for the activity of God. For Ezekiel, the human-generated category of mourning is closing the people off, shielding them from knowing the presence and activity of God. Galambush finds it surprising that Ezekiel makes no accusation against his wife for infidelity in this sign-action, as one might expect, given the woman/temple (presumably polluted woman/polluted temple) analogy that underlies the passage and that she sees as pervasive in the rest of the book. She observes that Ezekiel does not criticize the “real” women in the book any more harshly than he does the men (indeed, they are judged “equally” in 8:14–15 and 13:17– 23) and does not criticize them for sexual misconduct. Furthermore, in chapters 18 and 22 (18:6, 11, 15; 22:10–11), women are mentioned as the victims of male sexual transgression, not the perpetrators of it. Indeed, in 22:6–12 Ezekiel excoriates Israel for its mistreatment of mothers and fathers, orphans and widows (22:7), judgments found in other prophetic texts (and in Pentateuchal legal material: Exod. 20:12; Lev. 19:3; Deut. 5:16; Exod. 22:22–24; Deut. 16:11). When comparing Ezekiel’s treatment of “real” women to his use of images of women in metaphors, it becomes clear that something peculiar

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is going on in the metaphors: he is not just a clear-cut misogynist. In fact he does not seem to be particularly misogynist when it comes to the “real” women (keeping in mind his priestly worldview, which was not without certain problematic assumptions about women). If this is the case, then it lends support to the view that the metaphorized women in chapters 16 and 23 function rhetorically to “feminize” his male audience and so, he hopes, to shake the foundations of their world so deeply that they have no choice but to listen to what he has to say.

Restoration and Return of the Divine Presence (Ezek. 25:1–48:35) The oracles against the nations in chapters 25–32 form a kind of hinge in the book, as the scathing, judgment language against Israel comes to an end after the sign-action involving the lack of mourning observance for Ezekiel’s wife. A shift toward Israel’s deliverance begins, since judgment upon Israel’s enemies can be seen as a favorable sign to Israel. Indeed, though these chapters are apparently directed at seven different nations, it is clear that the nations themselves are not the real intended audience at all, but rather Israel in exile, who is to take comfort from these words of judgment against its enemies. Women as characters do not figure prominently in these chapters. In 33:21 it is reported that a messenger arrives among the exiles to announce that Jerusalem has fallen. The Hebrew is a mere two words (Heb. huketah ha’ir, “the city has fallen”), but the brief, devastating statement acts as a kind of fulfillment of the first twenty-four ominous chapters of the book. From this point forward, the book takes a distinctive turn toward God’s acts of deliverance and the restoration— one might even say the re-creation—of Israel. Re-creation of Land and People (Ezek. 36:1–37:14) In chapters 36 and 37 God acts not just to renew Israel and the land, but to re-create them entirely. Chapter 36 has the re-creation of both people (36:26–27) and land (36:1–15, 35) in view, whereas 37:1–14 famously focuses on the rebirth of the people alone. The devastating and destructive judgments against the mountains of Israel in chapter 6 are now applied to Edom in chapter 35. Then the mountains of Israel are addressed in 36:1–15,

this time in an oracle of deliverance. Now the promise is to renew the land, in fact, to re-create it (36:8–11 echoes the imagery in Gen. 1–3). The language of creation that saturates not only this oracle but also the latter part of the chapter (36:16–38) makes sense only when it is understood that for Ezekiel human identity (as it was previously conceived), along with the land itself, had been wiped away in the judgment and the destruction of the city and surrounding areas. The totality of destruction is not simply a function of the force of the divine wrath. Rather, from Ezekiel’s point of view, nothing of the old is usable; God must start from scratch. A new land and a new humanity—a new Israel—are possible, but only by the unilateral action of God that begins the work of creation all over again. The dry bones in 37:1–14 have a long and rich interpretive history through the millennia. As the totality of the destruction language in the first twenty-four chapters of the book attest, to Ezekiel’s mind Israel has died, and so it is perhaps not surprising to find birth imagery in the reanimation of the bones here. John Kutsko sees a connection between this text and Job 10:8–9, 11, where Job accuses God of destroying that which God has made (skin, flesh, bones, sinews). Kutsko cites this text in Job, with its birth imagery, to argue that what Ezekiel 37 describes is in fact a new birth. God redeems Israel from death by birthing a new Israel. This act of recreation, importantly not ex nihilo, but from the same dusty bones of the old Israel, transforms a people who were previously incapable of obedience into a people capable of obeying the torah and living in covenantal relationship with God. This absurd vision defies all logic. How can Ezekiel make such a vision compelling to the withered, benumbed imaginations of his audience? He does not do it by appealing to their reason. Instead, the vision offers them an image that reorganizes their view of reality and so affirms the absurd. Ezekiel’s role in the vision is not so much to make it happen—that is YHWH’s role—as it is to witness to it, to point to what YHWH is doing with and for Israel. Israel’s corporate death—those dry bones— make it possible for God to intervene decisively in Israel’s catastrophic free fall, and make a way for it once again to be YHWH’s covenant people. Understanding Ezekiel’s claim in this way helps to make sense of what otherwise seems to be incomprehensible divine wrath

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and judgment. Of course, the notion that there may be something positive in God’s destruction of Israel in order to re-create it is at first blush repugnant and, in a post-Holocaust world, almost unspeakable. Yet there may be something useful here for thoughtful readers of Ezekiel, including women. Ezekiel reveals that any and all human frameworks (think back to the desperate religious rituals in Ezek. 8, or the mourning rituals in Ezek. 24) may become obstacles between ourselves and God. Unexamined but cherished assumptions and worldviews (e.g., the temple will forever be the dwelling place of YHWH) must be stripped away in order for new life to begin. How might this be useful for women and other thoughtful readers? In our own time it is not views of the temple, but views about race, class, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and other categories of difference that may constitute unexamined assumptions—assumptions standing between us and a more faithful relationship with one another and with God. Reading through Ezekiel’s lens, we must be stripped of all those cherished assumptions and desires in order to experience new life. There is no incremental remedy. Final Vision and Return of the Divine Presence (Ezek. 40:1–48:35) Where the book began with a vision of the presence of YHWH (Ezek. 1–3), and continued with a vision of the departure of that presence (Ezek. 8–11), it now ends with a vision of YHWH’s return to a transformed temple (Ezek. 40–48). First, the temple is restored (40:1– 42:20), making possible the return of God’s kabod to the new sanctuary (43:1–11); then Ezekiel receives the detailed rules—the torah of the temple—for how people will live in such a way that their sin does not again drive God from the sanctuary (43:12–46:24). God’s presence in the temple again gives life to the land (see 47:1–12) and restores the relationship between people and land to a healthy interdependence. With the detail characteristic of those with priestly concerns, the vision describes the boundaries of this newly fertile land (47:13–48:35). The last line encapsulates one of the book’s major themes, the presence of God, by concluding with a new name for the city: “YHWH is there” (Heb. YHWH shammah; 48:35). Galambush notes that the metaphor of the woman-as-polluted-city almost entirely

disappears from the second half of the book (see only 36:17–21), and she concludes that with deliverance it is necessary to purge the metaphor of the woman from the book: “The restored city is faithful, but only because the elimination of the city’s female persona has made infidelity impossible” (Galambush, 148). Nonetheless, for Galambush there is still an association with the female in the vision of the temple in chapters 40–48. The new temple, though inanimate and desexualized, nonetheless is able to give birth symbolically, as demonstrated in the image of the gushing water in 47:1–12 that fertilizes the surrounding land. The temple can symbolize the “eternal feminine” without the pollution that actual female bodies entail in the priestly system. Another way of thinking about Ezekiel’s ending is to think about how Ezekiel conveys hope. Hope for the future is manifest in the controlled environment of the temple, in its torah, its rules and regulations, but also in the dynamic power of YHWH to burst through the temple walls and heal both land and people with an incalculable flow. The hope embodied in the quantifiability of the temple measurements stands in some tension with the unquantifiable power and reach of the healing water (47:1–12). Ezekiel seems to say that both are necessary— the ordered life, and openness to the possibility that God may break through that order—and that both together constitute the divine act of delivering Israel. Only when both are present is God present—“YHWH is there.” Bibliography

Bowen, Nancy. Ezekiel. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010. Galambush, Julie. Jerusalem in the Book of Ezekiel: The City as Yahweh’s Wife. SBLDS 130. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. Joyce, Paul M. Ezekiel: A Commentary. Library of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Studies 482. London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Kamionkowski, S. Tamar. Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos: A Study on the Book of Ezekiel. JSOTSup 368. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2003. Kutsko, John. Between Heaven and Earth: Divine Presence and Absence in the Book of Ezekiel. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2000.

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Lapsley, Jacqueline E. Can These Bones Live? The Problem of the Moral Self in the Book of Ezekiel. BZAW 301. New York: W. de Gruyter, 2000. ———. “Ezekiel.” In New Interpreter’s Bible One Volume Commentary, edited by Beverly Roberts Gaventa and David Peterson, 456–81. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010.

Patton, Corinne L. “‘Should Our Sister Be Treated as a Whore?’ A Response to Feminist Critiques of Ezekiel 23.”In The Book of Ezekiel: Theological and Anthropological Perspectives, edited by M. S. Odell and J. T. Strong, 221–38. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2000.

Daniel Carol A. Newsom

Introduction In the book of Daniel, at least as it appears in the Jewish and Protestant canons, women are conspicuous by their absence. The only female character with a speaking part is the unnamed queen mother who advises the frightened King Belshazzar to seek the advice of Daniel concerning the mysterious and disturbing writing on the wall (5:10–12). Consequently, feminist attention to the book of Daniel has tended to focus on the Greek version of Daniel, canonical in the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches, which includes the story of Susanna (see “The Greek Book of Daniel” in the Apocrypha section of this commentary). Yet the lack of female characters in the Hebrew and Aramaic version of Daniel should not mean that the book is of no interest to feminist reflection, for the book of Daniel presents a sustained theological critique of the nature of state power. Whereas much of this critique is congenial to feminism’s own understanding of the arrogance of power, a feminist analysis may also be able to show some of the limitations of the perspective from which the book of Daniel makes its critique.

Structure, Composition, and Date Two distinct literary genres occur in the book of Daniel: a collection of stories in chapters 1–6 and a series of four apocalypses in chapters 7–12. The stories in chapters 1–6 concern four young Jews who are exiled to Babylon in the sixth century BCE (when Nebuchadnezzar captures Jerusalem) and who rise to power in the courts of the Babylonian, Median, and Persian kings. It has long been recognized that

these narratives are fictional: short stories with historical settings. They are carefully plotted but full of historical errors. They also incorporate common folkloristic elements, and recycle and adapt earlier narratives and traditions originally about other characters. To acknowledge their fictional nature is not to diminish their theological significance, however, for narrative is a powerful instrument for theological reflection. These stories were probably composed in the fourth or third century BCE in the eastern Jewish Diaspora, that is, among Jews who lived outside the land of Israel in Syria or Mesopotamia (see also the stories of Esther and Tobit). Such narratives explore issues and anxieties characteristic of Diaspora life. They tend to be optimistic about the possibilities for Jews in the Gentile world of the foreign courts, even as they acknowledge the vulnerability that Jews may experience when their loyalty to God puts them in conflict with the demands of Gentile kings for exclusive allegiance. The stories in Daniel 1–6 are more theologically oriented than others of this genre in the way that they explore the proper nature of royal or state power in relation to the sovereignty of God. Although critical of state power’s tendency to arrogance, these stories affirm that such power can be redeemed and made to fulfill its proper function in the political economy of God’s world. The final six chapters of the book (Dan. 7–12) are not stories but apocalypses or revelations about heavenly mysteries and the course of history communicated by an otherworldly being to a human recipient. Continuity with the 293

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earlier cycle of stories is established by having Daniel be the recipient of the apocalyptic revelations. Unlike the critical but ultimately positive stance toward Gentile state power reflected in the story cycle, however, the apocalypses depict such power as inherently and unredeemably evil, destined by God for destruction. The

difference in perspective is accounted for by the different historical context in which the apocalypses were written. They were composed in Palestine between 167 and 164 BCE, during the period of the persecution by the Seleucid king Antiochus Epiphanes and the revolt led by Judah the Maccabee.

Comment Ironies of Power and Powerlessness (Dan. 1) The first narrative in the story cycle plays cleverly with the distinction between real and apparent power. As the story begins, it appears that King Nebuchadnezzar is very powerful, for he has captured Jerusalem, exiled its king and nobles, and taken the temple vessels as booty. Although he does not realize it, however, Nebuchadnezzar has achieved these victories only because “the Lord let [them] fall into his power” (1:2). The king likes to exercise his power in more paternalistic ways as well, so he orders that some of the captured Jewish youths be selected to be trained for posts in his royal administration. As part of his provision for them, the king commands they be fed rich food and wine from the king’s own supplies. From Daniel’s perspective, however, such food would be defiling. Daniel’s request to eat vegetables and water instead is initially refused and only reluctantly granted, since the officials in charge of the young men believe it would weaken them to eat such a poor diet. Although Daniel’s concern appears to be based on the importance of observing the Jewish dietary laws (Lev. 11; cf. Jdt. 10:5; 2 Macc. 5:27; 6:8; etc.), within the story food serves as the privileged symbol of power and of the claims that paternalistic power makes on those who receive benefits from it. Who “feeds” Daniel and his friends? the story asks. In the ordinary symbolics of food, rich food and wine would be the obvious power foods, whereas vegetables and water would be associated with weakness. Such foods are also gendered in most cultures, with meat and strong drink being associated with males, vegetables and water with women. Yet here in this story the traditional values are reversed, and it is the ostensibly weak foods and the hidden power that they represent that

make Daniel and his friends superior to those nourished from the king’s table. The irony that is apparent to the reader, however, remains hidden from the king, who has no clue as to the real source of the young Jews’ remarkable performance. The dynamics of the story are resonant for women, ethnic minorities, and other outsiders who have ever been invited to enter an institution of power formerly closed to them. Like the exiled Jewish captives, women and ethnic minorities appear in such contexts marked with associations of powerlessness. The institution, whether a church, a corporation, or other such organization, often sees itself simply and wholly as the powerful one, benevolently providing access to power to those previously excluded. It often cannot imagine that those whom it sees as in need of patronage may in fact be the bearers of resources of power that the institution neither creates nor controls, but which it may someday desperately need, as Nebuchadnezzar eventually learns (Dan. 2 and 4). To claim empowerment from a source other than that recognized by the institution within which one works, however, can be dangerous. As Daniel and his friends discover, it can lead to accusations of disloyalty and to deadly conflict (Dan. 3 and 6). One more detail of chapter 1 requires comment. African American, female, and immigrant readers often notice that the palace master who oversees the training of the young men gives them Babylonian names: Belteshazzar, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego. Is this also an exercise of power, a symbolic claim on a person’s identity, as “slave names” were given to Africans brought to America, and as women were traditionally required to take their husbands’ surnames? Although it might appear so to modern readers, the story cycle does not attach any particular significance to the name change. It does not function in the plot in the

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way that the issue of food does. Moreover, historically, Jews often took Babylonian, Persian, and Greek names without any apparent sense that their Jewish identity was compromised. Nevertheless, the renaming does identify a tendency for many dominant cultures to insist, either directly or more subtly, that foreigners should make themselves less “outlandish” if they are to be part of that society.

Redeeming and Judging Royal Power (Dan. 2–6) Although readers tend to think of the stories in chapters 1–6 as being about Daniel and his three friends, the real focus is on the character of the kings, specifically on their ability or inability to recognize that their power is not absolute but is a trust from God, the true sovereign to whom they are responsible. Although chapter 5 and chapter 6 depict contrasting types of weak kings who experience the sovereignty of God in judgment (Belshazzar) and deliverance (Darius), the theme is most extensively developed in the cycle of stories concerning the education of King Nebuchadnezzar (Dan. 2–4). This cycle is filled with ironic humor, as Nebuchadnezzar persistently fails to understand the true source of his power and its limits. At the end of chapter 1, King Nebuchadnezzar finds Daniel and his friends to be “ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters in his whole kingdom” (1:20), yet he has no idea that their superiority is from God and not from the training and food he has provided for them. In chapter 2, however, when none of the king’s experts except Daniel can meet Nebuchadnezzar’s desperate need to have his troubling dream interpreted, Daniel explains that it is not through his own power that he can interpret, but through the “God in heaven who reveals mysteries” (2:28, 30). Nebuchadnezzar appears to grasp this claim (2:47), although, incongruously, he also offers divine honors to Daniel himself (2:46). Whether Nebuchadnez­ zar understands the significance of Daniel’s interpretation of the dream itself is similarly uncertain. In the dream the statue of four metals represents four successive kingdoms, which are ultimately crushed by the rock that represents the fifth kingdom, which God will establish forever. Nebuchadnezzar is honored in the dream symbolism as the “head of gold” to whom the God of heaven has given

unprecedented power (2:37–38), yet the dream also contains an obvious element of judgment. One might think that Nebuchadnezzar has grasped the significance, since he praises the God of Daniel as a “Lord of kings” (2:47). He gives no indication that he has understood the word of judgment present in the dream, however, and his subsequent actions disclose just how far from understanding he is. In chapter 3 Nebuchadnezzar erects an enormous golden statue. Although what the statue represents is never explicitly stated, its similarity to the “head of gold” in the dream and the use to which Nebuchadnezzar puts it (requiring all in his kingdom to bow down to it) indicate that it is functionally an image of his own royal power. When Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego refuse to bow down, Nebuchadnezzar threatens them with death and states the conflict in terms of his struggle with their God: “who is the god that will deliver you out of my hands?” (3:15). Their refusal is absolute and unconditional. Whether God delivers them or not, they will not worship the golden statue. This is the point at which the king’s rage becomes uncontrollable, because the three young men have just demonstrated the impotence of this seemingly all-powerful king. The king literally has no power to make them do what he wishes. To be sure, he can kill them. But he cannot make them worship the statue. This simple refusal, which also characterizes later Jewish and Christian martyrs, and which is a part of women’s resistance movements in many cultures, is the weapon of the weak. While it can be costly, it exposes the limits of power based on the threat of violence and can sometimes bring an end to regimes of terror. In this story, of course, the three young men are not harmed. Their miraculous deliverance appears to convince Nebuchadnezzar of the superior power of their God, for he himself blesses “the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,” who delivered them when they disobeyed the command of the king (3:28). But the limits of Nebuchadnezzar’s flawed understanding are revealed in his final action. He issues a decree “protecting” this god against blasphemy, offering to use his own royal power to punish such blasphemers with dismemberment (3:29). Only through the humiliating events narrated in chapter 4 does Nebuchadnezzar come to a true understanding of the nature of his power and the sovereignty of God. In this story,

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recounted in the first person in the form of a confessional testimony sent by the king to all the peoples of the earth, Nebuchadnezzar tells of another disturbing dream and its fulfillment. The dream itself contains a representation of Nebuchadnezzar’s royal power, one which is more complex than the golden image Nebuchadnezzar had erected for himself. The dream imagery is important, for it succinctly expresses the book’s understanding of what royal or state power should be, and why it often fails. Royal power is represented in the dream in the image of a tree, suggestive of a world tree or a tree of life (4:10–12 [Aram. 4:7–9]). As such, it has an integrative role. Planted in the center of the earth, it touches heaven and is visible to the ends of the earth. Moreover, its primary function is nurture. Its fruit provides food for all; its branches provide both nesting places and sheltering shade; and its foliage satisfies the desire for beauty. One cannot, of course, simply transfer an ancient ideal of governmental power to modern situations. Especially in secular democratic nations, governmental power is considered to derive its authority from “the consent of the governed,” not from a heavenly mandate. Nevertheless, there is much in this image that is of interest to women who struggle politically to make government responsive to the needs of children, families, and the poor as well as the rich. This image sees governmental power as finding its privileged expression not in military prowess but in the flourishing of the entire community. Readers who sense a certain feminine quality in the image of the tree would not be wrong. Although the tree is here used as an image of a male monarch, the tree of life is in certain other contexts associated with female imagery. In Proverbs 3:18, for instance, wisdom, personified as a woman, is called “a tree of life” who nurtures those who hold fast to her. In ancient Near Eastern art the tree of life is often depicted as a symbol of royal power. Yet in some renderings the tree is replaced by a goddess figure who offers food to animals who stand on either side of her (Johnson, 48, 58, 203). In Nebuchadnezzar’s dream, the tree, which represents Nebuchadnezzar himself, comes under judgment and is cut down. One must scrutinize the imagery of the tree carefully to identify the flaw that corrupts its goodness. The problem is hinted at in the description of the tree with “its top reach[ing] to heaven”

(4:11a [Aram. 4:8a]), the same description that is used for the tower of Babel in Genesis 11:4. Arrogance is the flaw, the tendency of humans who hold power to aggrandize themselves and to become enamored of power for its own sake, not for how it may be used to serve the needs of others. (See Ezek. 31:1–14 for the use of the same tree imagery in a word of judgment against an Egyptian pharaoh.) In Daniel 4 Nebuchadnezzar’s humiliating punishment, a period of madness during which he is driven out from human society, serves as the instrument of his redemption. At the end of seven years he lifts his eyes to heaven and recognizes the sovereignty of God, whereupon he is restored to his throne and publishes the account of his own story in order to teach all his subjects that God “is able to bring low those who walk in pride” (4:37 [Aram. 4:34b]).

Further Reflections The story of Nebuchadnezzar has considerable resonance with feminist critiques of power. Women, who have often been the victims of aggrandizing power structures, have found an important resource in the critique that declares all human systems of power to be subject to the judgment of God. One should keep in mind, however, the original social context for the narratives in Daniel 1–6. They are not so much reflections on human power systems per se as a consideration of the nature of the power of Gentile kingdoms, as seen through the lens of thirdcentury-BCE Diaspora Judaism. Even though these stories see such Gentile political power as capable of redemption, chapter 2 makes clear the yearning for the reestablishment of a Jewish kingdom (2:44). In this regard the stories find their closest parallel in the struggles of colonial or other dominated peoples who are seeking self-determination. Women’s experience in such contexts suggests a less sanguine view than is expressed in Daniel 2. Securing the right to national self-determination has not always meant justice for women. Indeed, women who have been leaders in the national effort have often had to wage a second struggle against their own governments to protect the interests of women and their children. The narratives of Daniel, while providing helpful resources for the critique of power, are not sufficient. Elsewhere in the Bible, however, prophets such as Amos and Micah serve as models for those who

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call to account the nation’s own leaders for failure to do justice and to defend the rights of the marginalized and the vulnerable.

The Apocalyptic Visions (Dan. 7–12) These chapters, which were written in the very different historical circumstances of the persecution of Jews by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167–164 BCE, present a correspondingly different critique of power. The style of the material is different, as well. In contrast to the narratives in which Daniel interpreted revelatory dreams for King Nebuchadnezzar, in chapters 7 and 8 Daniel is himself the recipient of revelatory dream-visions that he cannot understand without the aid of an angelic interpreter. Similarly, in chapter 9, while Daniel is reading and seeking to understand the words of Jeremiah concerning Jerusalem (Jer. 25:11, 12; 29:10), the angel Gabriel appears and interprets the words as an eschatological prophecy. Finally, in the last vision (Dan. 10–12) Gabriel appears to Daniel to tell him “what is inscribed in the book of truth” (10:21). Although couched in different images, all four revelations are concerned with the same historical and eschatological scenario. Four successive empires dominate the earth: the Babylonians, the Medes, the Persians, and, finally, the Greeks. The Greek Empire divides into rival kingdoms, the two most powerful being the Ptolemaic kingdom in Egypt and the Seleucid kingdom in Syria. During the struggle of these two kingdoms, an exceedingly arrogant king emerges, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who defiles the temple in Jerusalem and attacks those loyal to God. At the height of his power he challenges heaven itself, but ultimately he is destroyed, according to the decree of heaven. Chapter 7 deserves closer analysis, since its imagery clarifies the difference between the perspectives on Gentile kingdoms to be found in the narratives and in the apocalyptic visions. Initially, one notices the striking similarities that exist between the vision in chapter 7 and Nebuchadnezzar’s dream in chapter 2. In both an image represents a succession of four world kingdoms (the statue made of four metals in chap. 2; the series of four beasts arising from the sea in chap. 7). Similarly, in each there is an act of judgment against the kingdoms (the rock that shatters the statue in chap. 2; the heavenly court and its decree in chap. 7). Finally, an everlasting kingdom decreed by God succeeds to

sovereignty (2:35b, 44; 7:13–14, 27), a kingdom identified as “the people of the holy ones of the Most High” in 7:27. Despite these similarities there is a significant difference. The imagery of the statue is not intrinsically negative. Moreover, Daniel’s interpretation affirms that it is none other than God who has given authority and power to Nebuchadnezzar, the head of gold (2:37–38). Presumably, it is also by God’s will that the other kings and kingdoms succeed to power. In the apocalyptic vision of chapter 7, however, the four kingdoms are represented by four monstrous beasts that arise out of the sea (7:2). Traditionally, in ancient Near Eastern mythology and in the Bible the sea, or its personification as a sea monster, is a symbol of the chaos that the creator God defeats in battle (Job 7:12; 26:12– 13; Pss. 74:13–17; 89:9–10; Isa. 27:1; 51:9–10). Thus, in the imagery of chapter 7 the kingdoms are more negatively marked, with the fourth characterized by terrifying violence. It is of interest to a specifically feminist reading to clarify the background of the imagery of the sea. The oldest known tradition of the battle between the creator God and the chaos monster is the Babylonian creation epic, the Enuma Elish (ca. 1000 BCE). In that account the chaos monster who represents the salt sea is a female figure, Tiamat, the primordial mother, “she who gave birth to all” (I.4). She is eventually defeated and killed by the young god Marduk, who splits her watery body in two in preparation for his work in creating the structures of the cosmos (IV.128–46). Although there is no indication in the Hebrew Bible that the sea was thought of as gendered, it is difficult to know the background of the imagery and not to suspect that a subliminal trace of sexual and intergenerational hostility remains in the use of the sea as the image for that which must be destroyed for creation to take place (cf. Rev. 21:1). Whether or not there is a submerged sexual subtext in such imagery, the conflict between the beasts from the sea and the transcendent powers of heaven clearly articulates the dualistic thought pattern of apocalyptic, in which good and evil are sharply distinguished and in which the struggle between them directs the very course of history itself. Several aspects of this apocalyptic imagination require analysis from a feminist perspective. For the most part, feminist thought has been critical of apocalyptic, although some types of feminism have

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an intriguing resemblance to apocalyptic in the structure of their thought (see Quinby). For example, certain forms of ecological feminism insist on the essential difference in nature between women and men and understand human history in terms of a succession of epochs (an original benevolently matriarchal, nature-centered period; a “fall” into a hierarchical and oppressively patriarchal and technological age; and a struggle between the bearers of each tradition, eventuating in a utopian future that will be egalitarian and again at one with nature). For the most part, however, feminism has been critical of accounts that attribute essential differences to men and women and understand their relationship in a dualistic fashion, judging such descriptions to be inadequate to the complex nature of human beings, as well as naive about the good and evil in various forms of culture. Similarly, apocalyptic conceptions of time, history, and power need to be scrutinized in the light of women’s experience. In apocalyptic thought, time is linear, and what is relevant are the great epochs that define the course of things from beginning to end. The aspects of history that matter tend to be the great political events, the conflicts of kings and empires. These preoccupations of apocalyptic often make it blind to other aspects of reality that are of great concern to women and men, but that are perhaps best illumined by women’s experience. Traditionally, women’s time and women’s engagement with the world have been shaped by the recurrent tasks of everyday life. Apocalyptic, as it is represented in Daniel, has no way of valuing or even conceiving of time as it is shaped by the daily routine of preparing meals, feeding and changing a baby, or planting and harvesting a garden. Nor do such actions find a place in apocalyptic’s account of the history of human existence. Such criticisms should not be taken to mean that apocalyptic has nothing valuable to say. It can be a powerful cry against evil and oppression, and a means of sustaining those who dare to believe that good can triumph even when all visible power seems to belong to forces of evil. The criticism is rather that the vision of apocalyptic too radically schematizes the world and so leaves out much that matters. Many of the most important events in history do not take place on the world stage but in the politics of everyday life, as women and men engage in local struggles for justice and compassion.

The book of Daniel, with its two different literary forms and its two contrasting analyses of the nature of state power, does not offer its readers a single perspective to be simply accepted or rejected. Rather, it models the way in which a subject that appeared one way from one set of historical and social conditions can appear quite different from another set of historical and social conditions. The authors of Daniel, or at least the authors of the apocalyptic chapters, would probably not agree to such a proposition. They understood themselves to be receiving an eternal truth about the world that had been previously hidden, not a “perspective on truth” that had to be judged against other perspectives. But feminism, aware of the ways in which women’s perspectives on the world have tended to be excluded from consideration, champions the importance of a diversity of voices from various social locations engaging in dialogue about important issues. Thus a feminist reading of Daniel finds the very form of the book, which preserves the perspectives of two different Jewish communities as they engaged the problem of state power, to be more congenial than the book’s explicit ideology of knowledge as a hidden secret to be revealed only to the elite of wisdom. Bibliography

Collins, John. Daniel. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. Fewell, Danna Nolan. Circle of Sovereignty: Plotting Politics in the Book of Daniel. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1991. Goldingay, John. Daniel. Word Biblical Commentary 14. Dallas: Word Books, 1983. Johnson, Buffie. Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals. San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1988. Pace, Sharon. Daniel. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2008. Portier-Young, Anathea. Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Quinby, Lee. Anti-Apocalypse: Exercises in Genealogical Criticism. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Smith-Christopher, Daniel. “Daniel.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 7, 17–152. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996.

Hosea Gale A. Yee

Introduction The book of Hosea is a much-examined work among feminist biblical scholars, because the prophet Hosea is the first to employ the metaphor of husband for the Deity, casting Israel in negative female imagery as God’s adulterous wife. This representation reflects the historical situation of ancient Israel, where gender relationships were asymmetrical: the man occupied the more privileged position in this society, and the woman was subject to him. What is important for women is that this socially conditioned relationship deeply affects the theology of the book of Hosea. This theology interprets the divine as male and the sinful as female. Using this imagery, the prophet describes God’s legitimate punishment as physical violence against the wife by her husband. The problem arises when the metaphorical character of the biblical image is forgotten and a husband’s physical abuse of his wife becomes as justified as is God’s retribution against Israel.

The Structure of the Book The book is structured in three sections, each highlighting a particular metaphor of the GodIsrael relationship. Hosea 1–3 focuses on the husband-wife metaphor. The bitter experiences of Hosea’s marriage to his promiscuous wife, Gomer, and the birth of their three children (Hos. 1) give the prophet deep insights into the covenantal relationship between God and Israel (Hos. 2). Hosea imagines this relationship as a marriage, and Israel’s worship of the Canaanite baals (deities) as adultery. God’s eventual reconciliation

with his “wife,” Israel, seems to provide a model for Hosea’s own reunion with Gomer (Hos. 3). The second and largest section, chapters 4–11, contains the bulk of Hosea’s oracles against Israel’s politics and cult. The final chapter summarizing and concluding this section, chapter 11, employs the parent-son metaphor for the God-Israel relationship. God is the loving, caring parent, while Israel in its breach of covenant is the rebellious son. In the third section, chapters 12–14, the prophet takes up the husband-wife metaphor again. The repentant wife returns to her husband and to the land. Symbolizing the wife’s reunion with her husband, the land that had formerly been devastated blossoms forth into a fruitful, luxurious plantation.

The Historical Context of the Prophet The Political, Economic, and Religious Climate One of the eighth-century prophets, Hosea preached in the northern kingdom of Israel. His ministry extended from the end of Jeroboam II’s reign, about 750 BCE, to 725 BCE, just prior to the fall of the northern kingdom to the Assyrians in 721. This era was a politically tumultuous one. The prosperous and peaceful rule of Jeroboam came to an end with his death in 746. From then on, the nation was plagued by several assassinations of its kings, court intrigue, imprudent political alliances, the Syro-Ephraimite war with the southern kingdom of Judah, and incursions into Israelite territory by the Assyrian leader Tiglath-pileser III. 299

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Furthermore, Israel’s ruling elite increased their demand for highly lucrative cash crops (grain, wine, and oil) from its peasantry, as taxes and tributes to support their luxurious lifestyle. This agricultural intensification conflicted with peasant strategies, such as crop rotation, to minimize risks of crop failure. When such failures occurred, the peasants were the hardest hit by this exploitative royal policy. Israel’s political and economic interests, both domestic and foreign, interconnected with its official religious cult. Hosea accused the wife/ Israel of chasing after her lovers, the Canaanite baals (2:7–8, 13). Baal, whose name means “master” or “husband,” was the Canaanite storm god responsible for bringing the life-giving rains. For an agrarian society with an arid climate like Israel’s, such rains were crucial for survival. Grounded in the agricultural seasons of the year, the Canaanite religion placed a strong emphasis on fertility in all areas of life, not only in the cultivation of crops and the breeding of flocks, but also in the birth of children. For Hosea, the nation’s veneration of the baals embodied all that was wrong with Israel’s leadership: its political instability and corruption, its “agribusiness” that exploited the peasantry and intensified ecological hardships, and its ill-advised foreign dealings. Hosea accused the nation’s elite of praying to Baal for their material welfare, abandoning YHWH altogether or placing him alongside Baal. For Hosea, the important questions were these: Who is the giver of all good things? Who is the Creator God who brings forth fertility from barrenness? In Hosea’s mind the absolute answer was YHWH himself. Canaanite Influence on Israelite Religion The book of Hosea (as well as other prophets and the whole Deuteronomistic History from Judges through 2 Kings) seems to presume a pure worship of YHWH that had become tainted with the Canaanite religion of the land Israel had conquered. Historically, however, Hosea’s exhortation of (or depiction of) the worship of YHWH alone is one that only eventually became normative for Israel. Monotheism, the belief in a single God and the denial of the existence of any other god, was not always practiced in Israel. The religion described in the biblical texts represents only a part, albeit an important one, of the rich pluralism in Israelite religious belief and practice. Instead of one that was static and fully formed, the religion of ancient Israel

developed over time and was influenced in its formation by other cultures. Particularly important for understanding Hosea is recognizing that the religion of Israel had a strong heritage in the religion of Canaan itself. Although YHWH was the primary deity, early Israelite religion included the worship of several other gods. The veneration of Canaanite deities like El, Baal, and even the goddess Asherah was accepted or at the very least tolerated in the early stages of Israel’s religious development. A number of complex factors, such as the centralization of cult, the rise of the monarchy, the increased use of writing that spread normative views, and a growing religious self-definition vis-à-vis other cultures, led to an evolving monotheism and a rejection of much, though not all, of Israel’s Canaanite heritage. The worship of Baal, which was once a legitimate part of Israelite religion, now stands condemned by Hosea. Although worship of Canaanite deities was most likely an established practice in ancient Israel, Canaanite religious rituals are very difficult to reconstruct on the basis of the biblical text alone. Because of its polemic against the religion, the biblical text presents a biased and even distorted picture of Canaanite rites. The Phenomenon of So-called Cultic Prostitution One alleged Canaanite practice that is specifically relevant to the book of Hosea is cultic prostitution. Fertility in all areas of life and the harmonious world order that resulted from it were major concerns of the agrarian religion of Canaan. We learn much about this religion from the Ras Shamra tablets discovered in the last century on the coast of Syria. In these mythological texts, the storm god Baal was killed by Mot, the god of barrenness and death. In its prescientific culture, this belief accounted for the hot, dry period between May and September, when no rains fell on the land. Baal’s sister-lover, the goddess Anat, came to the rescue by slaying Mot and bringing Baal back to life. Their passionate sexual intercourse, the Canaanites believed, initiated the rainy season that began in October. Many scholars thought that this mythic drama was rehearsed every year in a religious New Year festival that took place in October, even though the festival itself is not described in the Ras Shamra tablets. Supposedly, part of this festival was a “sacred marriage” imitating

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Baal and Anat, during which Canaanite men, from the king on down, had ritual sex with cultic prostitutes to bring about fertility in their land, flocks, and families. The religious intent behind these fertility cults was very serious indeed, nothing less than the survival of the people in a hostile climate. Human nature being of a piece, however, some worshipers may have frequented these cultic prostitutes for other than religious reasons. In the minds of many interpreters, these rituals often degenerated into full-scale orgies at the sanctuaries and high places. Allegedly, it was these services that were so offensive to Hosea (see 4:11–19; 9:1–3). Some critics have even regarded Hosea’s wife, Gomer, and other Israelite women (see 4:14) as cultic prostitutes themselves. Nowadays, however, scholars think that the phenomenon of cultic prostitution was unlikely, not only in Canaan but also in the rest of the ancient Near East. No substantive textual or archaeological evidence exists to verify that such a class of prostitutes ever existed or that such sexual rites were ever performed. The testimonies of ancient authors, such as the Greek writers Herodotus and Strabo, used by some to support the existence of cultic prostitution, are unreliable, because they were written at a far later date and are quite tendentious. Furthermore, the standard translations that describe Gomer as “a wife of harlotry” (1:2) and Israel as one “who has played the harlot” (2:5) are misleading. The Hebrew noun for “prostitute,” zonah, is a cognate of the verb zanah, the primary meaning of which is “to engage in sexual relations outside of marriage.” Zanah is a more inclusive term covering a range of sexual transgressions from adultery, involving a married woman, and fornication, involving an unmarried daughter, sister, or widow committed under levirate law (see Deut. 25:5–6), to prostitution, involving women soliciting sex as a profession. Gomer is a “wife of harlotry,” but not because she is a prostitute; she is never labeled a zonah, the technical term for a prostitute. Rather, she is a “woman/wife of harlotry” (’eshet zenunim) because she is habitually promiscuous. Her adulterous acts are evaluated pejoratively as being “like a harlot,” although she is not a prostitute by profession. Instead of “wife of harlotry,” a more accurate translation would be “wife of promiscuity” (or “promiscuous wife”), which avoids identifying Gomer as a prostitute. Similarly, “to play the harlot” is more correctly rendered “to be promiscuous.”

The translation of “cult prostitute” for the Israelite daughters described in Hosea 4:14b is likewise inaccurate. The Hebrew word customarily translated “cult prostitute” is qedeshah, not zonah, which designates a common prostitute and has no specialized connection with cultic activity. Qedeshah (literally, “holy one”) does have particular associations with the cult. However, the service these female cult functionaries actually performed within Israelite sanctuaries is very difficult to reconstruct on the basis of the biblical text or even the Ras Shamra tablets. Although in the prophet’s mind their rituals involved sexuality, it would be a mistake to accept this judgment at face value. The biblical text is simply too polemical, revealing more about the prophetic mind that leveled the accusation than about the actual observances in the cult itself. Until more intelligible and less polemical evidence surfaces, it would be better to translate qedeshah as “hierodule” rather than “cult prostitute.” “Hierodule,” a Greek word that means “temple servant,” preserves the cultic force of the word but remains neutral regarding the sexual aspect, if any, of the woman’s ministry. Marriage and Adultery in Ancient Israel Since Hosea’s distinctive metaphor for the YHWH-Israel relationship was one of husband and wife, it is important to have an understanding of Israel’s institution of marriage and its laws regarding adultery. Two primary features of this marriage were its patrilineal, patrilocal kinship structure and its honor/shame value system. The kinship line of descent in ancient Israel was patrilineal: the transmission of family name and inheritance followed the male line. Marriage arrangements were also patrilocal. A wife was brought to live with her husband in the household of her father-in-law. By its patrilineal and patrilocal customs, ancient Israel privileged the male. Marriage arrangements involved female mobility and male stability. The young woman had to leave the household of her birth and enter into the unfamiliar and sometimes hostile abode of her husband, adapting herself to it as best she could. Love and romance were not major factors when a couple joined in wedlock. Fathers often used the marriages of daughters to forge or strengthen alliances with other households and clans. Furthermore, if the husband was polygamous, his new wife had to contend with the other wives, who vied for

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the husband’s attention and the status it could bring, particularly through the birth of sons. In a labor-intensive agricultural society such as Israel’s, the birth of children was crucial for survival. Sons were especially valued because they were the beneficiaries of the father and did not leave the household. In fact, they brought additional human resources into the household in the persons of wives and the potential children they would bear. The wife’s primary contribution to the household was her sexuality, bearing legitimate sons to carry on the family name and keep limited commodities such as land and other resources within the family. The sexuality of wives and daughters was therefore carefully guarded and controlled. Embedded within this patrilineal, patrilocal kinship structure was an honor/shame value system. Honor was one’s reputation, the value of a person in his or her own eyes and in the eyes of his or her social group. Unlike our modernday concept of shame as something negative, in ancient Israel shame was a positive concern for one’s reputation or honor. The values of honor and shame were particularly divided along gender lines. A man’s honor was manifested in his wealth, his courage, his ability to provide for his family and defend their honor, and his overt display of sexual virility. A woman embodied the positive value of shame in her concern for her reputation, manifested in her modesty and meekness, her deference and submission to male authority, and her sexual purity. A man failing to exhibit courage or defend the family honor, or a woman failing to remain sexually pure, would equally be rendered shameless and therefore get shamed by the community. Both genders would have failed to consider their personal reputations and that of their household; they would not have had shame. However, the individual causes of their shamelessness differed according to their gender. In a patrilineal kinship structure, a large measure of a man’s honor rested on a woman’s sexual behavior, whether his wife’s, daughter’s, sister’s, or mother’s. Men had various strategies to keep their women (and by extension, themselves) honorable, such as insisting that women remain quiet and modest in public, segregating them from other males, and restricting their social behavior. If a woman was sexually shameless in any way, her acts would publicly reveal that her husband or male relatives failed to preserve the family honor by their inability

to control her. These males would consequently lose their honor or reputation in the community. Adultery was therefore a first-class offense in a society that operated under patrilineal and honor/shame-based social systems. In the first place, it violated a man’s absolute right to his wife’s sexuality and placed his paternity in question, something very threatening in a society governed by a patrilineal kinship structure. Second, adultery resulted in a considerable loss of honor for the husband and his household. His “shameless” wife defied his authority, revealing his failure to control his woman and maintain the honor of the family. Apparently, two types of punishment for adultery were administered. The first was stoning both individuals to death (Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). In practice, however, the punishment was often incurred only by the woman (see Gen. 38; John 7:53–8:11). According to Deuteronomy 19:15, the couple had to be caught in the act by witnesses before the death penalty was applied. This was not always feasible. Also, the woman was more vulnerable to the accusation than the man because she could later become visibly pregnant from the union. The second type of punishment is the one recorded in Hosea, that of publicly stripping the adulteress naked and exposing her shamelessness (Hos. 2:2–3; cf. Ezek. 16:37–39). An implicit double standard existed in the biblical evaluation of a man who broke wedlock. Extramarital activity, which would have been inexcusable for the wife, was tolerated for the husband in many cases. A man was not punished for having sex unless an engaged or a married woman was involved and he was caught in the act (see Deut. 22:23–29). Engaging the services of prostitutes was acceptable (see Gen. 38:12–23; Josh. 2:1–7; 1 Kgs. 3:16–27). This double standard underscored the issues of honor and paternity that so characterized the ancient Israelite society, making the woman the primary offender in adulterous acts.

Other Hermeneutical Matters Besides issues regarding gender and sexuality, one must also be aware in the Hosean text of the class conflicts and ecological struggles over land use that significantly affect its interpretation. These are closely intertwined with social attitudes about gender and sexuality, and ultimately with Hosea’s theological message.

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Feminizing Israel’s Male Ruling Classes When reading the book of Hosea, one must recognize that the prophet levels his critique against a particular audience: the king and his political and religious elite. His marriage metaphor feminizes these male elites by describing them provocatively as a licentious wife. Through this transgendering, Hosea accomplishes several rhetorical goals. First, he underscores their disgrace by signifying these men as the lowest, most shameful individuals in Israelite society, adulterous women. Second, Hosea uses the marriage metaphor to depict these men in an exclusive covenant with YHWH alone, an inequitable relationship in which YHWH holds the power. Hosea summons the elite to depend only on YHWH, and not put their trust in their “agribusiness,” foreign alliances, or military prowess. Third, the marriage metaphor allows Hosea to tap into the personal experiences of the male elite as husbands—the superior partners in a marriage—to teach them the depths of God’s covenantal love. Forgiving an adulterous wife, enduring the social stigma this entails, would have been extremely difficult for an Israelite male. Yet YHWH has precisely this merciful love for Israel and its corrupt leadership. Unfortunately, Hosea’s choice of a marital trope so identified with the domestic sphere obscured for later interpreters his class conflicts with the male elite in the public sphere. Highlighted, instead, was the image of an adulterous wife and the faithful husband who must brutalize her in order to secure her repentance. What one remembers from reading Hosea 1–2 is the clash between a faithful divine husband and his sinful wife/Israel, not the conflict between prophet and male aristocracy. Hosea and Ecology Hosea denounced the elite for imposing its own agenda upon farmland, by forcing its

peasantry to cultivate the lucrative cash crops of “grain, wine, and oil,” which were sold internationally (2:8–9, 22; 7:14; 12:1). In 9:1–3, this trade is described sexually as “playing the whore” and its profits as “a prostitute’s pay.” Profits from this trade supported the extravagant lifestyles of the upper classes. However, this agribusiness disrupted the precarious ecosystem of Israel, and it often resulted in crop failures that further impoverished the peasantry. To lambaste the elite, the book is filled with vivid metaphors drawn from the natural and animal world (5:14; 7:11; 9:10, 16; 10:1–4; 13:7– 8; 14:5–8). The rich agrarian themes of land, fertility, and creation in Hosea have caught the attention of biblical scholars who read the text from the perspective of an ecological hermeneutics, bringing motifs of creation together with the secular concerns of ecojustice and sustainability. What is underscored in Hosea 4:1–3 and 14:4–8, for example, is the physical kinship and interdependency between all creation and those human and nonhuman beings that populate the earth. As a preindustrial agrarian society, ancient Israel was fully conscious of its interconnection with the land. The way its leaders obeyed God’s covenant directly affected the rest of creation. When they sinned, the land mourned, and the wild animals, birds of the air, and fish of the sea perished (4:3). When they repented and returned to God, God would be like dew to Israel, who would blossom forth in lush vegetation (14:4–7). The comment that follows presumes both of these hermeneutical concerns. It will highlight Hosea’s polemic against the oppressive, interlocking political, religious, and economic structures that supported the male elite, whom he characterizes as sexually promiscuous. It will underscore the issues of land use and exploitation by these elites, as well as Hosea’s promises of a renewed land and agricultural prosperity.

Comment God as Faithful Husband, Israel as Faithless Wife (Hos. 1–3) In Hosea 1:2, YHWH commands Hosea, “Go, take for yourself a promiscuous wife and bear children of promiscuity, for the land fornicates away from YHWH” (my trans.). Hosea

then marries Gomer, the daughter of Diblaim, and has three children by her: a son Jezreel (the name of a fertile valley meaning “God will sow”), a daughter Not-Pitied, and another son Not-My-People (1:3–9). Each child represents, allegorically, the deteriorating state of the nation. Gomer’s licentiousness brings dishonor

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not only to Hosea himself but to his whole household. Hence, their offspring become “children of promiscuity” (see also 2:4–5). The prophet’s marriage to a promiscuous woman becomes an act symbolizing that “the land fornicates away from YHWH.” The land is a site of struggle in which the religious and political elite who control the land enforce a risky crop intensification of “grain, wine, and oil” that they export to foreign powers (cf. 2:6, 8–9, 22). The elite grow rich from these profits at the expense of the peasants who work the land. By means of the trope of promiscuity, Hosea exploits various interconnections among land, ownership, marriage, and female sexuality to attack the elite for their covenantal transgressions. Theological problems for present-day women become apparent in chapter 2, which details the covenantal relationship between God and Israel’s elite as a broken marriage. The class conflict between Hosea and Israel’s aristocracy is eclipsed, and a struggle between a husband and his wayward wife becomes the primary script. Bracketed by the human story of Hosea’s marriage (Hos. 1 and 3), chapter 2 pushes the marital language to dangerous limits, whereby YHWH’s legitimate punishment of Israel for breach of the covenant is figuratively described as threats of physical violence against the wife. The first cycle of threats in chapter 2 begins with YHWH enjoining his children to plead with their mother that she might forswear her promiscuity: “Or I will strip her naked and expose her as in the day she was born, and make her like a wilderness, and turn her into a parched land, and kill her with thirst” (2:3). This escalating series of threats also includes the children who are infected by their mother’s shamelessness (2:4–5a). Their dishonor lies not only in their mother’s sexual transgressions, but also in the fact that she attributes to her lovers the material sources of her well-being (2:5b). On the religiopolitical level, “the lovers” refer both to Canaanite deities thought to bring fertility and to the foreign trading partners of the elite (cf. 8:9–10). On the human level, they imply the great dishonor of the husband, who apparently could not provide for the material and sexual needs of his own wife and control her behavior. Both levels converge in chapter 2. YHWH engages in a three-part strategy to curb his “wife’s” actions. This strategy reflects the social methods of the patrilineal, honor/ shame culture described above to control

women’s sexuality. The first thing the husband does is segregate his wife from her lovers: Therefore I will hedge up her way with thorns;   and I will build a wall against her,   so that she cannot find her paths. She shall pursue her lovers,   but not overtake them; and she shall seek them,   but shall not find them. (Hos. 2:6–7a)

This enforced seclusion has as its aim to make the wife recognize her utter dependence on her husband, something of which she seemingly is unaware (2:7b–8). The divine isolation of Israel from her lovers apparently serves as a model for Hosea’s sequestering of Gomer in 3:3–4. However, it should be noted that the human behaviors of Israelite husbands toward their wives are only the symbols of God’s actions. God’s actions are not a model for the behavior of Israelite husbands. The second part of the husband’s strategy is a series of physical and psychological punishments against the wife. He will withhold food and clothing from her (2:9). He will humiliate her by exposing her genitalia before her lovers. No one will be able to rescue her from his power (2:10). He will put an end to her laughter and festivals (2:11). He will destroy her vineyards and orchards, making wild animals devour them (2:12). From his point of view, her public physical humiliation and punishment compensate for his own public loss of honor “when she offered incense to them [the Baals] and decked herself with her ring and jewelry, and went after her lovers and forgot me” (2:13). The third part of the husband’s strategy to control his wife is the most insidious one, because its implications for actual battered wives tend to be ignored as the reader becomes caught up in the joyous reconciliation between YHWH and his wife. After the wife has been suitably punished, after she has endured various forms of abuse, the husband will seduce his wife, bring her into the wilderness, and speak tenderly to her (2:14). On the religious level, the “wilderness” of Sinai is the place where YHWH and Israel first pledged themselves in a covenantal relationship and where, in some traditions, they enjoyed their one and only period of marital bliss (Jer. 2:2). Israel will respond to YHWH in the

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wilderness again, “as in the days of her youth, as at the time when she came out of the land of Egypt” (2:15). Israel will recognize YHWH, not Baal, as her true husband (2:16). God, in turn, will forgive her transgressions and betroth her to himself again forever (2:19–20). In love once more, the couple will renew their covenant/ marriage vows, inaugurating a period of cosmic peace, ecological harmony, and bounteous fertility (2:18–22). Moreover, the critical question of paternity is decided in 2:23. YHWH/ husband acknowledges his children as his own and renames them, indicating a new covenantal order. Jezreel now symbolizes the sowing of his mother back into the land. YHWH will have pity on his daughter, Not-Pitied, and will declare to Not-My-People, “You are my people.” As beautiful and profound as these religious images are, the human level on which they are based is very problematic for women. Studies have shown that many wives remain in abusive relationships because periods of mistreatment are often followed by intervals of kindness and generosity. This ambivalent strategy reinforces the wife’s dependence on the husband. During periods of kindness, her fears are temporarily eased so that she decides to remain in the relationship; then the cycle of abuse begins again. Moreover, the one-sided images of the father’s restored relationship with his children in Hosea belie the trauma real children experience when witnessing their father physically abuse their mother. Hosea’s metaphor of the marriage between YHWH and Israel offers an entrée into the divine-human relationship as no other metaphor can. It engages the reader in a compelling story about a God who is loving, forgiving, and compassionate, in spite of Israel’s sinfulness. However, growing out of a social structure and value system that privileged the male over the female, this metaphor makes its theological point at the expense of real women and children who were and still are victims of sexual violence. When the metaphorical character of the biblical image is forgotten, a husband’s physical abuse of his wife comes to be as justified as God’s retribution against Israel. Given its difficulties, is this metaphor still appropriate in describing the divine-human relationship for the modern reader? What are the criteria for determining the appropriateness of a particular metaphor? One can assess its appropriateness by asking a number of questions. To

whose experience does the metaphor speak, and whose experience does the metaphor exclude? Whose experience does the metaphor describe positively, and whose experience does it describe negatively? Is the metaphor fair and just in its representations? Certainly, the male violence embedded in the text of Hosea as it stands should make readers, both male and female, wary of an uncritical acceptance of its marital metaphorical language. Moreover, the imaging of God as male/husband becomes difficult when one forgets the metaphor that God is like a husband and insists literally that God is a husband and therefore always male. Because of the variety of human religious experiences, various metaphors are needed to represent them. Are there other metaphors in the book of Hosea that present different insights into the divine-human relationship? Although not as well known as the marriage metaphor, the image of parent and son in Hosea 11 is such a metaphor.

God as Loving Parent, Israel as Rebellious Son (Hos. 4–11) Hosea’s son, Not-My-People (Lo-Ammi), receives a new name, My People, in 2:23, symbolizing the renewal of God’s covenant with Israel. My People reappears in 4:6, 8, 12, at the opening of the second major section, chapters 4–11. Unlike Hosea 1–3, where gender conceals class conflicts, Hosea’s condemnation of the nation’s elite is readily apparent in chapters 4–11. Here, he censures priests (4:4, 9; 5:1; 6:9; 10:5), prophets (4:5; 9:7), kings (5:1; 7:3, 5; 8:4, 10), and officials (7:3, 5; 8:4, 10; 9:15). Collectively, they become the son, My People, highlighting the parent/son metaphor of this section (cf. also 4:9, 14; 6:11; 10:10, 14). The section climaxes in chapter 11, where God describes his intimate dealings with My People: When Israel was a child, I loved him,   and out of Egypt I called my son. The more I called them,   the more they went from me; they kept sacrificing to the Baals,   and offering incense to idols. (Hos. 11:1–2)

Thematic echoes from chapter 2, such as God’s love for Israel (2:19–20; cf. 3:1), Israel’s exodus from Egypt (2:15), and its idolatry of Canaanite

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gods (2:8, 13), can be found in these opening verses of chapter 11. However, the metaphor of the caring parent rather than the loving husband now expresses God’s character. The metaphor of the rebellious son, instead of the adulterous wife, now conveys Israel’s relationship to God. In first-person narrative, YHWH describes a series of nurturing gestures performed on Israel’s behalf: Yet it was I who taught Ephraim to walk,   I took them up in my arms;   but they did not know that I healed them. I led them with cords of human kindness,   with bands of love. I was to them like those   who lift infants to their cheeks.   I bent down to them and fed them. (Hos. 11:3–4)

In contrast to chapter 2, which views God explicitly as husband, it is important to note that, although the prophet does not call YHWH “mother” in chapter 11, he does not call YHWH “father” either. Teaching a son to walk, holding him in one’s arms, healing him, leading him, and bending down to feed him are all activities that both parents can perform, although one can argue that the primary caregiver during childhood is the mother. Emphasized in the parental metaphor is the nurturing, sustaining love of YHWH. Just as the wife/Israel “did not know” that it was her husband YHWH who provided for her (2:8), the son/Israel “did not know that I [YHWH] healed them” (11:3). Instead, the son persists in his rebelliousness: “My People are bent on turning away from me” (11:7). The son thus disowns himself from his parent, just as the wife/Israel divorces herself from her husband (2:2a). He will be banished to the lands of Egypt and Assyria “because they have refused to return to me” (11:5). According to Deuteronomic law, both parents could condemn a stubborn, rebellious son before the elders of the city, whereupon he would be stoned to death (Deut. 21:18–21). This legal background throws into relief the theological intent of 11:8: How can I give you up, Ephraim?   How can I hand you over, O Israel? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . My heart recoils within me;   my compassion grows warm and tender.

Here we have a rare glimpse of the emotional turmoil of God on the verge of destroying the son, My People, yet balking at the prospect. YHWH’s abhorrence regarding the son’s death penalty gives way to a growing compassion. Ultimately, the mother/father-God makes a decision: I will not execute my fierce anger;   I will not again destroy Ephraim. (Hos. 11:9a)

Although the parent has the legal right to have the son killed, compassion for and bonding with the child prevents God from doing so. YHWH transcends human legal institutions that enforce the death sentence for disobedient sons, proclaiming: “I am God and no mortal, the Holy One in your midst, and I will not come in wrath” (11:9b). God as parent desires the son’s repentance in turning from his evil ways. Within this section of chapters 4–11, the summons to repentance has been strategically placed in 6:1–3 and 10:12 before the climactic chapter 11. These passages prepare for the son’s eventual repentance at the end of chapter 11, where the mother/fatherGod welcomes him back from the lands of his banishment: When he roars,   his children shall come trembling from   the west. They shall come trembling like birds   from Egypt,   and like doves from the land of Assyria;   and I will return them to their homes,   says YHWH. (Hos. 11:10b–11)

God as Faithful Husband, Israel as Faithful and Fruitful Wife (Hos. 12–14) In the third and final section, chapters 12–14, the prophet takes up the marital metaphor of chapters 1–3 once again. In the first section of the book, the punishment of the wife sparked her repentance and return to her husband. The same theme appears in chapter 11, as the son returns to his parent after being banished. Hence, it is fitting that the last chapter of the book opens with a summons to repent: Return, O Israel, to YHWH your God,   for you have stumbled because of   your iniquity.

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Take words with you   and return to YHWH. (Hos. 14:1–2a)

Responding to Israel’s repentance, YHWH makes a number of declarations in 14:4: “I will heal their disloyalty,” he says, just as the mother/ father-God healed the son (11:3); “I will love them freely,” just as YHWH/husband expressed his passionate, tender emotions to his repentant wife (2:19–20; 3:1). Hosea 14:4–7 develops the image of YHWH sowing his wife/Israel in the land (2:23) by describing the fruits of this planting, the luxuriant growth of Israel. The metaphors of fertility in 14:4–7 are culled from the tradition of Hebrew love poetry, recorded in the Song of Songs. As the woman is “a lily among brambles” for her lover (Song 2:2), so shall Israel “blossom like the lily” as YHWH pours forth his dew upon her (14:5). This outpouring reinforces the fact that YHWH, not Baal, is the bringer of lifegiving rain. In Song 2:3, the woman describes her lover: As an apple tree among the trees of the wood,   so is my beloved among young men. With great delight I sat in his shadow,   and his fruit was sweet to my taste.

Likewise, in Hosea 14:7 YHWH declares that Israel “shall again live beneath my shadow” and compares himself to a tree that protects Israel and delights her with its fruit: O Ephraim, what have I to do with idols?   It is I who answer and look after you. I am like an evergreen cypress;   from me comes your fruit. (Hos. 14:8, my trans.)

In Hosea 14, the prophet documents the lush fruitfulness that springs forth in the covenantal rejoining of YHWH and Israel. He concludes his story of the husband and wife on a very propitious note—or an almost propitious one. What gives one pause is the qualifier of YHWH’s declaration of love in 14:4 (emphasis added): “I will love them freely, for my anger has turned from them.” The reader vividly recalls the descriptions of the God/husband taking out his wrath on the wife in chapter 2. Remembering the physical price the wife had to pay to regain her husband’s favor, one becomes ambivalent about

the beautiful metaphors of the wife’s abundant fertility. They are built on a series of images that are all too real and painful for many women. However, there is perhaps another way of looking at this concluding chapter that is more healing and affirming of women. Even as God is “like an evergreen cypress,” the well-known female personification of God’s own wisdom, Woman Wisdom herself, is also described as a life-giving tree: She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her;   those who hold her fast are called happy. (Prov. 3:18)

The metaphor of the tree for Woman Wisdom in Hosea 14:8 gains further support in the next and final verse of the chapter: Those who are wise understand these things;   those who are discerning know them. For the ways of YHWH are right,   and the upright walk in them,   but transgressors stumble in them. (Hos. 14:9)

For the wise and discerning, for the abused and the pained, God the husband gives way to the Wisdom of God, Woman Wisdom as the tree of life. Happy are those who embrace her and receive their fruit from her! Bibliography

Brenner, Athalya, ed. A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Habel, Norman C., and Peter Trudinger, eds. Exploring Ecological Hermeneutics. SBL Symposium Series 46. Leiden/Boston: Society of Biblical Literature/Brill Academic Publishers, 2008. Keefe, Alice A. Woman’s Body and the Social Body in Hosea. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Kelle, Brad E. “Hosea 1–3 in TwentiethCentury Scholarship.” Currents in Biblical Research 7, no. 2 (2009): 179–216. ———. “Hosea 4–14 in Twentieth-Century Scholarship.” Currents in Biblical Research 8, no. 3 (2010): 314–75. Marlow, Hilary. Biblical Prophets and Contemporary Environmental Ethics: Re-Reading

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Amos, Hosea, and First Isaiah. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Moughtin-Mumby, Sharon. Sexual and Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel. Oxford Theological Monographs. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Sherwood, Yvonne. The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in LiteraryTheoretical Perspective. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1996. Yee, Gale A. Poor Banished Children of Eve: Woman as Evil in the Hebrew Bible. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Joel L. Juliana M. Claassens

Introduction One of the twelve minor prophets, the book of Joel offers a prime example of theology done in the context of extreme trauma. Vacillating between despair and hope, this book, which most scholars will agree is to be situated in the postexilic (mid-Persian) period, gives voice to the Second Temple Judean community’s

attempts to come to terms with a series of disasters that had befallen them. Some of these theological answers pose difficulty for contemporary readers as evident in the dramatic reversal, in Joel 3:10, of the vision in Isaiah 2 and Micah 4 of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks.

Comment The book of Joel opens with dramatic descriptions of a devastating locust plague that has swept through the land like a powerful army. Reminiscent of scores of enemy soldiers invading the country, entering peoples’ homes and bringing death and destruction, the locusts descend onto every inch of the land, devouring everything in sight (1:4–7). The effect of this vivid description in the first part of the book (1:1–2:17) is one of complete and utter devastation—nothing remains after the locusts have passed by. The calamity furthermore evokes descriptions of a series of equally devastating events such as a debilitating drought (1:9–12, 17–18) and an all-consuming wildfire that calls to mind the scorched-earth policy of invading armies (1:19–20; 2:2–5). These events have in common that the food supply is cut off: the grain, wine, and oil crops are destroyed (1:10), the vines and fig trees—symbols for the bountiful production of the land—are ruined (1:7), and the fruit of the pomegranate, palm, and apple trees are shriveled and dried up (1:12).

The result of this large-scale disaster is an end of life as Judah knew it. Not only does the food shortage lead to starvation, but the lack of food is also responsible for the absence of joy—the people’s joy withering together with the vines and the crops (1:12). The lack of food moreover impacts people’s religious activities, as they no longer can bring food offerings to God (1:9), causing further anguish on an emotional and spiritual level. In response to this calamity, a communal lament resounds throughout the land: the people are called to weep and wail (note the repetition of the verb “wailing,” as well as the use of verbs like “lament,” “cry out,” “weep,” and “groan” in 1:5–14). This call to lament extends to the whole community: the farmers, the leaders, the priests, young and old; and in 2:16 even the bride and bridegroom are called to set aside their regular activities and lift up their voices in lament. It is not just the humans who are affected. In 1:10 the earth is mourning as well, and in 1:18 the animals also join the lament when the cattle groan because there is 309

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no pasture for them. Joel calls on the people to lament with the same intensity as a young girl whose fiancé has died right before their wedding (1:8)—an instance of using women’s experience to portray the nation’s grief. The expression of individual and collective grief in the face of a tragedy such as portrayed in the first chapters of Joel is an important step in coming to terms with extreme trauma. In terms of a gender perspective, it is significant that women often are associated with the lament genre. For instance, in Jeremiah 31:15 Rachel is weeping for her children; in the figure of a mother mourning for her children, Daughter Zion expresses her grief in the book of Lamentations; and in Jeremiah 9:17–20, the wailing women serve the function of providing the words to describe the calamity Judah is facing. Read in these terms, one can imagine in the book of Joel the women taking the lead among the beleaguered citizens of Judah in helping the community express their grief, an essential step on the road to recovery. One moreover sees in the book of Joel signs of critique against a system that draws a direct link between disasters and the people’s sin. Even though there is mention of religious acts such as fasting, mourning, and public lament, there is no reference to Judah’s sins, as there is in other prophetic books such as Isaiah, Jeremiah and Amos. In light of this, the term shuv in 2:12–13 is understood by most translations in terms of the notion of turning to God in a time of crisis (cf. the traditional understanding of “repent,” which assumes a link between sin and suffering). Such a theological perspective is particularly important in light of the cries that go up to the heavens in the wake of natural disasters such as droughts, plagues, earthquakes, and tsunamis, as well as in response to the havoc created by acts of war and genocide. These calamities, which often hit hardest the most vulnerable communities in the world today, cause tremendous suffering as people’s physical, social, and emotional well-being is seriously threatened. In a contemporary context, questions regarding God’s role in suffering ought to be coupled with questions regarding economic and social justice. For instance, the harrowing descriptions of famine in the book of Joel raise questions regarding food safety and security in a globalized world in which people from the developing world are particularly prone to food shortages caused by natural calamities and acts of violence.

A remarkable feature of the book of Joel is that, amid the heartfelt laments that go up to God regarding the devastating disasters that had befallen Judah, one reads at the end of chapter 2 how God has brought relief by once again giving rain as before (2:23). These abundant showers will have the effect of restoring the food supply, so much so that the grain bins and the storing vats for the newly pressed wine will not be large enough to hold all the food that God has provided (2:24–26). This reversal of fortune will lead not only the people of Judah, but also the earth as well as the animals who have mourned before, to rejoice once more (2:21–22). It is significant that these visions of restoration are written in the prophetic perfect, attesting to the sure conviction that God will hear the people’s cries and will change their plight, so much so that this future expectation is presented in terms of actions that already have been completed: God has given the rain (2:23), the threshing floor is full of grain, and the vats are overflowing with wine (2:24). It is indeed a remarkable act of courage to imagine the resumption of ordinary life activities once more when the disaster’s devastating effects are still all around. Following this vision of restoration is the powerful text in Joel 2:28–29 that speaks of the Spirit of God poured out on all people: men and women, old and young, slaves and nonslaves alike—a text that for the first time would be preached in the book of Acts during Peter’s Pentecost sermon. This text imagines a world in which God’s presence in the form of dreams, prophecy, and visions will extend to every member of the restored community. Thus distinctions of gender, age, and even social position are immaterial in the new community that will be characterized by God’s presence. These eschatological visions, which are an intensified form of hope in the midst of despair, have power in the present. We see vivid descriptions of how the world ought to be, a world in which there will be food aplenty and hunger will be no more. These visions serve the function of challenging and encouraging readers to find solutions for the world’s growing problems regarding food scarcity. Moreover, in a patriarchal context in which hierarchical relationships between male and female, servant and master, are firmly in place, the book of Joel’s imaginative descriptions of a world in which unjust

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power relations are deconstructed continues to inspire readers to resist the continuing incarnations of gender injustice in our respective societies today. Finally, in Joel 2:30–3:17, the cataclysmic crisis of the locusts evokes thought of the end of the world. The Day of the Lord is portrayed in the book of Joel as a day of judgment; a day on which Judah’s neighboring nations, who have caused great harm to Judah (3:3–5) will be judged by God (cf., e.g., the gruesome image of God treading the grapes in the wine press in 3:13 that also appears in Isa. 63:1–6). In particular, Egypt and Edom are said to be recipients of God’s wrath; the two nations, encompassing Israel’s history from the exodus to the exile, are both remembered as causing great affliction to Judah. At the same time, the Day of the Lord is considered to be a day of salvation and restoration for Judah. The hope for God’s restoration in the current reality is transposed to an eschatological plain when the restoration of the food supply after a time of famine as seen in Joel 2:19–26 is enlarged

in Joel 3:18 to reach miraculous proportions when sweet wine will drip from the mountains and the hills run with milk. In terms of a postcolonial critique, this last section from Joel that propagates divine violence at the expense of the nations ought to be treated with vigilance. For instance, consider the effect of a text such as Joel 3:10, which reverses the vision in Micah 4 and Isaiah 2 of beating swords into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks, in a country where intertribal conflict may flare up at any moment or in the conflict-ridden Middle East. Bibliography

Barton, John. Joel and Obadiah. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. Birch, Bruce C. Hosea, Joel, and Amos. Westminster Bible Companion. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997.

Amos Amy Erickson

Introduction The book of Amos is the earliest representative of prophetic literature. Amos prophesied in the northern kingdom of Israel in the last quarter of the eighth century BCE. The superscription in 1:1 relates Amos’s prophetic activity to the reigns of the Israelite king Jeroboam and the Judahite king Uzziah, also known as Amaziah (786–746). Like all prophetic books, later writers and redactors added new material to a collection of Amos sayings over time, likely through the Persian period, and it is difficult to assign precise dates to particular verses and sections. The book identifies Amos as a sheep breeder (1:1), sycamore dresser, and herdsman (7:14) from Tekoa (1:1) in the southern kingdom of Judah. The book, however, is not primarily concerned with Amos’s personality and character; his words are the focus, in particular his announcements of punishment and disaster due to the pervasive presence of unjust social and economic conditions in Israel. The audience of Amos’s message is one familiar with luxury and wealth. Amos directs his words to a society he characterizes as dominated by structural injustice. Israel experienced unprecedented peace and economic prosperity under King Jeroboam II, because at this time relations with Judah were amicable and the Assyrian Empire, a constant threat, was plagued by a string of inept leaders and otherwise preoccupied by defending itself against threats from the kingdom of Urartu. Israel’s prosperity, however, did not extend to its poorer inhabitants. Archaeological findings confirm what Amos decries; there is a deep divide between the living standards of the rich and the poor.

The rich have winter and summer homes, while the poor live in hovels. Amos’s message of judgment centers around this disparity between rich and poor, the pervasiveness of social injustice in the kingdom, the arrogance of Israel’s religious, political, and military leaders, and the failure of the elite to respond to divine warnings.

Structure That the book begins with YHWH roaring from Zion (1:2) and ends with the restoration of David’s “booth” (9:11) suggests that Amos reflects a Judean perspective on the situation in the northern kingdom of Israel. Framed as an implicit warning to the southern kingdom of Judah, the book seeks, at least in part, to persuade its audience and readers that God is about to punish Israel for crimes of social injustice. Amos presents God’s decision to destroy Israel not as an indication of divine weakness or capriciousness, but rather as testimony to God’s uncompromising insistence on justice. Following the introduction in 1:1–2, the book begins with oracles against the nations in 1:3–2:16. The pronouncements of divine judgment culminate with an oracle against Israel itself, beginning in 2:6. Amos 3:1–6:14 includes a variety of genres, including divine oracles of judgment and woe, prophetic speeches, a funeral dirge, and hymn fragments. Most of this material serves to detail Israel’s crimes against the needy, which constitute a failure to uphold Israel’s covenant with YHWH and live out their election, and to announce the inevitable judgment and destruction of Israel. The material in

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7:1–9:4 contains the book’s five vision reports (7:1–3, 4–6, 7–9; 8:1–3; 9:1–4) and a short narrative in which the priest Amaziah complains to the king about Amos’s words (7:10–17). After a cosmological image of the end of the world, the book concludes on a brief, hopeful note as YHWH promises to restore David’s booth, along with “the fortunes of my people Israel” (9:14), and pledges to plant the people in their land and never pluck them up again (9:15).

Class, Ethnicity, and Gender The book of Amos offers hope to the vulnerable and oppressed in that it unmasks the systemic causes of their suffering and indicts their oppressors directly and starkly. Amos calls the ruling classes and the people of influence in society to a deep sense of accountability and responsibility. His radical and sometimes even grotesque rhetoric is designed to elicit feelings of self-disgust in his audience and to challenge the self-interested construction of reality that society’s powerful advance. The book creates rhetorical chaos to mirror the breakdown in society, as well as the divine intent to destroy all the controlling and managing technologies and institutions at work in Israel. And yet, while YHWH is depicted as uncompromising in the face of injustice, YHWH’s destructive punishment threatens to increase, at least temporarily, the experience of violence and chaos for the elite and the poor alike. Amos pronounces judgment “against the whole family that I brought up out of the land of Egypt” (3:1) and does not distinguish the fate of the rich from that of the poor. With regard to the question of class, although traditionally interpreters have understood Amos to be a marginalized person himself (a shepherd), the prophet does not give voice to the poor and needy who suffer. Although God, through Amos, clearly advocates on behalf of

the poor and condemns those who oppress the needy, in general the book sketches the poor in abstract, primarily masculine, terms. Amos, unlike Deuteronomy and other prophetic books, does not use the vocabulary of “the widow, the orphan, and the alien” to refer to the poor. In general, as Phyllis Bird argues, the poor with whom Amos is concerned are full male citizens who are in danger of losing their status as free citizens, due to corrupt legal practices and economic exploitation—those males who are entitled to full “brotherhood” (Bird, 49). For Amos, these male citizens, who function as the heads of household, represent the basic economic and social unit of Israel. If the elite disregard these males’ rights and needs, they disrupt the general welfare of Israelite society. Surely women would have suffered from poverty just as much as the men in their households, but in general Amos does not recognize the particular forms a woman’s economic plight would take. When he does describe the impact of poverty on women, he does so from the perspective of a man (e.g., 7:17: “your wife shall become a prostitute in the city”). Finally, with regard to ethnicity, Amos deemphasizes the ethnic distinctiveness of Israel. In 9:7, he presents Israel’s memory of an exodus from Egypt as just another of YHWH’s liberations, an experience of God not exclusive to Israel. It may be that subverting Israel’s unique sense of ethnicity is part of Amos’s rhetorical strategy. Some of Amos’s rhetoric, such as the announcement of judgment on “my people Israel” and the threat that “you . . . shall die in an unclean land” (7:15–17), may serve to undermine tightly held views of Israel’s election as lending the nation superior and privileged status. Amos’s rhetoric also undermines sentiments of northern superiority over the southern kingdom by conflating the ethnicities of the northern and southern kingdoms.

Comment Violence Condemned and Condoned? Oracles against the Nations and Israel (Amos 1:2–2:16) In the first verse of Amos’s speech, the prophet refers to God in the third person: “YHWH roars from Zion and utters his voice from Jerusalem”

(1:2). In the Hebrew Bible, Zion is associated, directly and indirectly, with the mighty, immovable mountain of God, which was thought to lie at the center of the world. Therefore, the temple in Jerusalem, and by extension, the city itself, is imagined as sitting at the connecting point between heaven and earth.

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Amos announces that the god who speaks unconditional words of judgment against Israel is the mighty warrior who stands at the nexus of power between heaven and earth, and has the capacity to dry up the source of the waters on Mount Carmel with his voice alone. From this place of mythological significance God roars forth with the divine voice, causing nature to wither and dry up. The terrified response of nature is consistent with imagery of God as a divine warrior who marches forth in battle to destroy God’s enemies. With the exception of Obadiah and Nahum, which consist exclusively of oracles against the nations, Amos is the only prophetic book to begin with oracles against the nations (1:3–2:6). This beginning reflects the universal sovereignty of the god Amos announces. YHWH established the nations and their borders and gave them stability and prosperity by setting universal standards of just conduct. Unlike Hosea, who depicts a localized god concerned primarily with his chosen people and their cultic lives, Amos sketches the contours of a universally imagined deity who holds all the nations to account for acts of social injustice and breaches of YHWH’s established order. The transgressions listed in the oracles are primarily crimes of excess committed during war. Each oracle begins with the refrain: “For three transgressions of [place name] and for four, I will not revoke the punishment.” The nations’ transgressions include carrying communities into exile (1:6), failing to “remember the covenant of kinship” (1:9), pursuing a brother with the sword and casting off all pity (1:11). While Amos highlights war crimes, the force of the rhetoric implies that Amos’s critique applies not only to specific behaviors enacted in wartime, but also to the waging of war itself. The complete list of the surrounding nations, ordered geographically in a clockwise rotation, along with the insistent refrain applied to their transgressions, gives the impression that war itself is a cycle of excess and violence that inevitably leads to morally abhorrent behavior. Amos’s rhetoric also highlights the human casualties of war. Society’s most innocent members are wantonly abused and cast aside as their bodies are slashed open (1:13), and the new life contained in the wombs of pregnant women is wasted in acts of violence for violence’s sake. In addition, the poet makes the point that the most important and elemental relationships in

the community, namely kinship ties, are disregarded and devalued in war as one brother pursues the other. In this way, Amos shows the reader that war dehumanizes both its perpetrators and its victims. In the judgments, God appears to target the machinery and mechanisms of war. One of the punishments that God declares, in the first person, is a fire that will devour the “strongholds” (1:4, 10, 12, 14; 2:2, 5). The divine judgment also focuses on “the one who holds the scepter” (1:8) and the king, the ruler, and the officials (1:15; 2:3). In this way, Amos indicts the power holders and decision makers in the community. Those responsible for the care of the people and for ensuring that justice is served (in accordance with the law codes of the ancient Near East) have deemed land and the expansion of territory to be more important than human life, justice, and the protection of the vulnerable. Amos begins with judgments that Israel would likely have welcomed and cheered; YHWH condemns its neighbors, whom Israel sometimes perceived as enemies. Therefore, when the prophet’s indictments and punishments culminate in judgment on Judah (2:4–5) and Israel (2:6–16), the effect is rhetorically destabilizing and shocking. While Amos begins with the same refrain (“for three transgressions . . . and for four”), it is not for war crimes that God indicts Judah and Israel. Rather, it is social injustices committed during times of peace and prosperity. Like their neighbors who wage war to expand their territories, Israel—its leaders in particular—values wealth over the wholeness of the community. Israel is more interested in acquiring wealth than it is in caring for society’s most vulnerable members. Indeed, the actions of Israel and Judah are even more deplorable—perhaps even more violent—because they do not occur under the stress and duress of war. These injustices are committed in a context of relative economic stability, in everyday life, and in the name of greed. In this way, the habitual practices of injustice enacted by Israel’s elite are equal in severity to the war crimes of its neighbors. Selling the needy for a pair of sandals is a crime comparable to ripping open the wombs of pregnant women. The fabric of the community is rent as much by a person pushing aside the afflicted as it is by a man pursuing his brother with the sword. Such is the stark and uncompromising message of Amos.

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While many scholars laud Amos’s concern for the vulnerable, the parallels between the merciless human behavior YHWH condemns and the violent, martial nature of God’s punishments raise an ethical dilemma. In a turnabout of power, YHWH inflicts devastating and violent punishments on the perpetrators of injustice because of the terrible violence they have meted out to others. Because Damascus threshed Gilead (1:3), God will send a devouring fire, break the gate bars of Damascus, and send the people of Aram into exile (1:4–5). YHWH could be accused of perpetuating a cycle of violence, combating violence with only more violence. However, one could counter that the trajectory of the book makes clear that the divine violence is not ultimately cyclical in nature. YHWH’s plan is to destroy the entire system—all the institutions and brokers of power—so that the society might experience complete transformation and the end of the destructive cycles of violence and war. The final verses of Amos describe the people restored to a life centered not around war but, rather, on farming and planting and on eating and drinking peaceably together (9:14). Ultimately, the ethical questions Amos raises for contemporary communities cannot be easily resolved.

God’s (Un)Wavering Announcements of Punishment (Amos 3:1–6:14) Amos does not refer to women or their roles and experiences more than a handful of times. As a result, the reference in 4:1 to the “cows of Bashan” has been the basis of some scholarly conversation about gender in Amos. The precise meaning of the metaphor is uncertain, but contrary to what modern readers might imagine, Amos was not insulting the bodies of these women. The Hebrew Bible commonly uses animal metaphors to ascribe beauty and power to human beings (Pss. 22:12; 68:30; Song 1:9; 2:9; 4:5; 7:3), and Bashan was known for its valuable cattle and generally imagined in the Hebrew Bible as a place of prosperity (Mic. 7:14). Therefore, it is likely that Amos refers here to the women’s physical appeal as well as to their prosperity and high social status, both of which flourish at the cost of the poor. While some commentators have suggested that Amos singles out these women as the “real” oppressors, whose insistence on a luxurious lifestyle

pressures their husbands to engage in corruption and oppression, the text does not support such speculation. The condemnation of the “cows of Bashan” is simply another way Amos decries Israel’s callous disregard for the poor. Amos often highlights the treacherous actions of the prosperous members of society in order to justify YHWH’s decision to destroy them. Yet the prophet also suggests that punishment has a redemptive purpose. In chapter 4, YHWH lists the punishments he has unleashed on the people in an attempt to lead them back to God: famine (4:6), drought (4:7–8), mildew and blight (4:9), a pestilence reminiscent of those rained on Egypt (4:10), and military defeat (4:11). The refrain that concludes each description of punishment is “yet you did not return to me” (4:6, 8, 9, 10, 11). God concludes: “therefore, thus I will do to you . . . prepare to meet your God, O Israel” (4:12). This language of meeting and returning to God connotes an intimacy with God that is at once life-­threatening and potentially life-giving. Amos promises that the people will meet God in judgment, and yet with their systems of injustice and corruption destroyed, they have the chance to meet God without these barriers they have erected between God and themselves. God, through the voice of Amos, insists that the punishment is intended to bring the people closer to God. This image of God as one who abuses in order that the people will return to God in intimacy is potentially problematic for contemporary communities, particularly for women who have experienced domestic violence, because it could be used to condone or even promote abusive behavior as a legitimate means to ensure a woman’s faithfulness or love. The ancient and patriarchal worldview of this material cannot be denied and should caution readers against using texts such as these to think prescriptively about contemporary relationships between human beings. Unlike the prophetic books of Hosea, Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Ezekiel, Amos does not develop the metaphor of Israel or Zion as the wayward wife of YHWH. However, in chapter 5, Amos does refer to “virgin Israel” or “virgin of Israel,” which is consistent with the Hebrew Bible’s personification of Israel or Jerusalem as a woman. In the manner of a funeral dirge, Amos laments: “Fallen, no more to rise, is virgin Israel; forsaken on her land, with no one to raise her up” (5:2).

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The background of this female personification of Israel is the motif of the weeping city goddess in Mesopotamian city laments. In response to the chief deity’s decision to destroy a particular city, the goddess would protest and then lament her city’s decimation. The announcement of her death in Amos is doubly poignant in that the mourning woman, whose role is to lament on behalf of the city, is here not depicted as interceding on Israel’s behalf or even as mourning its death; instead, even the mourner herself has fallen, no more to rise, with no one to raise her up (5:2). The material in Amos 5:1–6:14 provides further details regarding the nature of Israel’s crimes. The Hebrew Bible imagines Torah—the law, conceived broadly as instruction for life— as a gift from God. The legal system in Israel and Judah was established to ensure YHWHcenteredness, fairness in legal and economic transactions, justice for all—especially the needy and the vulnerable—and a spirit of righteousness in the heart of the community. Amos’s anger is provoked, in part, because the people abuse the very legal system designed to protect Israel’s identity as a people of justice committed to a god of justice. Thus he accuses the people of hating the ones who speak the truth in court (“in the gate,” 5:10) and trampling the poor and taking levies of grain from them (5:11). While the poor suffer, the rich build houses of hewn stone and plant beautiful vineyards (5:11). As the elite engage in regular and “solemn” worship (5:21) and offer rich sacrifices to God (5:22), they neglect the poor and inhibit the free and wild flow of justice that God demands (5:24). Therefore YHWH announces that their special relationship with God will not save them; in fact, it serves to exacerbate God’s anger with them (2:9–11; 3:1–2). Amos announces time after time that life in Israel has come to an end. The only proper response to this declaration is to mourn and to grieve. Yet YHWH calls out, “Seek me and live” (5:4), and Amos says “Seek YHWH and live” (5:6). God also refers to the possibility that a remnant will survive (5:15; 9:8). In several places in Amos, this drift between the conviction that life is still possible and that death is unavoidable is evident. This inconsistency disturbs many commentators, but consistency does not appear to be a concern of Amos. The book is primarily concerned

to justify God’s punishing actions against the people, who are depicted as having rejected God’s numerous attempts to reform them.

Visions of Destruction (Amos 7:1–9:11) The progression of Amos’s visions (in 7:1–9:11) serves to communicate to Amos, as well as to his audience, that judgment on the people is inevitable and that God has attempted to act mercifully in the past, forgiving and ceasing to destroy, out of divine compassion. However, as the final three visions communicate, there will be no more mercy extended and no more chances to repent. God must destroy what God has made, because it is thoroughly and irredeemably corrupt. In the first two of Amos’s visions, the prophet protests YHWH’s intentions to destroy the city. After seeing the locusts consume the grass (7:1– 2) and a cosmic fire devouring the land and the deep (7:4), Amos cries out for God, first, to “forgive” (7:2) and then to “cease” (7:5). In both interventions, Amos protests that Jacob cannot possibly “stand” before the punishment because he is so small (7:2, 5). In response, twice God relents and says, “It shall not be” (7:3, 6). The third and fourth visions, however, depart from the pattern of Amos seeing the vision, Amos protesting, and God relenting. In the third, God, who is standing on or beside a wall with a plumb line in his hand, asks Amos what he sees. Similarly, in the fourth vision, God shows Amos an innocent-looking basket of fruit and asks Amos what he sees (8:1–2). These visions do not prompt protest but simple responses: “a plumb line” (7:8) and “a basket of summer fruit” (8:2). Following Amos’s straightforward responses, God interprets the seemingly benign visions as those of destruction (7:8–9; 8:2–3). The first two visions conclude with God relenting in response to Amos’s protests. The fourth ends without prophetic intervention and the divine command for Amos to be silent (8:3). The fifth and final vision shows God beside or on the altar, shattering it on the heads of the people and chasing down people fleeing the devastation with the sword (9:1). In this final vision, the interaction between Amos and God is nonexistent. Amos simply reports what he sees without prompting or interpretation from God or prophetic protest.

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Shifts in the pattern and the changing roles of Amos and God in the visions raise questions about power and manipulation. One interpretive option is to see God as entrapping Amos and tricking him into accepting and announcing God’s judgment. Instead of showing Amos a vision of the land being destroyed, God shows him obscure images of plumb lines and fruit. Even if Amos wants to intervene on Israel’s behalf, the enigmatic nature of the images prevents him from doing so. Yet, rather than choosing another prophet who will comply more easily or threatening Amos himself with death if he does not speak God’s words, God uses trickery and entrapment (or if one wants to read with less suspicion, pedagogical creativity) to gain Amos’s compliance. The visions raise interesting questions about the relationship between God and God’s prophets and the ways in which both assert their agency and power. Prophetic literature often exhibits tension between the prophet’s role as a messenger of God and as a member of the community of Israel or Judah. The prophet announces God’s intention to destroy but also protests the punishment, sometimes pleading with God to be merciful, as Amos does in the first two visions. At times, the prophets appear as willing spokespersons, but they also reveal a desire to resist speaking in God’s name (as Jeremiah does, e.g., in Jer. 20:8–9). Does God trick Amos to force him into speaking the divine message? Does such a coercion of the prophet constitute an abuse of God’s power? For readers interested in the ways power functions, these are questions the text raises. This section also contains a reference to the suffering of women during times of economic hardship. In the prophecy against Amaziah (7:16–17), the priest’s punishment for opposing Amos’s prophecy includes the detail that his wife will become a prostitute in the city (7:17). In the ancient Near Eastern world, a man’s honor was tied to protecting his wife’s sexuality. Thus while the image of his wife’s body for sale alludes to a particular experience suffered by women in desperate economic times, the point of the prophecy is to illustrate graphically the great shame YHWH will bring on Amaziah. Reference to the death of his sons and daughters reveals the loss of Amaziah’s progeny and hope for the future. The prophecy concludes with the announcement that he will

be cut off and he himself will lose his land and die in exile (7:17).

The Fortunes of Israel Restored (Amos 9:11–15) Many commentators view 9:11–15, which promises the restoration of David’s house, as a later addition to the book, added after the destruction of Judah and Jerusalem. While this may be the case, in its final form the book ends on a note of hope. Following the barrage of highly disturbing images of mass devastation, this short pericope does not offer cheap or easy hope. Still reeling from the impact of reading the book as a whole, the reader catches only a glimpse of a new and different Israel, just beginning to arise from the rubble of destruction wrought by military invasion. Writing from the perspective of postwar Guatemala, M. Daniel Carroll R. maintains that for countries and communities who live in the midst of and with recent memories of violence and war, the last four verses of the book offer up a brief yet powerful image of hope for the future (Carroll R., 56–57). Amos gives substance to that vision of a future with images of normal life resuming; people rebuild their cities, plant vineyards and gardens, eat fruit and drink wine (9:14). The images of the future break with those of Israel’s past, suggesting that God will not restore Israel to what it was before, but that God will rebuild an Israel transformed. Therefore, the poet does not imagine the restoration of the government with images of strongholds and fortresses rebuilt. Rather than David’s dynasty or house, it is David’s booth, an insubstantial and impermanent structure, that God raises up (9:11). God rebuilds Israel’s realm of leadership, but images of strength in the earlier sections of the book, associated with the arrogance and pride of the leadership, are absent in this pericope, as are mentions of the temple and the cult. There will be healing and repair, but the precarious new “house” of government looks fundamentally different in Israel’s future. Bibliography

Bird, Phyllis. “Poor Man or Poor Woman? Gendering the Poor in Prophetic Texts.” In On Reading Prophetic Texts, edited by Bob

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Becking and Meindert Dijkstra, 37–52. New York: Brill, 1996. Carroll R., M. Daniel. “Living between the Lines: Reading Amos 9:11–15 in Post-War Guatemala.” Religion and Theology 6, no. 1 (1999): 50–64. Houston, Walter J. Contending for Justice: Ideologies and Theologies of Social Justice

in the Old Testament. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2006. Paul, Shalom M. Amos. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990. Sparks, Kenton L. Ethnicity and Identity in Ancient Israel. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1998.

Obadiah L. Juliana M. Claassens

Introduction At first glance it may not seem feasible to identify feminist perspectives with regard to the book of Obadiah. There are no overt gender references in this shortest book of the Hebrew Bible (a mere twenty-one verses). However, with its theme of conflict between brothers and its dreams of revenge, this minor prophet offers intriguing perspectives that upon closer inspection align well with gender-justice concerns. Obadiah can be divided into two parts: in verses 1–14 one finds a scathing attack on Judah’s neighbor Edom, who is accused of

acting in an inhospitable manner toward Judah during the time of the Babylonian invasion in the sixth century BCE. In verses 15–21, this particular crisis gives rise to a more generalized prediction regarding the judgment of foreign nations and the accompanying restoration of Judah. Typically, the first part of the book is dated to sometime after 587 BCE (its closest contemporary being Ezekiel), with the latter part of the book coming from a later time (late Persian/early Hellenistic period).

Comment The first section of Obadiah, which draws upon a long history of conflict between Judah and Edom (the etiological story regarding the twins Esau and Jacob already fighting in the womb of their mother, as well as Jacob’s stealing his brother’s birthright, in Gen. 25:22–34), names the injustice Judah experienced by the hand of Edom in wrathful tones. Edom is charged with acting uncharitably in Judah’s darkest hour (note the repetition of “the day of his calamity” in vv. 12–15, alternated with “the day of his trouble/ruin/distress”) and taking delight when Judah was destroyed by the Babylonians (v. 12). So Edom is accused of standing at the fork and cutting off the fugitives (v. 14), handing over the survivors, pillaging goods, and gloating and rejoicing over the disaster (v. 13). The failure of showing solidarity to one’s neighbor in time of need is described in violent terms

as “the slaughter and violence done to your brother” (v. 10), which captures the seriousness of the human-rights violations that Judah experienced at this moment in time. In response to this indignity, Obadiah reflects the profoundly human desire of revenge, speaking of Edom’s immanent destruction that will be his just ­deserts (v. 15). This anti-Edomite sentiment reflected in Obadiah is far removed from the universalist tendencies found in Obadiah’s contemporary Second Isaiah. Obadiah seems to be aware of some of the anti-Edomite oracles that were in circulation at the time. For instance, Psalm 137:7 remembers Edom as standing by, watching the destruction of the temple and shouting: “Tear it down, tear it down!” (cf. also Jer. 49:7–22; Amos 1:11–12). Obadiah uses these traditions as the basis for his own message, but 319

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markedly expands and intensifies the message of doom. The book of Obadiah moreover constitutes a response to the trauma the Judean community experienced, the angry desire for revenge serving as a window into the community’s shock and rage at seeing Jerusalem going up in flames and foreigners casting lots for Jerusalem (v. 11). Trauma theorists would say that the act of naming injustice and voicing the anger toward nations that violate their neighbors, as found in Obadiah, is an important step on the road to healing. In a contemporary context, one might say that Obadiah’s candid quest for revealing acts of injustice resembles the various manifestations of truth and reconciliation commissions that have done important work in countries such as South Africa, Chile, Indonesia, and Ireland, to ensure that acts of injustice and human rights violations are not forgotten. In terms of a gender perspective, naming injustice is a primary feminist concern; righteous anger serves as an impetus to work for change. To name injustice is an important step in resisting acts of dehumanization, as where Judah is mistreated at the hands of his brother (note that in other prophetic books, such as Isaiah and Lamentations, Judah is imaged in female terms, as “daughter Judah/Jerusalem”). On the other hand, Obadiah also serves as a good example of the danger of vilifying the other—something that quite often happens to women. So scholars have asked whether Edom really could have been in the position of power to do the things of which he is accused in this book, and whether this is not a typical strategy of trauma survivors, who may engage in false testimony that passes on blame from the real enemy to an innocent bystander. In such a scenario, in order to rebuild their life in the face of tragedy, groups may engage in misdirected retaliation that leads to the traumatizing of another, innocent group of people. In the second section of the book of Obadiah, one finds how (as also in the case of the book of Joel) a particular crisis evokes reflection

regarding the end of time, here contemplation of an eschatological crisis on a much broader scale. It has been suggested that verses 15–21, with its theme of the judgment of all the nations that surpasses the indictment against Edom in conjunction with God’s vindication of Judah, may have been added in the later postexilic era (cf. John Barton’s suggestion of a DeuteroObadiah). The image of God’s judgment of the nations is closely associated with the idea of God’s love for Judah. After restoring their country beyond its prior borders, God will rule his people in this restored kingdom. This vision of God’s intervention on behalf of Judah attests to Judah’s ability to look beyond their painful circumstances, envisioning a future once more. However, within a postcolonial mind-set, the image of God who sanctions the expansion of one country’s homeland at the cost of his neighbors deserves close scrutiny. On the one hand, one may understand this divine image as the product of a vulnerable nation that is recovering from extreme trauma and seeks to build itself up by imagining the divine destruction of its neighbors. But in a world marked by complex geopolitical relations as well as a growing sense of xenophobia, the book of Obadiah and its vision of God’s love at the expense of other nations are in need of critical reflection. Postcolonial criticism has taught us the importance of unmasking texts that propagate divine justification for political expansion, particularly when it comes to enlarging one’s borders and taking land from others. Bibliography

Barton, John. Joel and Obadiah. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001. O’Brien, Julia. Challenging Prophetic Metaphor: Theology and Ideology in the Prophets. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008.

Jonah Kelly J. Murphy

Introduction The book of Jonah is located in the twelve Minor Prophets, between the prophetic books of Obadiah and Micah in the Hebrew Bible. However, unlike the prophetic books surrounding it, the title of the book comes from the name of its protagonist rather than an alleged prophetic author. Furthermore, the book is composed of narrative fiction rather than prophetic oracles; in fact, there is only one verse of prophecy in the entire book (3:4). As a story about prophecy, Jonah is similar to the narratives about Elijah and Elisha; but in contrast to those prophetic tales, the story of Jonah does not occur in a specified historical context, and the biblical text never identifies Jonah as a prophet. The narrative relates the (mis)adventures of a man named Jonah son of Amittai, a name likely used to associate the Jonah of this fictive tale with the prophet found in 2 Kings 14:25. The narrative recounts the Deity’s calling Jonah to prophesy against the notoriously evil city of Nineveh, and traces Jonah’s reluctant journey and his struggles with accepting both his prophetic call and its outcome. The story’s timelessness makes it difficult to date, but most scholars place the composition of the book sometime after the sixth century BCE. The intertextual biblical allusions support a late dating. The book is short—only four chapters with a total of forty-eight verses—and contains two scenes (Jonah 1–2 and Jonah 3–4). Each scene contains an episode featuring Jonah and “Other,” non-Israelite, characters (Jonah 1, 3) followed by an episode featuring interaction between Jonah and the Deity (Jonah 2, 4). The genre of the book is largely prose, although

Jonah 2 features a short poetic lament. A series of repeated key words—including great, evil, to go down, and to return/change—unite the four chapters. Throughout the narrative, Jonah, whether willingly or not, spreads divine knowledge in the world as the text grapples with issues of responsibility, repentance, justice, and mercy. From the outset, the world depicted in the book of Jonah is upside down, one in which a prophet runs away from both God and his mission, in which the non-Israelite “Others” respond more appropriately to divine injunction than the Deity-appointed Israelite prophet does, and in which repentance emerges even in Nineveh, the paradigmatic city of wickedness and sin. Though the book of Jonah features no female characters and lacks any discussions of issues directly focused on women, the book engages issues that have been central to feminist discourse ever since Carol Gilligan’s groundbreaking work In a Different Voice (1982). Gilligan argued that mercy is not so much in opposition to justice, but forms part of a different, but equally valid, way of doing moral reasoning that is particular to girls and/or women. Today a number of neuroscientists and philosophers argue that justice requires appropriate emotional responses from us—not just women, but all human beings—in order to be truly just. This is a rather countercultural notion in the West, but one perhaps in keeping with the overall tenor of the book of Jonah. Thus the concerns of the book of Jonah about the relationship of justice to mercy are deeply feminist concerns insofar as feminism has always attuned itself to questions of justice and how justice is understood. 321

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Comment Jonah’s First Call (Jonah 1:1–17) The first scene begins with the word of YHWH coming to Jonah in typical prophetic fashion, “Now the word of the Lord came to Jonah” (cf. Jer. 1:4; Hos. 1:1). YHWH commands Jonah to “arise” and to go to the “great” city of Nineveh, where he is to cry out against it because their “evil” has come up before the Deity (1:1). Although the narrative provides no specific details about Nineveh, the original biblical audience would have recognized the city as the capital of Assyria, the empire responsible for the destruction of the northern kingdom in 722/721 BCE. The use of “evil” is the first occurrence of this key word in the Jonah narrative (1:7, 8; 3:7, 10; 4:1, 2, 6). The subsequent narrative will concentrate on the proper response— both human and divine—to “evil” behavior. In answer to the divine proclamation of Ninevite evil, Jonah “arises” as expected. However, rather than express reluctance to take on the appointed prophetic task (a common motif in prophetic tales), Jonah does not address the Deity. Rather, he promptly flees from the presence of YHWH. Jonah “goes down” to Joppa, beginning a comedic descent that will end with the prophet in the belly of a fish. In Joppa, Jonah finds and boards a ship headed to Tar­ shish (1:3), the precise location of which seems less important than the fact that it appears to be in the opposite direction from Nineveh. Jonah, it seems, wants nothing to do with his divinely appointed prophetic task. At the beginning of the narrative, Jonah demonstrates no interest in the people of Nineveh or their wrongdoing, and he voices no commitment to carrying out divine justice. He wants only to get away from God. YHWH interrupts Jonah’s flight by hurling a “great wind” that stirs up a “great storm.” Jonah has fled, perhaps, from the great city of Nineveh, but not from the greatness and power of YHWH, who controls the sea (1:4). The Tarshish-bound sailors respond appropriately and with fear, crying out to their own gods and heaving extra cargo overboard in an attempt to keep the ship from sinking (1:5). Even the ship responds appropriately; the Hebrew literally says, “and the ship thought it would break up” (1:4). The disparity between the sailors’ response and Jonah’s response is manifest when Jonah continues his descent, “go[ing] down”

into the hold of the ship (1:5). Deep within the ship, Jonah falls asleep, seemingly oblivious to the imminent peril (1:5). The captain approaches Jonah deep within the bowels of the ship, rousing him from his sleep and demanding that Jonah call on his god in the hopes that the god might “spare us a thought so that we do not perish” (1:6). The captain—an “Other”— demonstrates insight into the efficacy of Jonah’s deity, underscoring Jonah’s inappropriate and indifferent response to the storm. In the upsidedown world of Jonah, the non-Israelites aboard the ship respond appropriately to divine displeasure, while the Deity’s own prophet sleeps through the unfolding disaster, his eyes closed to the reality around him. The captain’s response foreshadows the forthcoming recognition and repentance of the Ninevite king. In 1:7, the sailors cast lots, in an effort to determine who is responsible for the “evil” storm (1:7), utilizing a traditional Israelite means of determining the will of the gods, even though they are “Other” (Josh. 18:8, 10; 1 Sam. 10:20–24; 14:41; Prov. 16:33). Predictably, the lot falls on Jonah. The sailors then ask Jonah a series of questions to determine who he is (1:8), and Jonah responds by explaining that he is a Hebrew, one who worships YHWH, “who made the sea and the dry land” (1:9). Jonah’s response is both comical—he has been anything but a true worshiper of YHWH thus far in the story—and, characteristically, inappropriate. The sailors’ fear increases when they learn that Jonah is fleeing from the presence of the very deity responsible for the storm, and they ask him what to do to quiet the sea. Jonah tells them to throw him into the sea, admitting his guilt. For the first time, Jonah appears cognizant of reality, saying, “It is because of me that this great storm has come upon you” (1:12). Yet even here, Jonah is unyielding; he would rather drown than go to Nineveh to complete his prophetic mission (1:12). Once again, the response of the “Other” is more apposite than Jonah’s response. Instead of immediately casting Jonah overboard, the sailors attempt to “return” to dry land (1:13). When that fails, the sailors pray in traditionally Israelite language, invoking Jonah’s god and asking that they not be made guilty of shedding Jonah’s blood (1:14). In the end, they are forced to pick Jonah up and throw him into the sea, which immediately ceases its

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raging. Following their prayer, the sailors offer both sacrifices and vows to YHWH (1:15–16). The unexpectedly pious behavior of the nonIsraelites contrasts sharply with Jonah’s questionable reactions and responses. The “Other” continually acts appropriately, whereas Jonah does not.

Jonah and the Great Fish (Jonah 2:1–11) Once cast overboard, Jonah does not drown. Rather, the Deity intervenes by providing a “great fish” to swallow Jonah. The Hebrew dag means simply “fish”; there is no “whale.” However, like both the city and the storm, this is a “great” fish, underscoring YHWH’s power. For his comically inappropriate hero, the Deity provides a comically appropriate rescue. The reluctant prophet remains in the belly of the fish for three days and three nights, where Jonah, in a traditional lament, bewails his current situation—and for the first time in the narrative speaks to the deity who commissioned him. The language of the lament is heavily metaphorical and employs traditional images of drowning and distress (2:2–3). Jonah, apparently with newfound piety, worries that in the fish’s belly he is out of YHWH’s sight and that he might never again see the Deity’s holy temple (2:4). Jonah’s descent is complete once he is in the belly of the fish—he has “gone down to the land whose bars closed upon me forever” (1:6). But according to Jonah, as his life was ebbing away, he “remember[s]” YHWH and prays to him (1:7). In response, YHWH speaks to the fish, which unceremoniously “vomits” Jonah out onto dry land (2:10). The poem seems at odds with the surrounding material in both content and genre; these verses are likely older material incorporated anew into the Jonah narrative. Jonah’s newfound piety does not resurface once he reaches dry ground.

Jonah’s Second Call (Jonah 3:1–10) Jonah 3:1 echoes 1:1: “The word of the Lord came to Jonah.” As in the first scene, the Deity commands Jonah to “arise,” “go,” and “call out” (3:2, my trans.). This time, however, Jonah does not flee but immediately obeys. It seems that Jonah gets a prophetic do-over. He “arises” and “goes” to Nineveh, where he “calls out” (3:3–4). Jonah 3:4 contains the only words of prophecy in the text: Jonah enters Nineveh and

declares, “Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be overthrown!” At first glance, a new Jonah seems to have arrived on the scene: Jonah the dedicated prophet, committed to bringing justice as instructed by the Deity. The evil city of Nineveh shall be overturned for its wrongdoings. Yet Jonah’s pronouncement is terse at best; Jonah as prophet lacks rhetorical flourish and conviction. He says what the Deity commanded him to say, but no more. Jonah’s words conjure images of the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (Gen. 18–19). However, because YHWH will allow forty days to pass before the overturning of the city, the destruction does not happen immediately, and possibility hangs in the air. The response by king and Ninevite alike is instantaneous and unexpected. They immediately “believe God” and proclaim a fast, with everyone, “great and small,” donning sackcloth (3:5). When news of the prophecy reaches the king of Nineveh, he arises from his throne, removes his robe, covers himself with sackcloth, and sits in ashes (3:6). Much like the reaction of the sailors on the ship bound for Tarshish, the reaction of the Ninevites—from great to small, ordinary to monarch—is unexpected but theologically astute. Not only do the Ninevites believe Jonah’s words and repent accordingly (and immediately, in stark contrast to Jonah’s reluctant obedience); they do so in language and action evocative of traditional Israelite penitence. Always comedic, the narrator adds that even the animals of Nineveh, in accordance with the king’s proclamation, will fast and be covered with sackcloth. Repentance here is as full-scale, immediate, and overwhelming as was Jonah’s initial flight from his mission, and the narrator repeats the verb “to return, to change,” emphasizing both the Ninevites’ willingness to reform their ways and to repent of their evil and the Deity’s willingness to be both just and merciful (cf. 3:8, 9 [twice], 10). The Ninevite king hopes that “God may relent and change his mind . . . so that we do not perish” (3:9). The Ninevite king recognizes that the Deity might change course from pure justice to mercy, and the phrase “so that we do not perish” echoes the words of the captain of the Tarshish-bound ship in 1:6. The “Other” recognizes that the Deity has the power to choose mercy; Jonah will be less accepting of this. The narrative leaves the sincerity of the Ninevites’ response ambiguous. However, the

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Deity’s response is decidedly unambiguous: God sees the actions of the Ninevites, that they have turned from their “evil” ways, and changes his mind (3:10). Accordingly, the Deity decides not to bring upon them the “evil” he had said he would (3:10). In the narrative world of Jonah 3, the divine preference tilts decidedly toward mercy in the face of repentance. The evil Ninevites surely deserve the promised “overturning” of their city, but the divine response suggests that true justice might encompass mercy. Jonah 3 situates its protagonist in the world of the “Other,” and—like the sailors bound for Ta­rshish—the “Other” again reacts more piously and appropriately than Jonah.

Jonah and God (Jonah 4:1–11) Jonah 4 returns the focus to the protagonist and the Deity. Like Jonah 2, Jonah 4 depicts an angry prophet praying to his deity, but here the Deity’s response is detailed. Jonah is “displeased and angry” with the overwhelmingly positive reaction of the Ninevites to his words and with the Deity’s response (4:1). He explains then why he fled to Tarshish at his first calling: he knew that the Deity is “a gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and ready to relent from punishing” (4:1–2; cf. Exod. 34:6; Num. 14:18; Ps. 86:15). Jonah reacts angrily to the divine reprieve for Nineveh, not simply because of the Deity’s failure to deliver pure justice, but rather because he suspects his mission was pointless from the outset—the Deity is merciful as well as just. Of course, Jonah himself is no stranger to divine mercy: YHWH saved him from the storm, even after he had fled toward Tarshish and away from his mission; YHWH saved him from drowning in the sea by providing a fish to swallow him up; and YHWH saved him from the fish’s belly by delivering him to dry land. Yet Jonah is nonetheless unhappy with the Deity’s merciful response toward Nineveh. As the narrative continues to unfold, it focuses increasingly on Jonah’s desire for pure, retributive justice. The Ninevites are wicked (so said the Deity in 1:2), the Deity has foretold their doom, and yet there is suddenly a divine loophole provided by an unexpected tilt in the direction of mercy. In Jonah 4, Jonah the prophet expects and demands pure justice. Rather than depicting a simplistic resolution to the tension between the poles of justice and mercy, the narrative highlights the tension

between what Jonah expected to happen and what actually came to pass. Following his outburst in 4:2, Jonah asks that YHWH take his life—in a scene that recalls his request on the ship to Tarshish that he be thrown overboard. The Deity responds directly, asking, “Is it right for you to be angry?” (4:4). In response, Jonah leaves Nineveh and sits outside the city, waiting to see how events will play out (4:5). The Deity provides a bush to give Jonah shade, temporarily appeasing the angry prophet (4:6), but follows this by appointing a worm to attack the bush, causing it to wither (4:7), and then by preparing an east wind that leaves Jonah with the sun beating down on his head, faint and afraid he might die (4:8). Jonah repeats his earlier lament, “It is better for me to die than to live” (4:8). But the Deity asks, “Is it right for you to be angry about the bush?” (4:9). How can Jonah be angry about a bush that dies but show no concern that Nineveh, a “great” city, might perish? The Deity speaks the final words of the narrative: “And should I not be concerned about Nineveh, that great city, in which there are more than a hundred and twenty thousand persons who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals?” (4:10–11). With that (unanswered) question, the narrative ends. The book of Jonah begins with a hero who runs away, his eyes closed to the workings of the Deity around him; it ends with Jonah sitting outside the city of Nineveh, his eyes now wide open. At the start, Jonah does not confront God about his mission but, rather, simply runs in the opposite direction. At the narrative’s close, Jonah engages the Deity directly. Neither at the beginning nor at the end do the Deity and Jonah seem to agree. Throughout the narrative, the paradoxical reactions of the various characters to Jonah’s divine message force the reader to revise expectations and preconceived notions of the “Other” with respect to the “Us” figure, as well as to revisit notions of divine justice and mercy. Repeatedly, the “Other” appears more appealing than Jonah, who represents “Us.” Initially, readers would no doubt be sympathetic to Jonah, sent on a divine mission to evil Nineveh—not an easy prophetic calling by any stretch of the imagination. However, as the narrative wrestles with questions of right reaction to divine call and ideas of justice and mercy, it depicts a world in which the divine prerogative tilts decidedly toward mercy—and in which

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Jonah repeatedly appears unappealingly stubborn and blind to that fact. The book challenges preconceived notions about what “real” justice is, suggesting it is not what Jonah—or the reader—might think. The book of Jonah raises the possibility that perhaps mercy is a part of justice—that true justice is to be merciful, a question long discussed among women, both in the academy and outside of it. Yet the book still ends with a question, challenging any oversimplified answers readers may think they have found. And that too is a move that many women readers may appreciate.

Bibliography

Strawn, Brent A. “Jonah’s Sailors and Their Lot Casting: A Rhetorical-Critical Observation.” Biblica 91, no. 1 (2010): 66–76. Trible, Phyllis. Rhetorical Criticism: Context, Method, and the Book of Jonah. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994. White, Marsha C. “Jonah.” In The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1992.

Micah Judy Fentress-Williams

Introduction Micah belongs to the second division of the Hebrew Bible, called Nevi’im, (the prophets), where it is one of the “Book of the Twelve,” or Minor Prophets in the Hebrew Bible. The prophet, whose name means “Who is like YHWH,” came from the city of Moresheth-Gath in the southern kingdom of Judah, approximately twenty-five miles from Jerusalem. A contemporary of Isaiah ben Amoz, Micah was active in the second half of the eighth century during the reigns of kings Jotham, Ahaz, and Hezekiah in the days surrounding the fall of the northern kingdom of Israel. The book in its final form extends beyond Micah’s immediate context and encompasses the fall of the southern nation of Judah in 587 BCE. Thus the book that bears this prophet’s name reflects a community over time.

Historical Background The historical background for the book of Micah falls into two broad categories: the events that coincided with Micah’s prophetic career (Mic. 1–3) and those that came after (Mic. 4–7). Micah prophesied to a small nation that was in the shadow of the neo-Assyrian Empire. When Assyria destroyed Israel in 722 BCE, it protected its new acquisition by annexing the surrounding areas. Jerusalem was besieged but avoided the fate of its neighbors, because King Hezekiah agreed to continue paying tribute. Micah’s audience had to contend with the political and historical reality of Israel’s fall. It also struggled with the theological reality that this occurred because of Israel’s unfaithfulness

to YHWH. The materials in the book that come after the prophet’s activity (Mic. 4–7) have the historical contexts of Judah’s later exile and after the exile.

Structure, Composition History, Themes Although there is no consensus on the composition history of Micah, there is general agreement that the book’s references to Israel’s destruction (722 BCE), Judah’s fall to Babylon (586 BCE), and the period after the exile reflect a “complex history of redaction which passed through many stages” (Childs, 430). Many agree that the first three chapters can generally be attributed to Micah. The remainder of the book, chapters 4–7, falls into the broad category of later additions or expansions. Some scholars form a structure of the book based on this division between Micah’s words (Mic. 1–3) and everything else (Mic. 4–7). The literary structure of the book is one of alternating words of judgment and promise. At the conclusion of each indictment there is a word of hope, and then the pattern repeats. The resulting literary structure is this: Judgment: oppression vs. gathering (1:2–2:13) Jerusalem’s fall and future (3:1–5:15) Covenant lawsuit: call and response (6:1–7:20) Composed of a variety of genres, the final form of Micah suggests that the inevitable punishment is followed by an inevitable future where

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God makes things right. The structure of the book forms a dialogue between these two types of prophetic genres and claims that God’s faithfulness surpasses the experience of destruction and exile. The diversity of genres is anchored by a theme of justice. Micah’s emphasis on the evils of Judah’s society as proof of the broken

covenant discloses a Deuteronomistic perspective. God’s expectation of holiness exceeds far beyond the life of the cult. Unlike some of his southern colleagues who espoused Zion theology, Micah proclaimed that if the covenant was not upheld, Jerusalem would be subject to judgment.

Comment Judgment: Oppression vs. Gathering (Mic. 1:2–2:13) The first set of oracles contains two substantive oracles of judgment followed by two verses of promise. The first oracle, 1:2–16, is directed toward the northern kingdom of Israel, and moves to Judah. Both parts of the nation are guilty of apostasy. Israel and Judah have not been faithful in their worship of YHWH. In order to convey the significance of their transgression, Micah evokes a familiar metaphor of a prostitute. In a society where women’s sexuality is both protected and controlled, Micah’s image is effective. Building on the feminine forms of the nouns for nation and city, the prophet characterizes nations and cities as women in metaphor. In its unfaithfulness the nation becomes a prostitute and adulteress. The metaphor conveys both the severity of the sin and the justification for God’s wrath. The nation is YHWH’s possession, and her unfaithfulness makes her susceptible to a deserved punishment—one that preserves the values and norms of his presumed male audience (Weems, 13). The metaphor of Israel as woman/prostitute forces us to wrestle with the limits of metaphor. On the one hand, metaphor is highly contextual, in that the meaning it creates is specific to the context in which it is used. In this instance, the metaphor capitalizes on the cultural values regarding women as property. On the other hand, the metaphor of city and/or nation as woman/wife/adulterer/daughter and so forth is pervasive and has perpetuated a set of assumptions about women that extends beyond the domain of metaphor. The violent imagery and language directed against the metaphorical female entity of city or nation has been used to encourage and condone violence against real women.

To make matters even more complex (or interesting), the subsequent judgment in chapter 2 is about social injustice. Injustice, in the mind of the prophet, is the oppression of the Other, and the litmus test for a society is their treatment of the most vulnerable. In Micah 2:9 the “least of these” are women and children. In this second oracle, the sin of oppression is set up as an example of the nation’s brokenness. If there is injustice (brokenness) in society, it stems from a broken covenant. The judgment on those who oppress women and children serves as an interpretive lens for reading and understanding the oracle in chapter 1. The two verses of promise that conclude this section use another well-known image, that of sheep being gathered together. The shepherd/ king leads a flock. In verse 12, the action is assembling, gathering, and uniting; in verse 13, this connotes an enlarging of space. For both the sins of false worship addressed in the first oracle and the injustice in the second, the solution is a gathering in and assembling together. The united flock can no longer fit into the preexisting space.

Jerusalem’s Fall and Future (Mic. 3:1–5:15) The second round of judgment/promise begins with a specific and detailed oracle against Jerusalem. The imagery here is graphic; it describes the rulers’ oppressive behavior as tearing off the skin and flesh, consuming the people (3:1–3). The punishment is equally violent. In exchange for these sins, Jerusalem will be “plowed as a field and Jerusalem shall become heaps of ruins” (3:12). The violence of this oracle is set in dialogue with the following chapter, which includes images of the “peaceable kingdom” (4:3–5) and extends beyond Jerusalem/Zion to the nations (4:1–2). The oracles of hope in this section take

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on messianic significance as they contain the promise of a leader from Bethlehem (5:2). The oracles of promise and judgment in chapter 4 refer to Jerusalem as bat tsiyon, “daughter of Zion,” most often rendered “daughter Zion” (JPS “Fair Zion”). As is the case with references to women in general in the ancient Near Eastern context, daughters are to be protected and controlled by their fathers, as are wives by their husbands. The term “daughter” connotes affection and familiarity as well as a “tenuous existence” for a girl in this world. Without the protection of YHWH, the city/ daughter is doomed (O’Brien, 135–36). Here again, the metaphor that is used to convey Jerusalem’s value and vulnerability has the potential to perpetuate dangerous stereotypes about women. In 4:9–10, Jerusalem is likened to a woman in labor. Again, the image here connotes vulnerability, as a woman’s body is forced to undergo the process of birth and the possibility of death in the process. The metaphor of childbirth effectively acknowledges Judah’s suffering, while reminding the audience that there is a future beyond it. The gender of the child is secondary to the power of the mother to bring new life into the world.

Covenant Lawsuit: Call and Response (Mic. 6:1–7:20) The final segment of the book contains a covenant lawsuit or rib where God makes a case against the people. The mountains and hills are called as witnesses to hear God’s complaint. God rehearses a version of the past, beginning with the exodus (where Miriam and Aaron are mentioned alongside Moses). The response to the complaint comes in the form of a question in verses 6–7: “With what shall I come before the Lord?” The response is one of the bestknown passages of Scripture. God requires that

God’s people “do justice . . . love goodness . . . and walk humbly with . . . God” (6:8, my trans.). The dialogue does not end here. The individual voices of this larger construct struggle to make meaning of their circumstances and relationship with God. An oracle of woe comes in the second half of chapter 6 (6:9–16), followed in chapter 7 by a lament (7:1–7) and words of assurance and hope of restoration (7:8–20). The final three verses remember God’s power and faithfulness. Thus the literary tempest that swings from judgment to mercy comes to an end, but the dialogic pattern it establishes invites subsequent communities to continue the struggle. Just as the oracles in the final form of the text create a call and response, the oral tradition from which it comes calls to subsequent hearers to respond. When readers question the ongoing use of a metaphor such as the woman-as-­ prostitute, they are participating in a centuries-old practice of “talking back” to the proclaimed word, struggling to “do justice” with it. To borrow a metaphor from Micah, such response to the tradition is like a gathered flock that no longer fits into the old space. Bibliography

Childs, Brevard. Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1979. Hillers, Delbert R. Micah. Hermeneia: A Critical and Historical Commentary on the Bible. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984. O’Brien, Julia. Challenging Prophetic Metaphor: Theology and Ideology in the Prophets. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. Weems, Renita J. Battered Love: Marriage, Sex, and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995.

Nahum Julie Galambush

Introduction The book of Nahum both foretells and revels in Babylonia’s destruction of the Assyrian capital, Nineveh, in 612 BCE. Because the narrator compares Nineveh with Thebes, destroyed by Assyria in 663 BCE, Nahum is usually dated between 663 and 612 BCE. Such prophecies were often written after the fact, however, and a date after 612 BCE, particularly a setting immediately following Nineveh’s destruction, is also plausible. The name Nahum is a form of the Hebrew word for “comfort,” presumably because Nineveh’s destruction meant comfort for Judah. The book may or may not have been written by someone actually named Nahum. In the context of Assyrian oppression, God is “good” because of his willingness and ability to protect Judah while taking revenge on her enemies; his power is displayed almost exclusively through his brutal

devastation of Nineveh. Written to celebrate the sack of the Assyrian capital (whether before the fact or afterward), the book comprises an uninterrupted string of expressions of joy and satisfaction over the rape, deportation, and death of those—civilians as well as soldiers—whom the author sees as enemies. Nineveh itself is personified as an evil woman, as seductive as she is deadly, whose sexual exposure and rape serve as the book’s high point, the triumph of long-awaited justice. Her assailant, gloating over the rape of “that whore,” Nineveh, is God himself. Presumably written by someone for whom Assyrian oppression was a fact of daily life, Nahum purports to celebrate oppression’s end. It also serves as a chilling reminder of the frequency with which the practices of the oppressor are mirrored by the oppressed.

Comment YHWH’s Vengeance against Nineveh (Nah. 1:1–15) After an opening that identifies the book as “an oracle concerning Nineveh,” Nahum introduces YHWH in language characteristic of ancient Near Eastern storm gods. The storm god, whose celestial chariot thundered across the sky and who smote enemies with arrows of lightning, was typically also a god of war. Verses 2–8 alternate between proclaiming YHWH’s vengeful, earthshaking rage and assuring his protection of “those who take refuge in him”

(1:7). Already we see that YHWH’s rage against others means protection and comfort for the implied reader. The next section, 1:9–14, is difficult to follow in Hebrew and virtually impossible in English. Verses 9–11 address an unidentified feminine listener, probably a personification of Nineveh, who is warned that no enemy can “rise up twice” against YHWH; YHWH “will make an end.” In verses 12–13, however, the addressee (still feminine) seems to change. Judah is addressed as YHWH promises, “Though I have afflicted you, . . . now I will break off his yoke from you.” 329

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YHWH’s prior affliction of Judah is significant. Prophets typically saw foreign domination as YHWH’s doing. When YHWH became angry with his people, he employed foreign armies to carry out his punishment. Thus in Isaiah 10 YHWH exults over Assyria’s oppression of Israel: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger— the club in their hands is my fury! . . . Against the people of my wrath I command him” (Isa. 10:5–6). The prophet preempts the natural conclusion that YHWH has been unable to defend his people against an invader, by saying that the invader is acting at YHWH’s command. So also in Nahum, YHWH says that he has afflicted Judah, presumably by means of the Assyrians. The fact that YHWH is now destroying the empire with which he had earlier afflicted Judah renders YHWH’s “comfort” highly ambiguous. Whatever injury he will do to the woman Nineveh he has already done, and may yet do again, to Judah. She is told to celebrate Nineveh’s demise as comfort, but this comfort comes with a price. Judah may be comforted by YHWH’s brutality toward her enemy, but she is also warned that she remains vulnerable to his rage. The image is chilling in its evocation of an abusive relationship, in which a bullying husband expects his wife to be grateful for every time she avoids his “punishment.” In verse 14 the addressee changes again, as an unnamed male listener (presumably the king of Assyria) is told that YHWH will cut off his name and destroy the house of his god. In 1:15 (2:1 in the Hebrew) a messenger brings Judah news that her enemies have been “utterly cut off.”

The First Attack against Nineveh (Nah. 2:1 [2:2]–13 [14]) After Judah receives the news that her enemies are destroyed, the scene changes, and in 2:1– 3:17 Nineveh is called, first to defend herself, and then to watch helplessly as her people are slaughtered by an invading army. Given the announcement in 1:15 that Judah’s enemies have already been cut off, the description of Nineveh’s demise seems almost a flashback, filling in the reader (a personified Judah) on exactly what has happened. YHWH’s attack on Nineveh is presented as revenge. On the literal level, Assyria’s destruction of the northern kingdom of Israel in 720 BCE, combined with Sennacherib’s devastating campaign against Judah in 701, had nearly obliterated

both kingdoms; the Judeans had plenty of reason to want revenge against Assyria. Historically, of course, neither Judah nor Israel had ever been in a position where such revenge was remotely possible. The power differential was simply too great. The victory Nahum describes is the Babylonians’ victory and not connected to any Judean warfare at all. Babylonia, however, is never mentioned in Nahum; the attacking army is YHWH’s alone, creating the illusion that Judah’s own troops are sacking the Assyrian stronghold with YHWH at their head. The fierce warriors clothed in crimson, with prancing chargers and racing chariots, plundering the city while the residents quake, are YHWH’s men, implicitly the Judeans themselves. The invasion, says Nahum, will restore “the majesty of Jacob, as well as the majesty of Israel” (2:2). Israel as well as Judah has suffered loss of honor, even loss of identity under Assyrian rule; now it’s payback time.

The Rape of Nineveh (Nah. 3:1–17) In chapter 3 the narrator begins a new section, addressing the personified city in a complex metaphor that wavers between condemnation of Nineveh as a whore and images of the actual city’s destruction. Nineveh is reviled as “the bloody city”; the description, however, focuses not on the blood she has shed, but on the blood of her own people killed in the invasion: “piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end,” piled so deep that the invaders “stumble over the bodies” in their eagerness (3:3). The narrator justifies Nineveh’s utter destruction on the basis of “the countless debaucheries of the prostitute, gracefully alluring, mistress of sorcery” (3:4). It is hard to imagine why an especially alluring prostitute would come in for such condemnation; we seem to have here the biblical equivalent of “She had it coming to her.” In fact, the metaphor of Nineveh as a prostitute is surprisingly inappropriate: the Assyrians had conquered nations; they hardly needed to sell themselves. Nor, as conquerors, did they spend much time alluring or enchanting those they conquered. What, then, does the image of Nineveh as a prostitute add to Nahum’s description? First, ancient Near Eastern cities were often personified as women, the guardians or mothers of their inhabitants and, at times, the consorts of male patron gods. It would have been a

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commonplace to describe Nineveh as a woman. Second, from an Israelite perspective, Nineveh was no beloved “daughter” or “virgin,” the epithets typically applied to personified cities. If Nineveh was a woman, she was a bad woman: a whore. In ancient Israel (as in many modern cultures) calling a woman a whore was among the worst possible insults. Nor (again, as in contemporary cultures) did calling a woman a whore necessarily imply that she chose to be paid for sex. The Hebrew root znh, usually translated “prostitute,” “harlot,” or “whore,” had a wide range of connotations in ancient Hebrew and only rarely referred to paid sex. Although a zonah (the noun form of the root) was a literal prostitute (see, e.g., Josh. 2:1; 1 Kgs. 3), a woman who “played the harlot” (the verbal form of the root; see, e.g., Deut. 22:21) was not having sex for hire but engaging in illicit sex, sex with someone to whom she was not married. A woman who violated the rights of the husband or father who held authority over her was metaphorically a whore. This image of transgression as prostitution was similarly applied to deviant religious practice. Israelites, who owed exclusive loyalty to YHWH, “played the whore” (from the perspective of the biblical authors) when they worshiped other gods (e.g., Deut. 31:16). The unifying element in all these instances of metaphorical prostitution is the violation of patriarchal control. The injured party is always male (the head of the family or Israel’s male god), while the transgressor either is female or is portrayed as female. The reasoning seems to have been that only a prostitute exercised independent control over her sexual activities. The prostitute’s sexual independence thus epitomized female power as something to which men were deeply vulnerable; a prostitute effectively exposed male control of women as a cultural fiction. A literal prostitute, however, occupied a liminal space in society; she was no man’s woman, and no man’s authority (or sexual prowess) was shamed by her sexual freedom. Instead, it was the prostitute herself who occupied a shameful status. Although prostitution was legal in Israel as in Assyria, both cultures stigmatized it. The prostitute’s “already-shamed” status allowed her to exercise sexual freedom (and allowed men sexual access to her) precisely because she was already excluded from the acceptable social order. No one’s rights—that is, no male’s

rights—were violated, either by her offering sex for sale or by a man’s purchasing it. In the case of Nineveh, the epithet “prostitute,” though ill-suited to the city’s ruling status, vividly expresses the narrator’s desire to shame a powerful “other” whose imperial power has shamed the males (and male gods) of surrounding nations. The “woman” Nineveh has exercised absolute power over the kings and armies of surrounding nations. By casting Nineveh’s domination in sexual terms as prostitution, however, the narrator disparages that power as shameful. Because this prostitute has arrogantly “enslaved nations” with her wiles, she deserves to be punished by the men she has entrapped. The accusation of sorcery is consistent with the accusation of sexual entrapment (cf. 2 Kgs. 9:22); how else could she have dominated so many men, if not through foul play? Nineveh the whore is thus portrayed as the stereotypically seductive but deceitful foreign woman. She is a sister to the foreign woman in Proverbs, whose “feet go down to death; her steps follow the path to Sheol” (Prov. 5:3–5). In Proverbs such a woman must be avoided; in Nahum, she must be killed. Ironically, the city of Nineveh, though labeled a prostitute, is subjected to the punishment ordinarily (as attested in Babylonian legal texts) given to unfaithful wives: “’I am against you, says the Lord of hosts, and will lift up your skirts over your face; and I will let nations look on your nakedness and kingdoms on your shame. I will throw filth at you and treat you with contempt, and make you a spectacle’” (3:5– 6). The narrator posits a showdown between YHWH the conquering warrior and the sexualized Nineveh. His assault is clearly violent, but the description emphasizes Nineveh’s shaming (sexual exposure, hurling “filth” onto her), rather than injury per se. The physical city is destroyed; the woman is exposed and shamed. The narrator moves in 3:8–12 from describing Nineveh’s destruction as an already accomplished fact to taunting a Nineveh who only now faces imminent destruction. Asking whether she is better than Thebes, the great Egyptian city Assyria had conquered in 663 BCE, Nahum promises that she will fare no better. Despite her defenses, Thebes “went into captivity; even her infants were dashed in pieces at the head of every street.” As for Nineveh, “You also will be drunken, you will go into hiding; you will seek a refuge from the enemy” (3:10–11). Implicitly,

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Nineveh can expect to see her own infants slaughtered—and she will fully have earned the punishment. Remarkably, the narrator is so completely caught up in his eagerness to see Nineveh suffer that he seems oblivious to the horror of what he hopes for: children slaughtered in every street. Nahum’s need to make the oppressor suffer justifies—or perhaps simply inures him to—the obscenity of murdered infants. The trope of Nineveh as a woman seems simultaneously to personify and depersonalize her; personification enables the city to act as a single person—a powerfully destructive and sexually threatening woman who “deserves” what she gets. But the personification that makes Nineveh the object of such righteous anger also deprives the city’s residents of their humanity. Slaughtered infants and slaughtered soldiers alike lose their individual personhood, as their deaths serve only as expressions of divine “justice” against the great whore. In 3:13 the narrator returns to images of the city under attack. “Look at your troops,” says Nahum, “They are women in your midst.” The image of men becoming like women was a staple of Assyrian vassal treaties; if the vassal violated the terms of the treaty, his men would become “like women.” While the descriptor “like women” presumably means weak and helpless, the true impact of the phrase is as an insult; by becoming women, the men will become “less” than men and thus shamed. Here the image of the city’s warriors becoming women is compounded by the announcement, “The gates of your land are wide open to your foes.” That is, not only have the city’s male protectors been emasculated, but the city herself is “wide open,” defenseless against more potent males who rush to penetrate her (cf. the city’s sexual exposure, her helpless men, and the breaching of her gates in Isa. 3:17, 25–26). Within the metaphoric world in which walled cities are personified as women, the city’s invasion by hostile males is easily imagined as a form of rape. The fact that inhabitants of conquered cities so often experienced literal rape made the metaphor all the more effective. Moreover, the conquest of the city, like the rape of a woman, indicated that her male defenders were impotent. To defile the woman was to shame the male—in the case of Nineveh, the army, king, and gods of the strongest city on earth.

The King of Assyria (Nah. 3:18–19) In 3:18 the addressee changes for the final time, as Nahum at last addresses YHWH’s real opponent, the one whose power has subdued Judah for centuries: the king of Assyria. The king’s shepherds, that is, his governing officials, are asleep, and his people scattered over the mountains like so many lost sheep. “Your wound,” says Nahum, “is mortal” (3:19). The book concludes with a final insult to the Assyrian monarch, “All who hear the news about you will clap their hands” (my trans.), celebrating his defeat. Only in the concluding address do we see that the king of Assyria has been the implicit object of all the taunts against and abuse of “woman” Nineveh. As the lord and ruler of Nineveh, it is the king who is shamed by her violation. Just as the city hears in 3:7 that no one will mourn her devastation, so now the king learns that his ruin will bring universal joy. Ultimately, the book of Nahum is a set of variations on the theme of payback, encapsulated in the final question: “For who has ever escaped your cruelty?” (3:19, my trans.). Assyria has wantonly plundered the world; now she will suffer equal cruelty at the hands of an avenging God.

Nahum in Feminist and Postcolonial Perspective To read Nahum from a feminist perspective is edifying only in that the book expresses so clearly the patriarchal worldview assumed by Assyrians and Judeans alike, illustrating how easily the description of a woman (whether literal or metaphoric) as a seductive but dangerous whore can be used to justify contempt and even violence against her. In the case of Nahum, the emotional power of the image is such that it not only justifies the abuse of the metaphoric slut; it also masks the tragic realities of warfare. Nahum is really celebrating not the downfall of an exaggerated, cartoonversion evil woman, but the rape and death of thousands of innocents. Nahum is all too effective in setting up a discourse in which the portrayal of woman as a dangerous Other disguises brutality as justice. Perhaps the deepest irony of the book of Nahum is that the author wields the tools of oppression—vilifying women as (evil) sexual

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objects, justifying and obscuring the horrors of violence on a massive scale, venerating a God who condones the rape of women and murder of children—but uses these tools in the name of ending oppression. Judeans knew all too well what imperial armies were capable of; in fact, even as the Assyrian Empire dissolved, they continued to be its powerless victims. The book of Nahum remains, after all, a work of fantasy, a dream that power to destroy the oppressor belongs to YHWH and not the Babylonians. In the role of conquering king, YHWH not only can but should treat the Assyrians as savagely as they have treated YHWH’s people; subjecting the conquered was not only desirable but a necessary element in proving oneself a worthy warrior and king. Nahum is thus anti-imperial in that it celebrates the downfall of an empire, but it shows no signs of a postcolonial vision. On the contrary, one of the most striking aspects of the book is its appropriation of Assyrian propaganda. While Assyrian monarchs were renowned for their military power, they or their scribes were also masters of propaganda. Assyrian victory steles, boundary inscriptions, and palace bas reliefs convey a coherent ideology of empire, combining images of Assyria as provider and protector with the threat of unbridled retaliation for all who reject that “protection.” Assyria cultivated an atmosphere A. T. Olmstead dubbed “calculated frightfulness,” in which images of severed heads and flayed bodies impressed upon vassals the importance of submission (see Chapman, 39n78). Nahum effectively captures this Assyrian ideology, but casts Assyria in the victim’s role. Thus the women of Nineveh, led away “moaning like doves” (2:7), evoke Assyrian reliefs showing lines of women leaving besieged cities even as their men fall, impaled by arrows, from the ramparts. The flood imagery of 2:5, 8 parallels the Assyrian trope that the conquered cities look like “ruined hills [created by] the Deluge.” Infants dashed in the streets recall Assurnasirpal II’s repeated boast, “I burned their adolescent boys and girls.” Just as the Assyrian king brags, “I filled the streets of their city with their corpses. I dyed their houses red with their blood,” Nahum revels in “piles of dead, heaps of corpses, dead bodies without end” (3:3). Assyrian rulers demonstrated their prowess through lion hunts; Nahum derides the king of Assyria

as a once-potent lion who is now unable even to feed his family (2:11). Nahum’s shaming of Nineveh as a woman also finds its parallel in Assyrian visual and verbal propaganda. Kings swearing allegiance to Assyria, for example, affirmed that if they broke their oath to Assyria, their nation or capital would become a prostitute and be “stripped like a prostitute.” Their women would be raped and their warriors become like women (Magdalene, 343). In Nahum all these curses come to pass against Assyria, but all are described not as punishing male Assyrians, but specifically as punishments against the woman Nineveh. She “becomes a prostitute,” she is stripped and raped, and her defenders are emasculated. Personified Judah is summoned at the outset to celebrate her liberation from “the wicked” (1:2). The narrator presumes a Judean reader, thus putting the actual reader in the role of an abused woman who is called to witness and enjoy the abuse of her former persecutor. But within the fictive world of Nahum, the actors’ identities become blurred. It is not only Assyria, of course, who has abused Judah but, according to 1:12, YHWH himself. Judah is asked, however, to blame not YHWH nor even the Assyrian males, but Nineveh, the “bad woman.” Thus a male (Judean) reader is asked to take on the persona of an abused woman who is expected not only to forget that it is YHWH who has abused her but to share in his triumph over the “other woman.” The other woman is blamed and ultimately raped as punishment for the abuse of Judah. The psychosexual drama of Nahum is never overt; YHWH hails Judah as a woman in only a few verses of chapter 1, and it is not until chapter 3 that the personification of the woman Nineveh becomes explicit. Still, Nahum is remarkably consistent in enlisting the reader to participate, first as an abused woman (but one who deserved her punishment), and then as the “good woman” who takes comfort from the demise of the bad woman, who threatens both her and her man. All told, Nahum recruits the reader to witness and validate a drama in which imperialist power is condemned but not abolished; the roles are simply reversed. Patriarchal power is not only maintained but confirmed. We are asked, at the end of the day, to share the values of Assyria, as long as we come out on the winning side.

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It is all too easy to take a cynical approach to the author of Nahum, who from a distance of more than two thousand years seems so grossly oblivious to the violence he condones. But the book was written not only from the perspective of the oppressed, but in a time when intentional changes in the social system had rarely if ever been seen. The author thus hopes only to see the oppressor crushed; that would be miracle enough. Like Psalm 137, which weeps for the loss of Jerusalem, only to conclude with the wish that the Babylonians’ children be dashed against the rocks, Nahum bears the marks of trauma. It is a text that calls for a resistant reading, even as it calls us to acknowledge the suffering it reflects.

Bibliography

Chapman, Cynthia. The Gendered Language of Warfare in the Israelite-Assyrian Encounter. Harvard Semitic Monographs 62. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2004. Magdalene, F. Rachel. “Ancient Near Eastern Treaty-Curses and the Ultimate Texts of Terror: A Study in the Language of Divine Sexual Abuse in the Prophetic Corpus.” In A Feminist Companion to the Latter Prophets, edited by A. Brenner, 8:326–53. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. O’Brien, Julia. Nahum. Readings: A New Biblical Commentary. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002.

Habakkuk Amy C. Merrill Willis

Introduction The oracles of Habakkuk reflect the political instability of Judean life in the late seventh century BCE. Following the death of King Josiah at the battle of Megiddo in 609 BCE, Judah experienced the heavy-handed interference of the Egyptian pharaoh, who imprisoned Jehoahaz, Josiah’s rightful successor, and placed Jehoiakim on the throne as a vassal king. The country suffered as a result of his extravagant and repressive rule and the heavy tax burden of being a vassal country (2 Kgs. 23:35). Yet the situation only worsened when military events brought wholesale disruption to the international balance of power. With the demise of the formerly brutal but weakened Assyrian Empire in 612 BCE, the Neo-Babylonian Empire gained ascendancy. When Egypt became another victim of Babylonian might, Judah had to exchange one master for yet another more powerful one. Little is known about the prophet other than that his oracles seem to have originated from the period between 609 and 597 BCE. It may be that Habakkuk served in or near the Jerusalem temple as part of some kind of cult personnel, but no other personal information is contained in the brief book, and attempts to link him to a particular political party in Judah are not convincing. Nevertheless, it is clear that he was familiar with Israelite historical and mythic traditions, since these appear frequently in his oracles. The book consists of only three chapters but is nevertheless literarily complex, preserving

various redactional additions along with different voices, literary forms, and functions. Chapter 3 appears to be a separate unit added later to chapters 1–2. These first two chapters, which are themselves literary compilations, take the form of personal psalmic complaints addressed to God by the prophet, which are then followed by God’s responses. Thus these materials are presented as a dialogue between God and the prophet. This dialogue signals the prophet’s conviction that the God of Judah is a relational deity, one who can take harsh and heartfelt questioning. Moreover, the complaint is a form of biblical literature that gives voice to those who are vulnerable and victimized; it champions the power of the individual to speak of hurts and injustices. The third chapter, however, presents a vision of God in the style of a sung prayer. This vision, which contains a divine theophany, functions as an assertion of the prophet’s trust in God, a remembrance of God’s past actions, and an oracle of salvation, all at the same time. Central themes and issues in the book include the prophet’s observation of unrelenting violence and injustice both within and beyond Judah, the prophet’s perception of Babylon as the embodiment of evil in history, and the prophet’s recognition that the ways of God are profoundly disturbing and do not easily conform to human expectations of divine power or justice. The commentary below will develop these themes in the context of Habakkuk’s oracles.

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Comment “Destruction and Violence Are before Me” (Hab. 1:1–11) The prophet’s initial complaint speaks of the corrosive impact of violence and injustice that he witnesses within the Judean community. His list of legal, moral, and social ills is extensive and systemic. The powerful are guilty of a kind of oppression and destruction (hamas and shod) that disregards human rights and the covenantal concern for the vulnerable (1:2, 3). The prophet speaks of widespread deceit, the infliction of suffering (awen) on others, and a litigious atmosphere. Judah’s leaders, who should uphold the cause of the righteous (tsadiq) through the guidance of covenant law (torah), fail to do what is right, with the result that justice (mishpat) is perverted. The prophet opens his complaint with the question that one often finds in the lament psalms: “How long, O Lord?” (Pss. 13:1; 74:10; 79:5; 82:2; 89:46; 94:3). The question indicates that God’s saving power is undetectable in the face of such overwhelming violence and corruption. When God finally does speak (1:5–11), the oracle only complicates the prophet’s clear expectations of how God should respond. The prophet seeks an immediate end to violence and the restoration of justice, righteousness, and shalom within his own society. Instead, God asserts that God is active in present human events, but not in the way that the prophet expects. In response to pleas for national peace and communal justice, God instead speaks of imperial power. God is raising up the Babylonian Empire, a force that by God’s own admission will not bring immediate justice and righteousness, since the Babylonians are no more committed than the corrupt Judeans to God’s ways. Indeed, the oracle declares that the Babylonians recognize no authority other than their own power to seize and destroy, which they will most certainly do to Judah.

“Why Do You Look On the Treacherous?” (Hab. 1:12–2:4) The prophet bemoans the failure of his expectations, namely, that the sins of the nation’s leaders would be met by appropriate judgment and that God would judge the iniquities of Judah’s

enemies as well. While the prophet sees violence and stands in protest to it, God seems to look on the iniquity of the wicked and tolerate it. The prophet, struggling with the delay of liberation, accuses God of remaining silent in the face of these evils. Invoking the holiness and power of God from antiquity (1:12), the prophet urges the Deity to act in the present. God’s response to the prophet mirrors his complaints. The prophet invokes the need for immediacy, but God insists that a vision of salvation will come at the right time, which is to say, that it will come in God’s time. The seeming paradox of verse 3—“If it seems to tarry, wait for it; it will surely come, it will not delay”—speaks to the fact that God’s time does not correspond to human perceptions of time. And just as the prophet invoked God’s holiness, God invokes the need for human faithfulness in awaiting the fullness of time (2:4).

“Alas for You Who Heap Up What Is Not Your Own” (Hab. 2:5–20) This section includes five woe oracles against Babylon (2:6b; 2:9; 2:12; 2:15; 2:19), but it is not a continuation of the vision that God promised the prophet in 2:3. Instead, the prophet provides a trenchant critique of imperial brutality. This passage also imposes some sense of a just order on the crisis by applying the principle of lex talionis, or the law of retaliation. The prophet asserts that the destructive power of the Babylonians is not sustainable and that their actions will bring about their own punishments. He anticipates a future in which fortunes are reversed and the Babylonians, having enriched themselves with the wealth of their vassals and debtors, will find themselves indebted and enslaved to their own creditors and plundered by those whom they have plundered.

“In Wrath May You Remember Mercy” (Hab. 3:1–19) The final chapter of Habakkuk provides the vision of God’s saving power that was promised in 2:3. It begins once again by recalling the past saving action of God and urging God to make that power known again through acts of mercy and deliverance for God’s people. The prophet

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envisions God’s intervention in history by tracing the exodus route of God, who is shown as the warrior-king, leading the people from Teman to Mount Paran (Sinai and Edom; cf. Deut. 33:2; Judg. 5:4–5) and finally to Canaan. In the process of this march, the prophet sees God’s wrath and anger defeating Judah’s enemies. This march recapitulates ancient traditions of divine battles with the chaotic waters and God’s victory over Pharaoh’s army in the crossing of the Reed Sea (Exod. 15:1–21). The prophet’s own response involves both joy (3:18) and trembling (3:16) at the overpowering might of God.

Habakkuk in Feminist Perspective Habakkuk’s oracles intend to nurture a vision of salvation for the people of Judah, but at the same time they emerge from a patriarchal culture. Thus Habakkuk’s anthropomorphic depiction of God as a warrior-king is explicitly masculine and furthers the traditional identification of the Deity with patriarchy and its institutions. While the Hebrew Bible does utilize varying metaphors for divine power and divine appearance (and not all of them are anthropomorphic), Habakkuk speaks of God’s power using the terms “anger” (’af), “rage or fury” (’ebrah), and “wrath” (harah). Such terms conceive of God’s power as dominating, aggressive, even violent. Although Habakkuk makes linguistic distinctions between the violence of human oppressors and the wrathful power of God, feminist interpreters have long noticed that the symbolic construction of male domination and violence has been closely linked with the symbolic construction of divine violence and masculine metaphors for God. Women readers will recognize other troubling aspects of Habakkuk’s language that are connected to the trope of the warrior-king. Consistent with this trope, Habakkuk speaks of God’s domination of Neharim (the rivers) and Yam (the seas), God’s splitting of the earth and shaking the mountains. For the contemporary reader, such language suggests a destructive and objectifying attitude toward the natural environment. But for Habakkuk, these acts are part of God’s defeat of hostile and chaotic forces who in antiquity challenged God’s power. At other times, Habakkuk views nature instrumentally, as part of God’s divine arsenal. While other parts of the Hebrew Bible can inform an

environmental ethic, Habakkuk’s language of nature and the environment cautions the reader against facile judgments concerning the Bible’s view of the environment. Finally, a note of caution is in order concerning Habakkuk’s exodus imagery. Many feminist interpreters have embraced the exodus stories as they try to construct a biblical vision of justice for women, minorities, and the poor. Nevertheless, women readers will want to be careful interpreting Habakkuk using a liberationist hermeneutic, since Habakkuk’s language creates a simplistic dualism between the wicked and the righteous. And in chapter 3, God liberates one group at the expense of another. Just as Habakkuk questions the justice of God at work in human history, so readers should question Habakkuk’s images of redemptive violence and ask how the prophet’s vision of a liberating God might be revisioned in terms of restorative justice. Unquestionably Habakkuk is limited by his own cultural conceptions of God. Yet there is much that Habakkuk contributes to the feminist interpretation of the Bible and the feminist engagement with the world. The prophet’s clear-eyed critique of Babylonian brutality challenges romantic notions of empire and military prowess. Moreover, readers are right to see in Habakkuk’s language a challenge to the notion of God’s preferential option for the powerful and the rich. Though he himself seems to have benefited from the privileges of being at the center of his society, Habakkuk champions the cause of the powerless and the victimized of Judah. The prophet speaks honestly and incisively about the disjunction between God’s saving action in the past and God’s puzzling alignment with the Babylonians in the present. By voicing the pain and confusion created by God’s actions and Judah’s circumstances, the prophet rejects complacency and fatalism as valid responses to human suffering and systemic injustice. His complaint also challenges escapist responses that tolerate present suffering in the hope of future, otherworldly compensations and rewards. Habakkuk’s portrayal of God leads the reader to some final reflections about the problem of divine sovereignty. In recent decades, women readers have questioned the traditional discourse of divine sovereignty, a discourse that Habakkuk employs, on the grounds that it seems to disempower human agency in general

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and can be used to undermine women’s agency in particular. That is, the discourse of divine power can lead to systemic domination and repression of women’s agency within the community. It can also lead to a kind of learned helplessness on the part of the entire community if it construes reliance on God as passively awaiting rescue from an otherwise intractable crisis that only God can transcend. While this danger is real, feminist theologians have nevertheless found in the discourse of divine sovereignty new resources for a liberating praxis. Habakkuk’s own dialogical complaints incorporate this liberative dynamic. The prophet’s complaints acknowledge God as a subject separate from both the prophet and from the forces of the world. As a subject, the prophet understands God to be capable of relating to the prophet, capable of hearing his complaint, and capable of acting on his complaint. Even so, the prophet recognizes and voices the painful reality that God has, in fact, not delivered the people and is contributing to the hardship of the people. Indeed, the prophet, not unlike Job or Naomi (Ruth 1:20–22), understands that God’s actions are to be held accountable. This dynamic allows the prophet to see himself a subject who is also capable of blaming God, capable of trusting God, and

capable of acting for the restoration of self and others. Thus in the prophetic complaint, God’s sovereignty does not dehumanize or objectify the prophet, nor does it foster passivity. Quite the opposite, the prophet’s portrayal of God is one in which God’s action is connected to and reflected in human agency. Bibliography

Bergant, Dianne. “Yahweh: A Warrior-God?” The Bible Today 21 (1983): 156–61. Eszenyei Szeles, Maria. Wrath and Mercy: A Commentary on the Books of Habakkuk and Zephaniah. Translated by George A. F. Knight. International Theological Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1987. O’Brien, Julia M. Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004. Rigby, Cynthia L. “Someone to Blame, Someone to Trust: Divine Power and the Self-Recovery of the Oppressed.” In Power, Powerlessness, and the Divine: New Inquiries in Bible and Theology, edited by Cynthia L. Rigby, 79–102. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997.

Zephaniah Katie M. Heffelfinger

Introduction Zephaniah, one of the twelve Minor Prophets, is concerned with correcting idolatry and abuses of power rooted in human arrogance. The book is entirely written in prophetic poetry, and relies heavily on imagery, metaphor, and tone to communicate its message. Throughout the short book both the Lord and the prophet, who speaks on God’s behalf, engage in powerful invectives, threats, and warnings. These voices’ angry tones seek to produce humility and to turn the Judeans away from idolatry and toward faithful worship. From a feminist perspective this approach is laudable, on the one hand, as it implicitly recognizes and values the role of emotion in human life and discourse, in contrast to the frequent androcentric focus on the primacy of rational argument. On the other hand, feminists might criticize the divine voice’s humbling of the audience. The notions of humbling and shame are of particular concern for feminist theologians. They have emphasized the ways in which humility, treated as a virtue, and shame, especially when tightly associated with women’s sexuality, may be seen to undermine human flourishing. Feminists might also raise questions about whether threats of violence are appropriate means to oppose the abuses of power that the prophet condemns.

Prophetic Themes The book of Zephaniah embraces several common prophetic themes. It opens with an invective threatening ecological disaster on a massive

scale as judgment against the Judean addressees (1:2–18). The Judeans are charged with worshiping idols and foreign deities (1:4–5). However, the prophet also criticizes the religiously (1:9) and politically (1:8) powerful, before inviting the poor of the land to seek righteousness and humility (2:1–3). The prophet then employs the common prophetic theme of oracles against foreign nations (2:4–15) before returning to his opening themes and indicting Judah for injustice and lack of shame (3:1–5). The prophet interprets the Lord’s wrath as expressing justice and as purifying Judah’s remnant (3:6–13), a purification expressed in terms of the removal of its pride and haughtiness. The book closes with a celebration of the Lord’s deliverance and the clearing away of Judah’s enemies (3:14–20). In this final section the purified city is personified as “daughter.”

Date The superscription situates the prophecy in the reign of Josiah of Judah (640–609 BCE) and there is good reason to trust this date for the book. Josiah’s reign saw the discovery of a law book in the temple, widely regarded by scholars as some form of the book of Deuteronomy. The king undertook widespread religious reform in response to the commandments and warnings contained in the book. Zephaniah’s concerns are evidently those of Josiah’s reform, and in places Zephaniah echoes the account of that reform in 2 Kings. While Zephaniah proclaims God’s coming judgment for the people’s sin and

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idolatry, Zephaniah’s hope is that the people might humble themselves and escape in the day of divine wrath. This is precisely the message that the prophet Huldah gives Josiah. She proclaims that the king’s deliverance is due to his penitence and humility (2  Kgs. 22:19–20). It is as if Zephaniah takes up the spirit of Huldah’s prophecy and aims to move all of Judah to repent, just as their king had done. The words of the prophet become programmatic for faithful response to reform. A date during Josiah’s reign helps to situate Zephaniah’s use of the standard prophetic trope of oracles against the nations within the overall flow and aims of his book. The indictments of these nations denounce their gods and fit with Zephaniah’s larger interests in condemning the worship of foreign gods. Zephaniah treats the destruction of foreign nations as an element of divine deliverance for the remnant (3:15). However, Zephaniah also rhetorically supports the program of Josiah’s reform by proclaiming that the Lord will destroy those nations whose gods

the people worship. Their gods are not as strong as the God the Judeans have offended.

Issues for Feminist Interpretation Zephaniah presents several issues for feminist interpretation. First, Zephaniah portrays divine judgment as an ecological disaster on the scale of total uncreation. A reading that wrestles with issues of domination and power relationships will need to account for these imagined ecological consequences of divine wrath and their impact on the whole of creation. More generally, a feminist reading will highlight the violent portrayal of the Lord in Zephaniah, particularly the wrath directed both at Judah and at the foreign nations. Feminist readings will underline Zephaniah’s critique of the powerful, both religious and political, as well as his imagery of poverty and wealth. Finally, Zephaniah’s rhetorical aim of producing shame and humility calls for examination from a feminist perspective.

Comment Coming Cosmic Uncreation (Zeph. 1:1–18) The initial poem pronounces an impending release of divine fury on a cosmic scale. The poetry is rich in allusions to narratives from Genesis, including both the creation and flood accounts. Zephaniah imagines the ecological disaster God’s wrath produces as a total reversal of Genesis 1’s creation account, with humans, cattle, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea wiped away in this opening onslaught. The opening uncreation image stands stark and universal, without obvious motivation or explanation. Not until verse 4 does the prophet indicate what has merited this onslaught. The poetry particularizes the targets of its invective, moving from the cosmic sweep to idolators, then further zooming in on leaders, particularly those who are violent, wealthy, and overconfident. These leaders’ corruption is rooted in pride. They commit fraud (1:9) and proclaim that the Lord will do nothing about their crimes. They either doubt that God has relevance for daily life or that God has the power to intervene in their affairs (1:12). Either way, the prophet indicts them for both religious and

social crimes—crimes he shows to be intimately intertwined. The prophet announces that such irreverent apathy is about to be wiped away in a catastrophic divine onslaught of global proportions as the opening theme returns (1:18). The ecological disaster of this unit presents uncreation as an appropriate outworking of justified divine wrath. The misdeeds that incite divine anger include illegitimate worship and social injustice. Rather than diminishing the value of the created order, the poetic rhetoric works by shocking the hearers with the drastic consequences of their unjust dealings with the Deity and with one another. In this way, Zephaniah highlights the link between human flourishing and the flourishing of creation. While the uncreation imagery may well reinforce the hearers’ sense of the importance of the creation, the passage’s violence mirrors the activities indicted. The divine voice charges the addressees with “violence and fraud” (1:9). Yet it threatens violence on a massive scale in response. We are told that “their blood will be poured out like dust and their flesh like dung” (1:17). The divine voice’s use of violent imagery implicitly acknowledges the audience’s violent

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mind-set and their cultural location. However, a feminist reading points to the imbalance of power in these violent metaphors and questions their contemporary value as a productive means of achieving an end to human injustice.

Divine Wrath among the Nations (Zeph. 2:1–15) Zephaniah’s desire to instill humility in his audience becomes more apparent in chapter 2. The unit opens with direct address to the “shameless nation” (2:1), certainly the Judean audience. The prophet urges the Judeans to “seek righteousness” and to “seek humility” (2:3), that they might escape divine wrath. While Zephaniah urges his Judean audience to embrace such humility, he represents that same humility as forcibly extracted from Judah’s neighbors. The prophet shifts his attention to a series of oracles against foreign nations that emphasizes humbling. He indicts them for “taunt[ing]” and “ma[king] boasts” (2:8), for their “pride” (2:10), and for exultant self-confidence (2:15). These nations’ gods are to be humbled before the Lord, and the poetry proclaims that they will “shrivel” and “bow down” to the Lord (2:11). The prophet juxtaposes the charges of Judean shamelessness and the coming shaming of the foreign nations. The result graphically supports Zephaniah’s urging the Judeans to embrace humility. The indictments of the foreign nations reinforce the opening chapter’s threats and this chapter’s urged humility by giving further demonstration of the divine speaker’s power. The opening charge concerning humility sets these oracles against the nations within a very particular frame. Any Judean triumphalism about their God’s defeat of foreign gods would not be an appropriate response to Zephaniah’s urging that the audience humble themselves and reject idols. Thus the Judeans’ shamelessness stands juxtaposed to the proclamations that destruction is coming to other nations. The Judean audience is not exempt from the wrath of its powerful God, and is urged to humble itself accordingly. The rhetorical situation of these oracles helps to give context to their violence. The paired aims of warning the Judeans off of foreign gods and underscoring the power of the God whose wrath they had provoked through idolatry and injustice make sense of the choice to depict the divine wrath as unleashed against

foreign nations, regardless of whether actual historical destructions were intended. However, once again the prophet employs threats of violence on an international scale in his depiction of the Lord, and this violence is troubling to feminist readers. A feminist reading of this imagery points to its historical, rhetorical, and cultural rootedness. As much as we would like to reject such imagery as historically conditioned, we can hardly claim that contemporary readers have moved beyond violence. The shock of texts that mete out divine violence against others must not be diminished, but must be allowed to interrogate our own desire to enforce conformity to our own violent and nationalistic agendas, and particularly to justify such agendas as the will of God.

A Purified Remnant (Zeph. 3:1–20) As if the reader’s concerns about the fairness of divine wrath on an international scale have been heard, an emphasis on justice reappears in the final unit of Zephaniah. Here the poetry reminds the audience that the Judean leaders under indictment are “oppressi[ve]” (3:1) and that the Lord is the one who “does no wrong” and who “every morning . . . renders his judgment” (3:5). The poetry gives vivid descriptions of the injustices that stand in urgent need of correction (3:3–4), calling the princes “roaring lions” and the judges “evening wolves” (3:3). The Day of the Lord that Zephaniah has been proclaiming and describing in images of violence and uncreation he now portrays as a day of justice (3:8). Zephaniah’s tone shifts in this unit. Beginning with 2:1–3, Zephaniah had been proclaiming that those who humble themselves might escape the wrath directed particularly at the well-off and the politically and religiously powerful. Here in 3:9–20 Zephaniah turns his attention to this remnant’s purification and deliverance. They are the “humble and lowly” (3:12). Unlike the indicted leaders, the remnant will be righteous and truthful (3:13), and they “will no longer be haughty” (3:11). Zephaniah explicitly reverses the lowly and the mighty. The mighty stand under judgment. The lowly form the faithful remnant who rejoice (3:14). In his concluding reversal of fortunes, Zephaniah undermines human systems of domination. He represents the reversal as divine justice. Hierarchical patterns of community and

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religious life are worthy of critique and correction in light of Zephaniah’s depiction of God’s justice. Especially worthy of elimination are those hierarchies that protect oppressors, the unjust, and the dishonest. Zephaniah celebrates the reversal of fortunes and exults that the Lord has “turned away your enemies” (3:15). The enemies are the prideful and oppressive foreign nations, but certainly from the perspective of the humble, poor, and lowly of the land, the enemies are also their leaders. The concluding emphasis upon reversal corrects any facile rejection we might make of the book’s violence. The book raises complex questions about the role of violence in liberation movements and the eradication of injustice.

While some movements have successfully begun and remained nonviolent, many have not. In any case, Zephaniah speaks of a God whose passion to see justice done for the marginal, the poor, and the oppressed will not be set aside. Bibliography

Berlin, Adele. Zephaniah. Anchor Bible 25A. New York: Doubleday, 1994. Kapelrud, Arvid S. The Message of the Prophet Zephaniah: Morphology and Ideas. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1975. Sweeney, Marvin A. Zephaniah. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003.

Haggai Julia M. O’Brien

Introduction The short book of Haggai is the ninth of the twelve Minor Prophets. Its backdrop is the Persian period, during which several waves of those who had been exiled to Babylon returned to the land of Judah and attempted to redefine the nature and boundaries of Judean/Jewish identity. The book addresses the leaders of these returnees, cajoling them to (re)build the temple in Jerusalem, which had been destroyed a generation earlier by the Babylonians. After reporting that the leaders, along with the people, did respond—working on the temple and laying its foundation—Haggai then promises future prosperity, perhaps even nationhood. According to the book of Ezra, temple building originally began soon after the first return of exiles in 538 BCE; the altar and foundation were built, but further construction was halted by “the people of the land”—those who had remained in Judah during the Babylonian period. In response to the encouragement of the prophets Haggai and Zechariah, the returnees eventually resumed the project, and Ezra 6:15 indicates that the temple was completed in the sixth year of the reign of the Persian king Darius (=516 BCE). These descriptions correlate generally though imperfectly with the book of Haggai; Ezra and Haggai disagree, for example, on when the temple foundation was laid and by whom. In addition to the prophet Haggai, key characters in the book are the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua; the former is mentioned seven times and the latter five, and all of the prophetic oracles are addressed to one or both of them. The prophet also enters a brief

discussion with “priests” in chapter 2; although they are not described further, they are likely temple hierarchy traced through the male line. Other members of the community are described as “the remnant of the people” and “the people of the land.” The book talks about and occasionally to them but does not record their names, their speech, or their perspectives. The book repeatedly blames the community’s failure to thrive on its delay in building the temple, and it reports that as soon as temple building resumed, it began to prosper. This reward-punishment scheme is often linked with that of the books of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), but Haggai’s definition of “faithfulness” is far narrower than the Deuteronomic perspective: only temple building is named as necessary for success. Haggai also differs from Deuteronomy in its hopes for the future. While it shares with Deuteronomy the view that faithfulness will lead to agricultural productivity, chapter 2 describes the laying of the temple’s foundation as the harbinger of more dramatic reversals to come. God soon will intervene in global politics: other nations will be overthrown, and the governor Zerubbabel will become a signet ring on God’s hand. The book of Haggai appears uninterested in women—and in men outside of established leadership structures. Throughout, focus remains on male leaders of male-dominated institutions. Chapter 1 explains that in a particular regnal year of a particular male king, the Deity (implied to be male) instructs a male prophet to address 343

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the male governor and the male high priest about the people’s failure to build a temple in which men officiate. In chapter 2, the right of male priests to make rulings on purity is accepted and made the basis for a prophetic oracle. The vision offered for the community’s future is the further exaltation of a male leader. Reading between the lines of Haggai’s oracles, however, readers might imagine the reality

of average people’s lives. The lack of food and wages, mentioned so often in the book, would have been felt most by those without power and privilege. And Haggai’s claim that the people are to blame for their own hunger suggests a community in which those who disproportionately suffer depravation are expected to work toward, and find their hope in, the return of traditional institutional structures.

Comment Success Dependent on Building the Temple (Hag. 1) The all-male tone of Haggai is set by the book’s opening verse, which names six men: the Persian king, two Judean leaders, their fathers, and the prophet. The Deity’s gender is less clear; though masculine verb forms are employed, the book uses no metaphors or titles for God, only the name YHWH. The opening verse might suggest that the book is addressed only to the Judean leaders, informing them that the people have brought calamity upon themselves for failing to build the temple. A shift begins at 1:6, however: although the people are not explicitly addressed, they seem to be the “you” who earn wages only to find their moneybags full of holes. They are judged as selfish for living in covered houses (NRSV “paneled,” 1:4), while the temple remains in ruins, even though 1:6–11 acknowledges that the people are physically suffering. Indeed, this chapter and the next suggest the difficult conditions in which people lived: failed crops, loss of income, drought, blight, mildew, hail, and widespread deprivation for humans and animals. The leaders are twice again named in 1:12– 14, when they are reported to have responded positively to Haggai’s words. The people also are described as working, though they remain an anonymous collective character: “remnant of the people,” a common description in Persian-period texts for those who returned from Babylon. Throughout this chapter, the community’s fate is determined by the people as a whole, even while focus remains on their leaders and on the prophet through whom the Deity speaks.

Looking Forward to the Future (Hag. 2) With the temple building having begun, chapter 2 turns to a series of promises for the community’s future, each punctuated by a date formula. In the first oracle (2:1–9), God tells leaders and people to take courage, because the newly founded temple will resound with even greater glory than the first one, built by Solomon. Soon God will shake the nations, and their gold and silver will pour into the temple. In these verses, the prophet again speaks to the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua, though for the first time the people are also addressed. Scholars disagree about whether “the people of the land” (2:4) are the same group as “the remnant of the people” (2:2), since Ezra 4:4 describes the former as those who did not go into exile but thwarted the building project of the latter. If the labels do indeed refer to different groups, Haggai differs from Ezra in imagining peace rather than competition between factions, although the book offers nothing more on which to make this determination. The second promise is introduced in 2:10 with a seemingly obscure discussion about temple contagion. God instructs the prophet to inquire of the priests for a ruling on matters of purity, although the answer seems to provide more of an object lesson than an actual ruling. Just as contact with holy objects does not sanctify common objects, but unclean objects do contaminate those that are clean, so too holy offerings could not make the temple holy, and an unclean temple contaminated the offerings the people made. In its present literary context, the point seems to be that since the temple has been reestablished, offerings will now become

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acceptable to God and the people will be blessed. This conclusion is stated clearly in 2:19: the agricultural blessings that God inaugurated when work on the temple began will continue “from this day on.” In the third promise (2:20–23), the prophet speaks directly to Zerubbabel the governor and announces his pending elevation. While in 2:7 God promised to shake nations to fill the temple with treasure, God now promises to shake heavens and earth to overthrow the nations and establish Zerubbabel as a “signet ring” (2:23). Some interpreters understand this promise as Haggai’s hope that Zerubbabel would rule as a Davidic king, perhaps the result of an overthrow of the Persian Empire. Others suggest that Haggai is intentionally ambiguous about Zerubbabel’s future role, strategically failing to mention his Davidic lineage (indicated by the genealogy in 1 Chr. 3). Whatever his exact role, he will serve as the “stamp” of God’s authority on earth. In this promise, the people are not mentioned—neither their role in the newly envisioned community nor how they might benefit from Zerubbabel’s increased stature. While the fall of empires that Haggai envisions might be welcomed by all who groan under their weight, the alternative that the book offers is ambiguous: some passages in the Hebrew Bible raise the possibility of a just human king (e.g., Ps.

72), but others describe the burden of supporting any royalty, including a Davidic one (e.g., 1 Sam. 8). Seen in this light, the book of Haggai faces readers with the difficult but long-standing question of the relative importance of one’s own livelihood and the strength of traditional institutions. Should women—and all people outside of established hierarchies—sacrifice for what is cast as the “greater good”? Who gains when a community grows in status and honor—everyone or only those already in power? In promising the reestablishment of Davidic kingship, the book of Haggai does not explicitly challenge hierarchies based on gender and political status. But those of us who seek a world more just than the one we live in may yet share its hope that God will soon shake the heavens and the earth (2:21–22) to create something new. Bibliography

Kessler, John. The Book of Haggai: Prophecy and Society in Early Persian Period. Leiden: Brill, 2002. O’Brien, Julia M. Nahum, Zephaniah, Habakkuk, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004.

Zechariah Julia M. O’Brien

Introduction The book of Zechariah is the eleventh and longest of the twelve Minor Prophets. It is a complex book, replete with symbolic visions, mysterious characters, and abrupt shifts in tone and style. Readers have long recognized that the book is uneven. Chapters 1–8 parallel in many ways the book of Haggai. Like that previous book in the canon, these chapters employ date formulas correlated with the reign of the Persian king Darius and depict the temple in Jerusalem as in ruins, suggesting a date prior to 515 BCE. The dominant tone is that of encouragement, as God promises to comfort Jerusalem, punish her enemies, rebuild the temple, exalt community leaders, and restore the cities of Judah. Zechariah 9–14, however, takes on a darker tone. In two distinct subsections, each marked as an “oracle” (9:1 and 12:1), harsh judgment is passed on the nations around Judah and on leaders within the community itself. Cryptic references to “one who is pierced” and a “worthless shepherd” suggest great tensions within the community. The final chapters foretell a pending time of conflict and widespread violence, in which the Deity will decisively defeat all foes and establish Jerusalem as the focal point of the world’s worship of YHWH. Some scholars believe that these chapters derive from other

time periods, though most agree that the precise historical setting remains unclear. Male voices and characters dominate the book. A male prophet is foregrounded, a male interpreter explains the meaning of the visions, the Deity is depicted as warrior and king, and the governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua are deemed “anointed ones.” The more limited female references are to stock characters (widows, old women, girls, wives, rape victims) and to cities personified as women. The most intriguing, and debated, feminine image appears in chapter 5, where a woman called Wicked (or Wickedness) is enclosed in a container and flown to Babylon by women with wings of a stork. For readers concerned with gender, Zechariah can seem quite traditional in assigning male and female roles: men are individuated and strong, while women are generic and vulnerable. However, attentive readers also can notice ways in which gender assignments in the book of Zechariah are unstable. In Zechariah 1–8, men do not always speak with authority, and women’s power refuses to be contained. In Zechariah 9–14, metaphors reinforce gender scripts but also exaggerate them to the point of parody, providing a means by which to critique their normalcy.

Comment Zechariah 1–8 This first section, sometimes called First Zechariah, announces that the time for Jerusalem’s

comfort and restoration has come. Like other biblical books, it blames the fall of Jerusalem on the sins of an earlier generation (in Hebrew, the term is “fathers,” though NRSV uses the

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inclusive “ancestors,” 1:4); yet it also criticizes other nations for exploiting Judah’s weakness. In the restored Jerusalem, leadership is a decidedly male affair. The governor Zerubbabel and the high priest Joshua are exalted in chapters 3–4 and deemed “anointed ones” in 4:14. Even though Joshua alone is crowned in 6:11–14, the Hebrew text refers to “crowns” in the plural (6:11), suggesting that the original text may have included Zerubbabel. The crown(s) are entrusted to the care of four males, whose names are listed, and the ultimate head of Jerusalem, YHWH, is depicted in male terms as well. The vocabulary of 2:6–13 echoes other biblical descriptions of God as a warrior who “rouses” (2:13) himself to march on behalf of his people (e.g., Isa. 63). The recipient of the divine warrior’s protection is Daughter Zion (2:10), an image shared with other prophetic books and expanded in the subsequent section of the book. The “apple of [God’s] eye” (2:8), the city is consistently described with feminine pronouns. English translations obscure many of these references (as in 1:16, where God’s house is to be built “in her” and in 2:4, where people and animals will dwell “in her”), though NRSV does retain the feminine pronoun in 8:2. Similarly, Babylon is called “daughter” in 2:7. Human women are mentioned only generically: as widows in a list of the downtrodden (7:10) and as young and old females who join young and old males in a roster of the community (8:4–5). These gender assignments appear traditional and immutable: females are vulnerable, needing the protection of stronger males, who in turn govern the community. Yet several figures within this unit transgress the boundaries of “normal” gender. The first and most striking example is the prophet Zechariah himself. In chapters 1–6, Zechariah behaves in decidedly unmasculine ways: rather than strong and authoritative in speech, he remains passive, uncertain, and deferential. Although the book opens indicating that God’s word came to Zechariah (1:7), God does not speak directly to the prophet until chapter 7. Until that point, God communicates instead through a messenger/angel. While earlier prophets were depicted as themselves the messengers of divine speech (e.g., Jer. 32), Zechariah must depend on another messenger to ask God for explanation (1:12), receive the interpretation (1:13), and relay to him the

message he should deliver (1:14). Throughout these chapters, the prophet’s visions take on meaning only through the authoritative speech of the messenger, whom the prophet addresses as his “lord.” This pattern of a passive Zechariah is broken only twice in chapters 1–6, in passages considered by many scholars as problematic in some way (4:8–10 and 6:9–15). The prophet’s role shifts dramatically in 7:1. God interacts directly with Zechariah, not through visions but by issuing instructions to be relayed to others (7:4, 8). The material that follows might be seen as overcompensation for the prophet’s previous silence; fourteen times in chapter 8 the reader is reminded that the Lord spoke to Zechariah, authorizing him to speak. In the language of contemporary gender theory, the sudden impulse to reassert the prophet’s authority (in this case, to speak for God) indicates how tenuous his status has been all along. The second unstable gender role appears in 5:5–11, the vision of a woman transported to Babylon. Ambiguities of translation plague this unit. The container that the prophet sees is variously translated as a “basket” (NRSV) or “tub” (Tanakh); the Hebrew term is epah, a dry measure estimated to hold about a bushel. Precisely what the container signifies is unclear: in the Hebrew text, the interpreting messenger/ angel describes it as “their eye” (reflected in KJV and Tanakh), while the Septuagint and the Syriac offer “their iniquity” (reflected in NRSV and NIV). The identity of the woman inside the container can be understood in several ways as well: as the abstract “Wickedness” or the descriptive “The Wicked One.” The opening of the vision depicts the silencing and control of the woman. Once labeled, she is thrust back into the container (one far too small for a person) and pressed down by a leaden cover: Hebrew does not clarify whether the “mouth” closed is that of the epah or of the “woman,” since both are feminine. Two winged women remove the container from the community, apparently implying their collusion with her banishment. This unit ends, however, not with the woman’s obliteration but with the potential for her enthronement. She is transported to Babylon (Shinar), where a “house” is built for her and her epah set on a “base.” Because such vocabulary was commonly used in the ancient world to describe temples that housed statues of deities, the woman likely represents a goddess or

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goddess worship. When seen in this light, the winged female transports serve not as enforcers of patriarchal values but as agents by which the woman attains honor. Yet the unit closes with the woman in a liminal space: on a goddess’s throne but still inside the epah. Her power cannot be denied, but neither is it freely expressed.

Zechariah 9–14 Chapter 9 marks a noticeable shift in the book of Zechariah. The interpreting messenger/angel, Zerubbabel, and Joshua disappear; visions give way to prophetic announcements of salvation and judgment; and the future is envisioned in a style that has been called “apocalyptic” or “protoapocalyptic” because of its pessimistic and violent tone. For these and other reasons, many scholars claim that Zechariah 9–14 was not written by the same author as Zechariah 1–8 and deserves the label Second Zechariah. Some have suggested the presence of multiple collections, speaking also of Third Zechariah or of even more diverse authorship. Despite these discontinuities, some themes and imagery run throughout the book as a whole. Both First and Second Zechariah share a fervent concern with the restoration of Jerusalem, the conviction that Jerusalem’s enemies will be punished, and hints of tension between Jerusalem and other towns of Judah. Second Zechariah also continues many of the gender assignments established earlier in the book: cities as vulnerable females and YHWH as a powerful warrior. Yet Second Zechariah extends, multiplies, and exaggerates these gendered metaphors, culminating by the end of the book in what might best be seen as gender parody. Masculine and feminine gender assignments are key to the logic of chapter 9. In Hebrew, feminine forms depict Tyre, Ashkelon, Gaza, and Ekron as recipients of divine wrath. Although their punishments are not sexualized as in other prophetic books (e.g., Nah. 3), the verb used in 9:5 for “writhe” (NRSV) is elsewhere used to describe labor pains (e.g., Isa. 13:8). The destruction of these feminized cities is portrayed as good news for equally vulnerable Jerusalem/Zion, who, as in Zechariah 2, is called Daughter Jerusalem. In contrast to the other females, she will be rescued by YHWH,

himself depicted as a very masculine warrior king: he cuts off chariots, extends dominion to the ends of the earth, wields people as bow and arrow, marches to tread down enemies, and makes them drink their own blood—all in protection of his people. When in chapter 10 YHWH shares power with others, their gender predictably shifts to the masculine. The newly empowered are transformed into warriors: “they shall fight, because YHWH is with them” (10:5). Similarly, when in chapter 12 Jerusalem’s fortunes improve, she is compared no longer to a woman but to a series of inanimate objects: a cup of reeling (12:2) and a heavy stone (12:3); the clans of Judah become a blazing pot and a flaming torch (12:6). Throughout, feminine imagery stresses vulnerability, while the masculine underscores strength. This gender characterization, however, is exaggerated in chapter 14 to the point of absurdity. While YHWH stands outside Jerusalem with feet firmly planted on the Mount of Olives, the mountain splits underfoot on its east-west axis, and the two halves move apart, north and south. As the gargantuan divine warrior straddles the resulting chasm, the earth itself transforms into unending day and warmth. Carnage and brutality proliferate: people’s eyes and tongues rot in their faces, and plagues overtake all animals. Those who survive understandably worship—and fear—YHWH as king. As YHWH progressively grows more powerful in this chapter, the protection earlier promised to Jerusalem fades in and out of view. Zechariah 14:2 plainly states that the city will be taken, the houses looted, and the women raped; only half of the city’s population will survive. When the divine warrior does appear, he promises Jerusalem’s future security (14:11), though he fails to mention Daughter Jerusalem or the fact that the city has already been decimated. Our gaze is drawn to the warrior king YHWH, exaggerated in size and honor, while the city he promised to protect sits in ruins. Even though the ultramasculine warrior who strides the Mount of Olives in Zechariah 14 seems far removed from the humble king who comes to protect Daughter Jerusalem in chapter 9, the former is the logical extension of the latter. Both portrayals derive from gender scripts that equate masculinity with physical might and femininity with physical weakness;

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as in parody and drag performance, the exaggerated portrayal illuminates just what the rules for “normal” gender are. The hypermasculinization of YHWH underscores the effort required to maintain gender roles and the anxiety produced when they are challenged. In Zechariah as in human living, the constant work of “doing” our gender can produce comical, even grotesque, results.

Bibliography

Edelman, Diana. “Proving Yahweh Killed His Wife (Zechariah 5:5–11).” Biblical Interpretation 11 (2003): 335–44. O’Brien, Julia M. Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004.

Malachi Ingrid E. Lilly

Introduction The book of Malachi concludes the collection known as the twelve Minor Prophets. In the Jewish Tanakh, Malachi serves as the “seal” of the prophets. For Christian Bibles, Malachi is the transition to the New Testament. Since malaki means “my messenger” (3:1), it is probable that Malachi was written by an anonymous prophet. Malachi addresses a postexilic audience in Jerusalem. The temple had been rebuilt (ca. 516 BCE) and served as the administrative center linking the Judean province to the vast Persian administration system (“governor” in 1:8). Persians could guarantee regional stability through sponsoring temples, priesthood, and local law. However, Jerusalem was a small, struggling city, and as is clear from the book of Malachi, the local priesthood lacked confidence in the preexilic temple rituals and covenantal deity. Malachi draws on the past significance of the Mosaic covenant and seeks rejuvenation through a future figure who will initiate God’s return to his temple. He challenges the Jerusalem priesthood to reform, criticizing its lapsed temple services (1:7, 13) and priestly infractions (1:6–8).

Similarly, the Judean people are censured for the cessation of tithes (2:17; 3:7–10), foreign marriages (2:10–16), and social injustices (3:5). Ezra’s roughly contemporary reform programs share several of these concerns. Hence Malachi is usually associated with the period of pre-Ezra decline (516–458 BCE). The book contains six dialogues, usually initiated by questions (1:2–5; 1:6–2:9; 2:10–16; 2:17–3:5; 3:6–12; 3:13–4:3). This dialogic style complements the pervasive theme of relations by exposing and exploring the power and passions of father-son, master-servant, husband-wife, and God-priest relationships. With Malachi, we enter a world of relational dynamics where love, hate, honor, and shame operate to distinguish insiders from outsiders. Of particular interest to women are Malachi’s discussion of marriage and divorce (2:10–16; see discussion below) and the paternal metaphor for God. The metaphor of the fatherhood of God is actually not very common in the Hebrew Bible (Deut. 32:6; Isa. 64:8; Jer. 3:4, 19). However, Malachi explicitly uses it three times (1:6; 2:10; 3:17).

Comment The Parent’s Preferential Love for Jacob (Mal. 1:2–5) The book of Malachi opens with the words “I have loved you.” However, this love is cast as a parent’s preference for one son at the expense of

another: Jacob is loved, while Esau is an object of hatred. The family relations in the stories of the twins Jacob and Esau, known from Genesis 25–36, are rich with marital drama, sibling strife, tricks, and parental preferential love. In Genesis, Isaac preferred Esau, and Rebecca

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preferred Jacob; so Malachi 1:2–3 takes the mother’s point of view when God says, “I have loved Jacob, but have hated Esau.” The parental metaphor amplifies the experience of childhood rejection to the level of divine exclusion. Divine love contains the possibility of passionate rejection as well. The people’s question in 1:2, “how have you loved us?” conveys an anxiety likely born of political experience. Jacob and Esau represent ethnic entities: Israel and Edom (see Gen. 36:8). The hatred and rejection of Edom in Malachi correspond to a more general prophetic disdain for the Edomite kingdom just south of Israel (Isa. 34; Jer. 49:7ff.; Ezek. 25:12ff.; and esp. Obadiah). Many Israelite authors and prophets felt that Edom must endure divine punishment similar to Israel’s exile (Lam. 4:21–22). Malachi goes a step further, even condemning Edom’s efforts to rebuild after the ruin of warfare. The harsh indictment of Edom in Malachi reflects a broader ethnic exclusion that increasingly came to characterize Israelite identity in the Persian period.

Honoring the Father in Priestly Ritual (Mal. 1:6–2:9) Malachi is especially concerned with the temple as a sacred space. Hence the prophet focuses on the priests, extending the paternal metaphor to their operations as well. The second dialogue opens with an analogy: “A son honors his father. . . . where is the honor due me?” The paternal metaphor is clearly hierarchical, comparing the son’s relation to a father to that of a servant to his master (1:6). So while the first dialogue was about a parent’s love and hate, the second dialogue focuses on the exchange of human honor for paternal favor in the context of Israel’s central religious institution: the temple. Because the temple operates as a sacred space, priestly conduct there is subject to notions of purity. Several problems are named: polluted food on the altar (1:7), blind, lame, or sick animals as sacrifices (1:8), sacrificial animals taken in violence (1:13), and a blemished alternative to the owner’s male animal (1:14). The idea that only whole, clean, and pure animals are sufficient for temple sacrifices corresponds to Mosaic law (Lev. 22:17–30; Deut. 15:21). The paltry offerings do not sufficiently express honor and reverence, which Malachi amplifies with increasingly powerful metaphors

for God: father (1:6) master (1:6), governor (1:8), and great king (1:14). YHWH’s exasperation at the failed relationship of honor is represented twice. First, YHWH says that it would be better that the temple doors were shut altogether (1:10), eliminating the temple institution from Israelite religious experience. Second, YHWH sounds his intention to curse the priests and reverse their blessings (2:1–3). This announcement is not simply straightforward but is, rather, communicated at a high emotional pitch. Having just asserted his great kingship over the nations, YHWH descends to profanity: “I will spread ‘dung’ on your faces.” Visceral indeed, the slur uses the image of the fecal waste of a sacrificial animal that had to be handled by priests. Recovering from the passion of this exchange, the section ends with a more levelheaded presentation of the intended covenant with Levi (2:4–9). This covenant of well-being, reverence, and true instruction is presented with a hint of nostalgia (2:5–6). YHWH longs for a golden past in which the temple institution flourished under the charge of ideal Israelite priests. While the legal system of purity regulations is clearly behind Malachi’s critique of his contemporary priesthood, Malachi’s theological imagination draws on the passionate human emotions involved in systems of honor. YHWH is subject to hierarchical metaphors and hence displays commensurate emotional responses to his subjects.

Marriage with Native and Foreign Women (Mal. 2:10–16) Malachi turns to another specific critique of the practices of his day: marriage and the status of women in postexilic Judah. The dialogue covers such issues as Judean men marrying foreign women, women’s religious beliefs and practices, an ideal of monogamy, and a cosmic argument against divorce. The passage contains some important textual and redactional issues that bear significantly on interpretation. Malachi 2:11–12 calls it an “abomination” that Judean men are marrying foreign women. Malachi sounds a typical postexilic view of intermarriage, akin to that found in Ezra 9–10. Ezra leads the postexilic community in a penitent renunciation of their foreign marriages and a program of divorce that would send foreign wives away. Ezra’s concern for the ethnic

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purity of the “holy seed” (Ezra 9:2) may have some correspondence with Malachi’s “godly seed” (2:15). Appealing to covenantal obligations, Ezra taught that foreigners polluted the land, were an abomination, and that intermarriage introduced threatening religious practices (Ezra 9:14). Similarly, Malachi is concerned that the marriages with foreign women reflect Judean faithlessness and the violation of the ancestral covenant (2:11). Malachi 2:11 goes on to indicate that Judah will profane the sanctuary in marrying these “daughters of foreign gods.” Indeed, the connection between foreign worship and intimate love with foreign women is a common fear in the Hebrew Bible (Exod. 23:32–33; 34:12–16.) However, Malachi does not make it clear how exactly the Judean men’s marriages profane the sanctuary, perhaps by diminishing the value of their sacrifices (2:12b, 13b), or through altar rituals of weeping that elsewhere characterize female worship (2:13; cf. Ezek. 8:14). According to this reading, Malachi 2:11–12 presents a negative view of outsiders, intermarriage, and female worship practices. The non-Judean women are not even referred to directly (e.g., foreign women, cf. Ezra 10:1) but rather as “daughter[s] of foreign gods,” a traditional way to conceive of religious corruption (cf. Num. 25, Deut. 17:17). An alternate textual reading of 2:11b runs, “he [Judah] loves Asherah and Baal, the house of a foreign god.” In this reading, the passage is primarily about the threat of syncretistic worship in Judah. Even without following this alternate proposal, the dangers of foreign worship, typically associated with women, lurk in the background of the verses. The passage opens with an assertion of the singularity of YHWH, calling him “one father” and “one God” (2:10). Additionally, it could be that Judah threatens the “sacredness” or “separateness” of YHWH, not the “sanctuary,” in verse 11. This reading makes sense of the somewhat rare idea that Judah “profanes the covenant” with YHWH (2:10) and is consistent with the use of “abomination,” which frequently denotes worship of other deities. The passage claims Judean men who invite “foreignness” into Judah’s religious community, whether by marriage or by worship or both, need to be cut off from Jacob (2:12), echoing the book’s opening distinction between Jacob and those cast outside in hatred. Here we pause to appreciate the religious fissure cutting through

the male emotional subject. A Judean male’s emotional and sexual intimacy in his marriage to a non-Judean woman is at odds with his emotional desire for paternal love from God. The woman is hardly more than an object and symbol within this masculine religious drama. The second topic broached in the dialogue affirms a man’s first marriage in the situation of divorce (2:13–16). The Hebrew Bible is not univocal about divorce; indeed, it is permitted in Deuteronomy 24:1–4, but this passage is the strongest statement against “sending away” (2:16). Malachi imagines that divorce is like wearing a highly visible mark of violence (covering the garment). Indeed, in verse 14 we see Malachi’s reasons for taking the issue so seriously; three times he describes the woman: “the wife of your youth,” “your companion,” and “your wife by covenant.” The passage has a high view of the bond between a husband and a wife. In the ancestral traditions, first wives (in the polygamous context) were frequently portrayed as special (Sarah, Rebekah, etc.). By Malachi’s time, monogamy was more often the norm. Malachi makes a cosmic argument for the original marriage bond. Not only does verse 14 indicate that YHWH was a witness in the marriage covenant, but verse 15 brings in creation language. Textual difficulty obtains in this important verse, but the most straightforward reading runs: “Did he not make one [couple] that a remnant of spirit would belong to it?” (NRSV “both flesh and spirit are his” has no textual basis.) The creation language here also refers back to 2:10, which asks, “Has not one God created us? Why then are we faithless to one another?” On the one hand, Malachi 2:13–16 holds little value for a feminist reading. In all three cases where the woman is mentioned, as in the previous verses, the woman is named only in relationship to the husband. On the other hand, Israelite society was patriarchal, and a divorced woman would have lacked most opportunity to thrive alone. Malachi’s views on divorce would at least protect first wives from men who would seek to send them away, socially and economically vulnerable. It is difficult to know how interrelated the two sections in 2:10–16 are. Some commentators take the foreign marriages (2:11–12) as the cause of Judean men divorcing their first, native wives (2:13–16). In this understanding, Malachi’s two opinions on marital relations

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reinforce a larger argument for ethnic, cultic, and religious purity. However, the two passages are in contradiction if a Judean man’s first wife is a non-Judean. In fact, a defensible position takes 2:11b–13a as secondary. The implications are huge for a feminist interpretation of the passage: it is possible that Malachi so strongly opposed divorce (2:14–16) that he would have Judean men remain married to their original wives, even if they were foreign. This would have been a strong renunciation of a program like Ezra’s to initiate mass Judean divorces and to send away foreign wives. Indeed, the cosmic argument for the original marriage bond would even extend to cases of intermarriage as well. Even if one does not follow this redaction argument, it is clear that Malachi’s teachings about marriage would challenge Ezra’s roughly contemporary program of divorce.

The Messenger, Justice, and the Father’s Special Possession (Mal. 2:17–4:6) The three dialogues of 2:17–4:3 begin with an accusation: “You have wearied YHWH with your words.” The image of a weary Deity captures the emotional escalation that occurs in these passages. Determined to rectify things, the Deity promises a messenger who will clarify the delightful covenant, a day of judgment to purify the priesthood and punish wrongdoing, and a book of remembrance to mark out those who revere YHWH. The expected arrival of “my messenger (malaki)” in Malachi 3:1 will provide instruction and initiate the indwelling of God in the temple. New imagery takes aim at the purification of the priestly class (“descendants of Levi” in 3:3). This purification is deemed necessary to guarantee proper offerings and improve the operation of the temple. YHWH then turns to society, stressing the importance of covenant justice on behalf of the socially vulnerable. Drawing together these two themes, temple and society, Malachi makes a common postexilic economic statement (cf. Neh. 10:35–39; Ezek. 34:26): that the full temple tithe is necessary for Israel’s agricultural life to experience

YHWH’s “overflowing blessing” (3:10). The anticipated messenger affirms Israel’s covenant theology and focuses especially on the social role played by the class of priests who are deemed to be ruining the postexilic temple community (cf. 2:7). The theme of economic prosperity continues into the final dialogue (3:13–4:3), where it is given voice in the people’s question: “What do we profit?” Those who “put God to the test” (3:10, 15), that is, those who take their chances to acquire blessing outside of the covenantal commands, were viewed as a grave problem for the covenantal theology of Israel’s heritage (cf. Prov. 28:13; Ps. 1:3). The theme of divine passion and preference, introduced at the beginning, is finally bestowed upon a specifically named group: “those who revered YHWH” (3:16). The paternal metaphor returns in Malachi 3:17 when the “special possession” is spared on account of their status as “children.” The idea of a heavenly book, the phrase “the day is coming,” and the imagery of burning stubble (4:1– 4) are characteristic of apocalyptic expectation (cf. Dan. 7). Malachi’s vision for restoration includes a covenantal messenger, a renewed temple, a land of abundance, and a community of reverence who will enjoy righteousness and healing (4:2). However, the last word of the book is herem (“total ban”; cf. Deut. 7 and 13). Just as hated Edom was destined for destruction, the prophetic book ends with the parental metaphor once again and the passionate preferential treatment that captures both the love and the rejection possible within families. Bibliography

Glazier-McDonald, Beth. Malachi, The Divine Messenger. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 98. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987. Hill, Andrew E. Malachi. Anchor Bible 25D. New York: Doubleday, 1998. Petersen, David L. Zechariah 9–14 and Malachi. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995.

Women’s Religious Life in Ancient Israel Carol Meyers

Introduction The foundational role of the Bible in Jewish and Christian tradition means that people today often turn to the Bible for information relating to their religious beliefs and practices. Women especially, as they strive to redress the imbalances in religious roles available to them, are interested in the religious lives of their biblical foremothers. Were Israelite women restricted in the ways the Bible seems to imply? Was religiosity a feature of their daily lives? People seek answers to these and similar questions. Investigating the religious activities of Israelite women can be a meaningful enterprise, despite the disparities between the conditions and religious modes of biblical antiquity and contemporary life. Whether or not the religious dynamics of Israelite women can model women’s religious life today, the very process of bringing this aspect of their lives to light is an important part of the larger feminist task of recovering women’s roles in past societies. The study of religion in the period of the Hebrew Bible tends to focus on matters of faith. When did the Israelites begin to worship YHWH? When did monotheism, the exclusive worship of YHWH, become dominant? How widespread was the worship of Canaanite deities, especially the high gods condemned in the Bible, notably Baal and Asherah? These significant questions are about beliefs and reflect contemporary ideas about religion. Many Americans equate religion with belief in God and prayer rather than the performance of ritual. But this is a relatively recent development; as late as 1971, the Oxford English Dictionary

had “actions” and “rites” as the first definition of “religion,” with “system of faith” as the second. The current conception, which gives priority to issues of belief, would have been foreign to people in biblical times. Although their religious activities were shaped by their beliefs, religion was what people did rather than what they believed. Israelite religion had two integrally related components: belief in a supernatural power or powers; and behaviors directed to those powers, often in order to secure divine help in negotiating the not inconsiderable difficulties they confronted in their daily lives. Religion was part of Israelite collective identity rather than a matter of individual belief. And connections with God or gods were established not by faith but through behaviors. These behaviors would have been intensely meaningful and important, for they were based on an understanding that the transcendent powers to which they were directed could affect the fertility—of humans, land, and livestock—that was essential for survival. Even Yahwists believed that other supernatural powers existed: lesser divine beings or messengers (NRSV “angel”), and malevolent spirits. Because of the essential behavioral quality of religion, and because most Israelites were probably not followers of YHWH alone until late in the period of the Hebrew Bible, this essay focuses on the religious activities of women rather than on which deities they worshiped. These activities would likely have been the same, no matter which divine power(s) they recognized.

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Resources for the Study of Women’s Religious Activities Reconstructing women’s religious activities is not possible without using several different sources. The Bible is important but not sufficient, although for women’s communal religious roles, it is the only source. Otherwise, archaeological data, ethnographic information, and anthropological studies are also essential. Most of the religious activities depicted in the Hebrew Bible are carried out at the national shrine: wilderness tabernacle or Jerusalem temple. There are elaborate and lengthy directives in the Pentateuch for the sacrificial cult carried out by male priests. But it is inconceivable that religious experiences would be limited to participation in rituals at a central locale. Those rituals were hardly the sum total of Israelite religious life. Rather, the religious activities of most people, even those living near the central shrine, consisted of household practices and observances at local or regional shrines. Clues about those practices appear in biblical texts, but the information is incomplete or even distorted. No specific guidelines appear, let alone information about women’s roles. Yet, because the festivals and celebrations mandated in the Pentateuch for community life were large-scale versions of household observances, they indirectly indicate the nature of many household practices. To be sure, those Pentateuchal texts likely date from late in the Israelite period; but the festivals they describe appear in earlier texts (e.g., Hos. 2:11; Amos 8:5), and similar celebrations are ubiquitous across cultures. Thus biblical references to them are relevant for Israelite households throughout the biblical period. Because of the essential materiality of Israelite religious activities, traces of them can be found in the archaeological record. However, using archaeological data poses certain problems. For one thing, the archaeological work in the land of the Bible has often focused on monumental structures (e.g., fortifications, palaces, temples) rather than households, thus limiting the available data. Another problem is the matter of identifying artifacts used in ritual activities. Some objects, similar to ones found in shrines, clearly served ritual purposes; incense stands and chalices would be examples.

Yet artifacts used for food preparation can also be considered ritual objects if the food was intended for household offerings or festal meals. It has become clear that many ceramic vessels had overlapping mundane and sacral functions. A small juglet, for example, might be used for ordinary cooking purposes or to pour out librations. The absence of specifically cultic objects in household contexts is no longer seen as evidence that no rituals took place there. Anthropology is also important for reconstructing women’s religious lives. Ethnographic studies indicate the range of household religious activities in premodern agrarian cultures. Information from societies in ecological zones similar to that of ancient Israel suggest what kind of festivals are typically geared to the agricultural calendar and what roles women played in those celebrations. Equally important, those studies help understand what women’s activities mean—to women and to their households—in traditional societies.

Women’s Household Religious Activities An Israelite household was not simply a domicile or a family. It was both those things and more, for it also included property—lands, animals, tools, and other objects—and the activities of its members. This anthropological perspective allows us to acknowledge that religious celebrations of household members, whether they took place in the domicile or elsewhere, were part of a household’s religious life. Different types of religious activities can be identified:   1. The reproductive process (pregnancy and childbirth) entailed religious behaviors.  2. Rituals accompanied ordinary foodpreparation practices.  3. Religious festivals took place at set calendrical times.  4. Recurrent life-cycle events were cele­ brated or marked.   5. Occasional or sporadic rituals were performed to deal with specific problems. The Bible associates many of these with the central shrine, and regional settings are also mentioned. But the household’s own domicile was arguably the place where most people experienced these religious activities.

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Reproduction: Pregnancy, Childbirth, and Neonatal Care Problems in the reproductive process are not uncommon. Some women have trouble conceiving or carrying the fetus to term; some experience difficulty during labor, delivery, or the postpartum period; lactation may be inadequate. And newborns are vulnerable to complications during and after their emergence from the womb. Unlike in the developed world, the reproductive difficulties of Israelite women were exacerbated by inadequate nutrition, unsanitary birthing practices, and similar issues. Maternal and infant mortality in biblical antiquity was greater than even in today’s thirdworld countries. A woman’s life expectancy was up to ten years less than a man’s because of childbearing risks, and fewer than half of all infants lived to the age of five, an estimate that does not take into account the possibility that an outbreak of disease might claim more. Reproductive problems today are generally addressed by medical interventions, although prayers requesting divine assistance may also be offered. For women in traditional societies, ancient Israel included, religious practices were the chief resource. To achieve pregnancy, women (and their spouses) prayed and offered sacrifices in hopes of overcoming barrenness. In her effort to conceive, Samson’s mother observes aspects of a Nazirite vow and also, with her husband, offers a sacrifice (Judg. 13:2–24). Hoping to become pregnant, Hannah prays, makes a vow, and offers a sacrifice at a regional shrine (1 Sam. 1). Many folk traditions of peoples in biblical lands, some likely dating to biblical times, attest to other acts carried out by women seeking to become pregnant. For example, deceased ancestors, who were believed to exist in a shadowy, semidivine state, could be called upon to assist the living. Female ancestors in particular might help with fertility problems. Petitions to the matriarch Rachel, who died in childbirth and whose concern for children endures beyond the grave, are still made at the traditional site of her tomb. Because reproductive problems were typically attributed to evil spirits such as Lilith (see Isa. 34:14) and other demons considered dangerous to pregnant women or their offspring, measures could be taken to keep those malevolent forces away from pregnant, parturient, or nursing women and from their infants. Protective folk customs abound in Mediterranean

cultures; and some can be identified in biblical references or archaeological remains. Pregnant women might wear amulets to deter evil spirits. For example, small figurines depicting the Egyptian dwarf god Bes, renowned as the guardian of new mothers and their children, have been found in many Israelite households. In fact, molds to make these objects have been discovered at Israelite sites, indicating that they were in great demand and therefore were made locally rather than being imported from Egypt. Their use does not mean Bes was worshiped; rather, a powerful symbol was appropriated from a nearby culture for its apotropaic value, that is, its ability to protect by averting harmful forces. Similarly, the eye of Horus (wedjat) was used as an amulet to keep away the problematic evil eye; these have been recovered archaeologically and to this day eye amulets are used in traditional Mediterranean cultures, certainly by people who do not believe in Horus. Shiny objects of any kind were also considered deterrents to evil spirits, which preferred the dark. Thus jewelry that reflected light and even lamplight were considered protective. The metal items of personal adornment discovered in excavations had protective as well as aesthetic value; and clay oil lamps provided both light and protection from malevolent forces (see Prov. 6:20–23). The procedures performed on a newborn (Ezek. 16:4)—mentioned in rabbinic texts and carried out in Syria and Palestine well into the twentieth century—were protective measures. Many more apotropaic practices known from folklore surely date back to biblical days. Foodways and Ritual Women were responsible for household food-processing activities. Without the time, energy, and skill they devoted to the transformation of crops to edible form, survival would have been impossible; there was no other way to procure sustenance in the largely self-­sufficient households of most Israelites. The dietary restrictions in the Pentateuch, which mainly limit the animals that could be eaten (Lev. 11; Deut. 14:3–20) and also stipulate practices related to animal slaughter and cooking (Exod. 23:19; Deut. 12:16; 14:21), likely had little relevance to women’s daily food preparation activities. Most of those regulations became religious stipulations only late in Israelite history, although some may have been customary practices much

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earlier. Moreover, animal protein was not part of the ordinary daily diet. Still, those texts indicate that foodways can have a sacral dimension and that food preparation activities would have been imbued with religious significance. One example is found in the instructions about offering a piece of bread dough to YHWH (Num. 15:19–21) in order to secure a blessing on the household (cf. Ezek. 44:30b). This practice represents a superstition associated with bread-baking like ones recorded among Muslim and Christian women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Levant. Fears of tainted flour (and thus spoiled dough) caused by evil spirits led women to practice rituals associated with preparing bread dough. Food consumption too probably had a sacral aspect. When the artifacts of a household are found in their original-use space, ritual objects appear in household spaces identified as eating areas, suggesting that ordinary meals were accompanied by ritual acts. Perhaps small portions of food were provided to ancestors or deities, as among other Semitic peoples (cf. the prohibition in Deut. 26:14). Several passages in Jeremiah (7:18; 44:15–19, 25; cf. Jer. 19:13) depict household women presenting libations and offerings. And in other ways no longer visible to us, the mundane acts of preparing and consuming a meal might be marked as religious. In fact, historians of religion have argued that the sacrificial regime at community shrines was a household meal writ large. That is, household meals prepared by women were the template for the sacrificial cult. Regular Celebrations: Annual, Monthly, and Weekly Events The arduous daily life of most Israelites was relieved periodically by festal events, which were food events: feasting was an important and often overlooked aspect of their celebration. Feasts in general are marked by special foods (especially meat, if not eaten at everyday meals), a respite from labor, a carnivalesque atmosphere, and the opportunity to spend time with kin and neighbors. Because women were responsible for most food preparation, they would have contributed essential components of Israelite feasts while also experiencing their social and religious intensity. In agrarian societies everywhere, feasts are typically linked to the agricultural calendar; they celebrate milestones in economic life, like

the beginning or end of a harvest season. The Israelites marked these important moments too, although their three annual festivals (Passover, Weeks, and Booths) also take on historical meaning. Deuteronomic texts give the impression that these festivals took place only at the central shrine, with women participating as household members (Deut. 16:11, 14). But only men are enjoined to participate, except for Booths in the seventh year (Deut. 31:10–12); and wives are omitted from the lists of household participants. Do these stipulations mean women were marginal participants? Probably not. These stipulations are addressed to the male head of household; the senior female is likely subsumed in her partner and was thus a full participant. More important, celebrations at the central shrine did not preclude celebrations in a household’s local community or domicile (see Exod. 12:3–7, 46; Neh. 8:16). Festival celebrations were held in local communities and individual households too, especially ones far from the central shrine. The same can be said for monthly and weekly festivals. New moon festivals held each month were popular celebrations (Hos. 2:11; Amos 8:5) that likely originated as household and clan feasts (e.g., 1 Sam. 20:5–29) to honor deceased ancestors as well as celebrate the seemingly miraculous reemergence of the moon after weeks of gradual disappearance. In fact, priestly regulations (Num. 28:11–15) do not even call the new moon festival a “sanctuary convocation,” a term used for festal events at the central shrine. The Sabbath, unlike the annual and monthly celebrations, seems to have been a uniquely Israelite institution, perhaps originating in compassion for those engaged in arduous daily toil. Priestly texts refer to Sabbath offerings at the central shrine (Num. 28:9–10), but other texts assume household observance (e.g., Exod. 20:8– 10). The manna narrative (Exod. 16) focuses on the availability of food on the Sabbath, suggesting that these weekly events, like annual and monthly ones, entailed the consumption of special foods. Like the annual and monthly festivals, the weekly celebration involved feasting—albeit perhaps less elaborate than annual and new-moon feasting—with special foods prepared by the women of a household. Recurrent Life-Cycle Events Like peoples everywhere, the Israelites marked transitions in the life cycle. Birth and

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death rituals in particular appear in the Hebrew Bible, both with special roles for women. Marriages were a social occasion or, for propertyowning or elite households, a legal matter; they do not seem to have involved religious ritual until the postexilic period. Puberty rituals are found in many cultures but go unmentioned in the Hebrew Bible; perhaps circumcision as an Israelite birth rite, often associated with puberty in other cultures, preempts the puberty event. In addition to the apotropaic measures already noted, childbirth was marked by rituals. According to priestly texts (Lev. 12:6–8) new mothers may have offered special sacrifices meant to remove the impurity of the parturient discharges (related to childbirth); that these offerings also marked gratitude for a successful pregnancy is likely. Circumcision was another Israelite birth rite (Gen. 17:12; Lev. 12:3). Its origins are uncertain, but the strange episode of Zipporah (Exod. 4:24–26), who circumcises her son and uses his foreskin to ward off mortal danger, may reflect an ancient apotropaic practice carried out by mothers of infant sons, a practice later associated with membership in the covenant community (Gen. 17:9–14; cf. Josh. 5:1–8). Another birth rite was the naming of the newborn. Done more often by women than men in the Hebrew Bible (e.g., Gen. 30:6, 8, 24; 35:18), it was likely a woman’s practice. The theophoric component of most biblical names, many of them referring to the birth process, attests to the religious dimension of this life-cycle ritual involving women and their offspring. Household religious practices marking the end of life were probably similar for women and men. Ancient Semitic custom mandated immediate burial in the family tomb or burial area, with women probably preparing the corpses of women and children. Vessels for serving food and drink are typical among tomb goods, suggesting that burial rites included funerary meals or that food and drink offerings for deceased ancestors were deposited at the tomb (in addition to being offered at household meals). Either way, women prepared the funerary foodstuffs. Another funerary custom was wearing torn garments or sackcloth (e.g., 2 Sam. 1:11–12; 3:31), probably during a weeklong period of intense mourning (Gen. 50:10). Shaving the head, cutting the body, and rolling in ashes are also mentioned, sometimes to forbid them (Lev. 21:5; Deut. 14:1; Isa. 15:2;

Mic. 1:16). Dirges accompanied mourning and interment; as in other Mediterranean cultures, Israelite women were the ones to chant laments if professional keeners (who were women; see below) were not hired. Occasional Rituals Illnesses and accidents were inevitably part of household life; as in most cultures, women likely were the caregivers for the sick and injured. When the Shunammite woman’s son falls ill, his father has him carried to his mother (2 Kgs. 4:19). When Samuel warns the people that having a monarchy will mean having family members work for the crown, he mentions women as herbalists (1  Sam. 8:13; NRSV “perfumers”). Because many plant substances used for flavoring foods were also used to concoct healing salves or potions, women’s food-­ preparation tasks gave them familiarity with materia medica (substances inhaled, ingested, or applied to wounds). Caring for the ill or injured, like dealing with reproductive problems, had a religious dimension, for health problems were often attributed to supernatural causes. That is, they might be considered divine punishment for misdeeds or simply the result of a deity’s unknowable reasons (as for Job). Or demons might be the culprits; “pestilence” in Psalm 91:6 is better translated “demon.” Thus dealing with health issues meant that women would have offered prayers or incantations, along with the use of materia medica, in their care for family members in distress. Another occasional ritual can be called crisis intervention. Agrarian difficulties such as insufficient rainfall, assumed in biblical texts to be the result of human disobedience to the divine will, might be met with special offerings appealing for divine assistance. Both women and men would have made offerings to their household’s god(s)—and ancestors too. These gifts, it was hoped, would be reciprocated; the moisture essential for crop production would be provided in return. Note that in Deuteronomy 26:12–15 the fertility of the land depends on both offerings and obedience to God.

Community Religious Roles The religious lives of most women and men took place in their own households, whether in the domicile itself, at the family tomb, or at local, regional, or national shrines. However,

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some Israelite women served as religious functionaries for the larger community. Several positions held by women at the national shrine are mentioned in the Bible. Although the priesthood was open only to men who were members of the priestly tribe (and not to men in general), several texts indicate that women too were temple servitors. Two verses (Exod. 38:8; 1 Sam. 2:22) refer to women serving at the entrance to the national shrine (tent of meeting). Their role is not specified; but because the word for “serve” in these verses is related to a term describing Levitical priests performing menial labor, it is likely that they too performed menial tasks. A more skilled religious position is apparently designated by a somewhat enigmatic biblical word (qĕdēšâ), which comes from a root meaning “holiness.” This term (and its masculine equivalent), traditionally translated “temple prostitute” (e.g., Deut. 23:17), according to recent research refers to a class of cultic personnel rather than people performing sex acts in a sacral context. One other text mentions women performing a cultic role, namely, “weeping for Tammuz” (Ezek. 8:14) in the temple precincts. Usually thought to denote women worshiping a Mesopotamian fertility god, it is also possible that this phrase is used in an extended sense to denote a mourning ritual, one that is carried out, together with male priests, as part of a complex set of temple rites. Women’s general expertise in funerary rites would have made them well suited to this role. Women were also professional mourners who could be hired by affluent households to lead funerary processions. In the ancient Near East and Aegean, professional mourners were almost always women; and in Egypt they were exclusively women. Ethnography also indicates that funerary lamentations are typically recited by women, and ancient iconography depicts women in mourning gestures. Biblical texts confirm the presence of this role for Israelite women. The call for “mourning women” in Jeremiah (9:17–20 [Heb. 9:16–19]; cf. Ezek. 32:16) calls those women “skilled” in acknowledgment of their professional proficiency; and it urges them to teach laments to their “daughters,” probably a designation for members of a group of professional mourners (see also 2 Sam. 1:24), just as “sons” in “sons of prophets” (e.g., 2 Kgs. 2:3, 7, 15; NRSV “company of prophets”) designates a prophetic group.

Another kind of religious expertise was exhibited by women who were skilled in transmitting the divine will to others. Most prominent in this group are “prophets,” a title given to four named biblical women (Miriam, Deborah, Huldah, and Noadiah) and several unnamed ones (Isa. 8:3; Joel 2:28 [Heb. 3:1]; cf. Ezek. 13:17–23). In addition, the masculine plural word nebi’im, frequently used in reference to groups of prophets, may be a gender-inclusive term in some instances. Like their male counterparts in ancient Israel and the female and male prophets elsewhere in the ancient Near East, many of these female prophets were probably skilled prognosticators. That is, they would have been experts in divinatory techniques (see Num. 22:7 and Ezek. 21:21–23), enabling them to respond to clients’ requests for information about the future. One biblical narrative portrays a particular kind of divination, necromancy: the medium of Endor, a woman who helps Saul consult the deceased prophet Samuel (1 Sam. 28). Women as singers, dancers, or instrumentalists are mentioned in a number of biblical texts; and women were almost certainly part of many ensembles, even when the gender of the musicians is unspecified. These musical professionals sometimes performed in religious contexts, as when an ensemble of women performers praises YHWH’s deeds (e.g., Exod. 15:20–21) or when female percussionists participate in a temple procession (Ps. 68:24–25). Finally, midwives were not only health professionals but also religious specialists. As in postbiblical tradition and in other ancient Near Eastern cultures, Israelite midwives would have recited appropriate prayers for the well-being of the parturient and incantations against the evil forces threatening her and the newborn. Their specialized knowledge included religious as well as “medical” procedures.

Evaluating Women’s Religious Lives Israelite women were important actors in the array of religious practices considered essential for maintaining the vitality and continuity of households and the larger community in which they were embedded. Religiosity, in the form of an array of ritual activities and apotropaic acts, was an integral element of their daily lives. The following comments about women’s religious lives—about what women likely experienced in

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performing religious activities that served their households and communities—are based on ethnographic data and anthropological perspectives. But traditional characterizations of household religion and of women’s practices must first be set aside. Household practices have sometimes been characterized as “folk” or “popular” religion and thus considered heterodox or deviant, in contrast with the “official” or orthodox practices at community or national shrines. This oppositional dichotomy is problematic, and household and temple religious practices are more appropriately viewed as two ends of a continuum of religious behavior. Thus the strong association of women with household religion, rather than casting women in a negative light, instead signals their importance in Israelite religious life, especially because the household was central for the religious lives of most people. Similarly, because some of women’s household practices were in the realm of magic, they have often been perceived as antireligious. This negative assessment is also flawed; magical behaviors are better viewed as instances of ritual power, that is, practices intended to influence supernatural powers. Women were the chief practitioners of rituals surrounding the reproductive process. Offspring were essential for the survival of households as part of its labor force, as heirs to its patrimony, and as the sole resource for eldercare. In performing reproductive rituals with their lifedeath significance, women likely earned the kind of respect garnered by medical personnel today. The rituals associated with food were mainly the responsibility of women. Performing foodpreparation rituals meant safeguarding the health of the family and maintaining customs associated with group identity. The food offerings at household meals or at burial sites were intended to seek agrarian fertility by securing the help of deities or ancestors; the women portrayed making food offerings in Jeremiah clearly understand that these acts were necessary for household prosperity. Sharing food with deceased family members also maintained household identity across generations. And the special foods that were the sine qua non of the regular and occasional feasts contributed to the many important functions—religious, political, social, and psychological—of these events in Israelite society. Food preparation today would hardly be deemed a meaningful religious activity. But

we must put present-day attitudes aside and recognize that food-related contributions to household religious life are imbued with positive value for women in traditional societies. Foods had to be prepared in certain ways, and food offerings had to be made in prescribed modes. With grain-based foods supplying the bulk of the caloric intake in most households, protective procedures associated with preparing dough, for example, took on a life-death quality no less than did reproductive rituals. Proper offerings to deities or ancestors were linked to beliefs about how to obtain the fertility of a household’s lands and animals essential for household survival. In other words, the preparation and offering of food were ritual acts. The women who carried out these acts—and also those surrounding the reproductive or healthcare processes—were ritual experts, no less than were the male officiants at community shrines. Because women’s religious expertise functioned on a daily basis, it was arguably a more dynamic presence in household life than was priestly expertise at shrines. Marginalized or nonexistent in the Bible, women’s religious activities were of central importance in lived reality. The community religious roles of Israelite women also entailed expertise, but at a level not easily acquired without special training. Divinatory techniques, laments, midwifery incantations, temple music, and the rest all involved the acquisition of skill sets or knowledge that served religious purposes. Senior practitioners passed their expertise on to younger women, earning the respect due to mentors. All the practitioners of these skills, perceived as necessary for certain aspects of community life, likewise garnered a measure of prestige. Community specialists experienced the gratification of supplying essential services, just as ordinary women performing religious activities felt the satisfaction of performing deeds believed vital for their households’ welfare. Bibliography

Ackerman, Susan. “Household Religion, Family Religion, and Women’s Religion in Ancient Israel.” In Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, edited by John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, 127–58. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008.

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Albertz, R. “Family Religion in Ancient Israel.” In Household and Family Religion in Antiquity, edited by John Bodel and Saul M. Olyan, 89–112. The Ancient World: Comparative Histories. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008. Meyer, Marvin, and Paul Mirecki. “Introduction.” In Ancient Magic and Ritual Power, edited by Marvin Meyer and Paul Mirecki, 1–8. Boston: Brill, 1995. Meyers, Carol. “Household Religion.” In Religious Diversity in Ancient Israel and Judah, edited by Francesca Stavrakopouolu and John Barton, 118–34. London: T. & T. Clark, 2010.

———. Households and Holiness: The Religious Culture of Israelite Women. Facet Series. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. ———. Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. Meyers, Carol, Toni Craven, and Ross S. Kraemer, eds. Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Sered, Susan S. Women as Ritual Experts: The Religious Lives of Elderly Jewish Women in Jerusalem. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

The Apocrypha

Introduction to the Apocrypha Eileen M. Schuller

The term “apocrypha” is difficult to define with precision because it is used in different ways. The word itself is a Greek term for something that is “hidden away” or “kept secret.” This distinction between books that are public and available to all and other books that are kept for a few derives from a text in 2 Esdras (also called 4 Ezra) 14:45–46 that distinguishes between twenty-four books that are accessible (the books of the Hebrew Bible) and seventy other books that were written last and hidden or kept secret for the wise (apocrypha). The modern use of the term is related to the development of a canon, a set, fixed list of books that are judged to be sacred Scripture or Bible by a specific religious community. The Apocrypha is a term for certain Jewish books that were included in the Greek (Septuagint) and Latin (Vulgate) manuscripts of the Old Testament but were not included in the Hebrew (Masoretic) Bible. The Apocrypha includes those books that the Roman Catholic Church accepts as part of its Bible or canon: Tobit, Judith, some additions to the book of Esther, the Wisdom of Solomon, Sirach, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, additions to Daniel (the Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews; Susanna; Bel and the Dragon), and 1 and 2 Maccabees. It also includes books that are in Orthodox Bibles (there are some variations in Slavonic, Russian, and Greek traditions) and are used in liturgies and lectionaries: the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, 1 Esdras, and 3 Maccabees. Fourth Maccabees was in an appendix in some manuscripts of the Septuagint; 2 Esdras was included in an appendix to the Vulgate.

The existence of the Apocrypha as a distinct entity is a reflection of a long and complex process of canon formation. Much is unknown about the reasons and the process whereby certain books were included as sacred Scripture and others were excluded. We have the end result: the books of the Apocrypha were not included in the Hebrew canon of twenty-four books; the Greek Bible of the early Christian church included these books, and they also came to be part of the Latin Bible (the Vulgate) used throughout the Middle Ages—though scholars such as Jerome in the fourth century were still conscious of the distinction between those books that were included in the Hebrew Bible and those that were not. At the time of the Reformation, Protestants adopted the shorter Hebrew canon and either omitted the Apocrypha entirely from their Bibles or retained it for “example of life and instruction of manner” but not “to establish any doctrine” (the Anglican Thirty-nine Articles, 1562). The Council of Trent (1546) determined the books to be included in the Catholic Bible; those books whose canonical status was secondarily reconfirmed after having been called into question are sometimes designated “deuterocanonical” books. Some modern editions of the Bible do not include the Apocrypha; others place it as a separate unit between the Old Testament and the New Testament (or occasionally after the New Testament). In Catholic editions of the Bible these books are grouped with others of similar type in the Old Testament (e.g., Tobit and Judith come after Nehemiah; the Wisdom of Solomon and Sirach after the Song of Songs; and the 365

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additions to Daniel and Esther are included within the respective canonical books). The Apocrypha is distinguished from a still broader group of writings from early Judaism that is called the Pseudepigrapha (literally “false writings”) because some of these books are attributed to biblical figures even though they are clearly much later compositions. The latter books were not included in the Bible of any religious community over the centuries, although a few (1 Enoch, Jubilees) were considered Scripture by the Ethiopic church. What status these books had for their authors or the communities that copied them is hard to ascertain; books like 1 Enoch and Jubilees are found in great numbers among the Dead Sea Scrolls and are sometimes quoted as a source of authority and prophecy (e.g., the quotation from 1 Enoch in the Letter of Jude 14–15). All the books of the Apocrypha are works of religious literature from the Jewish community, written from approximately the third century BCE to the first century CE in the land of Israel and in the Diaspora. In types of literature, content, language, and date of composition, the Apocrypha is a diverse collection. Some are narratives (Judith, Tobit); others continue the biblical wisdom tradition (Sirach, also known as Ecclesiasticus, and the Wisdom of Solomon). There are histories (1 and 2 Maccabees, 1 Esdras); psalms and prayers (the Prayer of Manasseh, Psalm 151, the prayers of Mordecai and Esther, the Song of the Three Youths); and apocalyptic visions (2 Esdras 3–14, also called 4 Ezra). Many of these books were originally composed in Hebrew (e.g., Sirach, Baruch, 1 Maccabees) or perhaps Aramaic (Tobit) but survived only in Greek translation; fragments of the original Semitic text of Sirach and Tobit have been found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Other books (e.g., the Wisdom of Solomon, the Prayer of Manasseh) were composed in Greek. The books of the Apocrypha are crucial for an understanding of Second Temple Judaism. They provide information about the events of history (particularly the crucial period from 180 to 140 BCE that marked the overthrow of Greek domination and the rise of the Hasmonean kings). The many prayers, hymns, and

psalms in these books give evidence of rich piety and devotion, and several of these works illustrate how the powerful influence of Greek language and ideas was simultaneously resisted and absorbed by Judaism in this period. Women play an important and prominent role in many of these books. In two, Judith and Susanna, a woman is the central character and gives her name to the story; in addition, Queen Esther is a speaker of a prayer in the Greek version. There are seventeen women named in these books, as well as significant women who are not named, most notably the mother of the seven martyred sons in 2 and 4 Maccabees. The didactic narratives such as Tobit and the wisdom instruction of Sirach can tell us much about commonly held and changing assumptions about the role and place of women during the time of the Persian, Greek, and Roman empires. The Apocrypha contains some of the most negative material about women (e.g., Sir. 25:24 has the first explicit statement blaming Eve for bringing sin and death into the world) as well as some of the most positive (e.g., the passages about Sophia/Wisdom in Sir. 24 and Wisd. Sol. 7–9). Bibliography

Craven, Toni. “The Apocrypha/Deuterocanonical Books.” In Women in Scripture, edited by Carol Meyers, Toni Craven, and Ross S. Kraemer, 12–16. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. de Silva, David A. Introducing the Apocrypha: Message, Context and Significance. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001. Harrington, Daniel J. Invitation to the Apocrypha. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999. Levine, Amy-Jill, ed. “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the GrecoRoman World. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Loader, William. The Pseudepigrapha on Sexuality: Attitudes towards Sexuality in Apocalypses, Testaments, Legends, Wisdom, and Related Literature. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

1 Esdras Eileen M. Schuller

Introduction First Esdras (the Greek form of the Hebrew name Ezra) is a small book that continues to be a puzzle; its origin and purpose is a matter of ongoing debate among scholars. In the Septuagint, the book is designated as Esdras A and comes before Esdras B (the translation of Ezra–Nehemiah); it was used by Josephus and was well known in the Eastern church. In the Vulgate, it is entitled 3 Esdras, and comes in an Appendix following the New Testament. Most of the book is a translation into Greek of material that is found elsewhere in the Bible in Hebrew or Aramaic. The book contains all of 2 Chronicles 35 and 36:1–21; most of the book of Ezra; and a small segment of the book of Nehemiah (7:73–8:12). It covers the period beginning with the Passover that was celebrated under King Josiah at the first temple, the rebuilding of the temple under the leadership of Zerubbabel at the beginning of the reign of King Darius, and the reading of the law by Ezra to all the people assembled in front of the temple. Scholars disagree about whether we have the original beginning of the book and likewise whether the last preserved words are the actual end or whether it breaks off abruptly in midsentence. The only material that is not paralleled elsewhere in the Bible is in 1 Esdras 3:1–5:6. This section, a narrative about three young men who answer a riddle-question, is often designated as “The Contest of the Guards” or “The Story of the Youths.” The setting is the court of King Darius, ruler of Persia, presumably in the years soon after he took office in 522 BCE. The

three bodyguards of King Darius are each to answer the question, what thing is strongest? The first guard argues that wine is the strongest. The second makes the case that the king is the strongest. The third, Zerubbabel, presents a double argument: “women are strongest, but above all things truth is victor” (3:12). Darius declares Zerubbabel the winner and as a reward gives him permission to rebuild the temple in Jerusalem. The story ends with Zerubbabel’s praise of God, who has given him this wisdom (4:59–60). Tales set within the royal court and contests about “what is the greatest?” are a wellestablished genre in the ancient Near East; perhaps even the wine-king-women combination was part of common folklore. A similar type of “court tale” is found in Daniel 1–6 and in some very fragmentary scrolls among the Aramaic manuscripts of the Dead Sea Scrolls (e.g., 4Q550, a narrative at the court of ­Darius). Many theories about the composition of 1 Esdras focus on whether this book is only a fragment of a much larger work or is a compilation of various parts pulled from the books of Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah; from either perspective, the Story of the Three Youths seems a secondary and somewhat peripheral insertion. But some recent scholars (Talshir, De Troyer) have argued that this story is the central core of the book and that 1 Esdras is best understood within the framework of “rewritten Bible,” a reworking of earlier traditions to focus attention on Zerubbabel, who, like King Solomon, is presented as a temple builder.

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Comment Women as the Strongest (1 Esd. 4:13–32) The story of the contest has been expanded by the addition of the fourth section about truth (4:33–41). In its original form, the argument about women (4:13–32) would have been the climax and conclusion of the contest about “what one thing is strongest” (3:5). Zerubbabel begins by acknowledging the power of wine and the king, but points out that ultimately it is women who give birth to these very kings and to the “men who plant the vineyards from which comes wine” (4:16). It is women who make clothing and women who bring men glory (4:17). Thus it is not only in the realm of procreation but also in the economic and social realms that “men cannot exist without women” (4:17). Special attention is given to the power of a woman’s beauty. The assumption is that a man might encounter a beautiful woman; it is not presumed that women are secluded or veiled (4:18–19). This is the only part of the argument where a concrete example is given: King Darius is under the sway of his concubine Apame, who can take all kinds of playful liberties with the mighty king, who is reduced to gazing at her “with mouth agape” (4:31). The author draws upon two verses from the Genesis creation story. Genesis 2:24, “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife,” is to be taken positively to promote monogamy and faithfulness: “with his wife he ends his days.” Yet the verse is also given a negative twist with the charge that a man’s care for his wife means that “he ends his days with no thought of his father or his mother or his country” (4:21, 25). Furthermore, it is seen as a negative that the order established by Genesis 3:16, of a man “ruling” over his wife, has been reversed so that now “women rule over you” (4:22). Although there are passages where love between a man and woman is assumed and praised (4:24), ultimately the dependency of men upon women becomes an argument for female culpability. Men perish or stumble or sin “because of women” (4:27); and in the final praise of truth, women are named specifically in the list of all that is “unrighteous” (4:37), in contrast to truth. Precisely because this is not a learned or theological work, a folkloristic tale like this may provide a glimpse into some more

popularly held views of ordinary people in the Persian or early Hellenistic period.

Women in Passages with Parallels in Ezra–Nehemiah Most of the book is a translation of passages that are found in other parts of the Bible, and where there are women mentioned in the Hebrew version, they are also in the translation. For instance, women are mentioned explicitly among those killed in the Babylonian attack on Jerusalem (2 Chr. 36:17=1 Esd. 1:53); female slaves are listed among the returnees from exile (1 Esd. 5:41–42=Ezra 2:65; Neh. 7:67), and 1 Esdras 5:1 also mentions wives and daughters explicitly; the passages about the expulsion of foreign wives in Ezra 7:1–10:44 and 7:7–8:12 are virtually the same in 1 Esdras 8:1–9:55. There are, however, a few places where 1 Esdras has some interesting variations. For instance, the role of women as mourners is well attested in many ancient societies and throughout the Bible (2 Sam. 1:24; Jer. 9:17–22; Lam. l:4). Second Chronicles 35:25, in describing the laments for King Josiah, who was killed in battle in 609 BCE, notes “all the singing men and singing women” who “have spoken of Josiah in their laments to this day.” Yet because the translator read a different letter in the Hebrew text, the parallel text in 1 Esdras 1:32 has “the principal men with the women [or: wives]”—and the female singers disappear. At the very end of the account about the foreign wives, after the list of priests, Levites, and men of Israel, the Hebrew in Ezra 10:44 reads that “all these had married foreign women, among whom were some women who had borne children” (my trans.); the text is unclear and probably corrupt and does not say that the expulsion was carried out. The parallel in 1 Esdras 9:36, however, states explicitly that “they put them away together with their children,” and it is this reading that has been incorporated into the NRSV translation of Ezra 10:44. Bibliography

Crenshaw, James L. “The Contest of Darius’ Guards.” In Images of Man and God: Old Testament Stories in Literary Focus, edited



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by B. O. Long, 74–88. Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1981. De Troyer, Kristin. “Zerubbabel and Ezra: A Revived and Revised Solomon and Josiah? A Survey of Current 1 Esdras Research.” Currents in Biblical Research 1 (2002): 30–60. Eron, Lewis John. “‘That Women Have Mastery over Both King and Beggar’ (T. Jud. 15:5)— The Relation of the Fear of Sexuality to the Status of Women in Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha; 1 Esdras (3 Ezra) 3–4, Ben Sira, and the Testament of Judah.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 9 (1991): 43–66.

Loader, William. “Attitudes towards Sexuality in Histories, Legends, and Related Writings: ‘The Tale of the Three Youths.’” In The Pseudepigrapha on Sexuality: Attitudes towards Sexuality in Apocalypses, Testaments, Legends, Wisdom, and Related Literature, 142–47. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011. Talshir, Zipora. 1 Esdras: From Origin to Translation. Septuagint and Cognate Studies Series 47. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1999. See esp. pp. 58–80 on the Story of the Youths.

2 Esdras Karina Martin Hogan

Introduction Second Esdras is made up of three compositions of different origins. The longest part (2 Esd. 3–14, called 4 Ezra) is an apocalypse by a Jewish author, probably written in Hebrew near the end of the first century CE. It is bracketed by two shorter works by Christian authors, probably written in Greek: 5 Ezra (2 Esd. 1–2), dating from the second or third century CE, and 6 Ezra (2 Esd. 15–16), which can be dated to the late third century CE. The two Christian works present themselves as prophetic, but much of their content is apocalyptic. Second Esdras as a whole is pseudepigraphic: it claims to be written by the scribe Ezra (Esdras is the Greek form of Ezra), who plays a prominent role in the canonical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. In 4 and 5 Ezra, however, Ezra is portrayed as a prophet and seer. The beginning of 6 Ezra was apparently lost when it was attached to 4 Ezra, so it is not certain that it was originally ascribed to Ezra. Second Esdras as a whole is extant only in Latin, in the Vulgate, where it is called, confusingly, 4 Esdras (the canonical books of Ezra and Nehemiah being called 1 and 2 Esdras respectively, while the apocryphal book known as 1 Esdras is called 3 Esdras). The Jewish apocalypse, 4 Ezra, is extant in several other translations from the Greek, including Syriac, Coptic, and Armenian. All of those translations were made and preserved by Christians; there is no evidence of a Jewish reception of 4 Ezra in rabbinic literature. Despite its preservation in the Vulgate, the canonical status of 2 Esdras for Christians was in doubt until the sixteenth century CE, during

which it was declared noncanonical by Luther, Calvin, and the Roman Catholic Church. The Council of Trent, which denied canonical status to 2 Esdras, simultaneously affirmed the canonicity for Catholics of most of the books of the Apocrypha (which had been included in the Septuagint). Although a Greek version of 4 Ezra did exist at one time, no part of 2 Esdras had ever been included in the Septuagint, so it was relegated to an appendix of the Vulgate. It has semicanonical status in the Armenian Orthodox Church, but in no other branch of Christianity does it enjoy canonical status, despite its profound influence on both Western and Eastern Christianity. As the only apocalypse in the Apocrypha, 4 Ezra is most similar in form and content to Daniel in the Old Testament and Revelation in the New Testament. All three of these historical apocalypses communicate a message of hope to people in distress through symbolic visions and auditory revelations to a human seer, reassuring their audiences that God is in control of human history. Apocalyptic literature has been understood as a literature of resistance to and critique of oppressive imperial power. More than the canonical apocalypses, however, 4 Ezra uses feminine imagery to portray in a positive way the approaching transformation of the world and the triumph of the oppressed. The two Christian additions (5 and 6 Ezra), while not apocalypses in form, also use feminine imagery to convey an apocalyptic theology. Unfortunately, a central idea in 5 Ezra is God’s rejection of the Jewish people and the fulfillment of the promises to Israel in the

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Christian Church. In 6 Ezra, feminine imagery is used more negatively to personify the enemies of God’s people and sin itself as female. At the same time, 6 Ezra, like 4 Ezra, uses an analogy to pregnancy and labor to describe the approaching end of the world. Since 4 Ezra was written first and probably influenced the Christian additions, it makes sense to read chapters 3–14 (4 Ezra) first. This Jewish apocalypse is divided into seven episodes, traditionally referred to as visions, although only three of them feature visual imagery. The first three episodes take the form of contentious dialogues between the seer, Ezra, and an angel, Uriel. The central episode begins with a dialogue between Ezra and an unnamed mourning woman who turns out, in a dramatic visual transformation, to be Zion (Jerusalem). The fifth and sixth episodes are highly symbolic visions (both loosely based on Daniel 7), interpreted for Ezra by Uriel. The final episode, sometimes called the epilogue, shows Ezra in his traditional role as a scribe, restoring the Scriptures that had supposedly been destroyed along with Jerusalem. The literary setting of 4 Ezra is in the Babylonian exile, thirty years after the first destruction of Jerusalem in 587/6 BCE, but the content of the book (especially the eagle vision in 2 Esd. 11–12) clearly points to the end of the first century CE, after the destruction of

the Second Temple by the Romans in 70 CE, as the time of composition. The Christian additions are harder to date with precision. Fifth Ezra (2 Esd. 1–2) is generally dated to the second or third century, because of its mood of intense competition with Judaism, implying that Christianity is still a minority religion. The main message of 5 Ezra is that God has rejected Israel because of their repeated disobedience; the promises to Israel are redirected to “a people that will come” (1:35), which is generally assumed to refer to Gentile Christians. The church is personified as a widow and a mother and identified with Zion (2:40), the symbolic center of Judaism. Sixth Ezra (2 Esd. 15–16) reflects a period of persecution of Christians, so it must have been written before 313 CE (the conversion of the Emperor Constantine), and it probably alludes to the Palmyrene-Persian wars of the early 260s, so a date in the late third century CE is likely. Much of the book is taken up with oracles against four nations which may be taken collectively to represent the Roman Empire, but it ends with promises of salvation for God’s people in the last days, which are expected to come soon. In its present form 6 Ezra makes no reference to Ezra, but an author quoting it in the sixth century CE attributes it to Ezra, so it had likely been attached to 4 Ezra by that time.

Comment 4 Ezra: The Dialogues (2 Esd. 3:1–9:25) Each of the three dialogues begins with a lament by Ezra that raises troubling questions about God’s justice and the status of the covenant between God and Israel. The two related questions that Ezra raises in the first lament and revisits throughout the dialogues are the following: Why did God create humankind with an inclination to do evil (the “evil heart”) and nevertheless expect them to obey the commandments? Given that Israel has done better than other nations at keeping God’s commandments, why has God allowed another nation (“Babylon,” standing for Rome) to conquer Zion? The angel Uriel refuses to answer Ezra’s questions directly in the first two dialogues, maintaining that “the way of the Most High” is beyond human comprehension. In the

third dialogue, however, Uriel is drawn into an extended debate with Ezra over the fate of sinful humankind. Ezra’s compassion for his fellow human beings, despite the angel’s assurances that he himself will be saved, makes him an appealing character. In all three dialogues, Uriel actually does instruct Ezra about “the way of the Most High” by means of analogies, and he also reveals to him many “signs” of the end times. Nevertheless, Ezra is not fully satisfied with the answers he receives in the dialogues. There is a good deal of maternal imagery in the dialogues, especially in the analogies Uriel uses to instruct Ezra. Three times in the first two dialogues, Uriel exhorts Ezra to “ask a pregnant woman” (4:40), “ask a woman’s womb” (5:46), and “ask a woman who bears children” (5:51). These rhetorical commands introduce analogies comparing the earth or the world to a

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childbearing woman and making a point about the divine plan of creation. Similarly, in the third dialogue, Uriel twice urges Ezra to “ask the earth” about which is more valuable, what is abundant or what is rare (7:54–57; 8:2), in order to justify the salvation of only a few. From the first analogy Ezra learns that the earth is “pregnant” with the souls of the dead (4:41–42), and when the appointed time comes, they will be reborn in the resurrection (cf. 7:32). An extended maternal metaphor in the second dialogue conveys the message that the present world is in decline, like a woman nearing the end of her childbearing years (5:50–55). Uriel also alludes to the birth story of Jacob and Esau (Gen. 25:19–26) to illustrate how quickly the age to come will follow upon the end of the present age (2 Esd. 6:7–10). The image of the earth as a mother also hovers in the background of Ezra’s own descriptions of the creation of Adam. Ezra’s very first words in the book describe this creation in an unusual way: “you [God] . . . commanded the dust, and it gave you Adam, a lifeless body” (3:4–5). The personification of the earth as Adam’s mother is stronger in two of Ezra’s exclamations in the third dialogue: “O earth, what have you brought forth?” (7:62) and “it would have been better if the earth had not produced Adam, or else, when it had produced him, had restrained him from sinning” (7:116). In response to Uriel’s insistence that “many have been created, but only a few will be saved” (8:3), Ezra offers an impassioned discourse on God’s involvement in human reproduction, expressing wonder at the processes of pregnancy, birth, and lactation (8:4–14). After reflecting on these processes, Ezra objects to Uriel’s comparison of people to seeds sown in the earth, not all of which come up and flourish (8:41–45). Although Ezra generally accepts the concept of Mother Earth underlying Uriel’s analogies, in this last example he seems to call it into question.

4 Ezra: The Vision of Zion (2 Esd. 9:26–10:59) By the end of the third dialogue, Ezra is still distressed that, as he puts it, “there are more who perish than those who will be saved, as a wave is greater than a drop of water” (9:15–16). In the central episode of the book, Ezra begins to undergo a transformation that is complete by the end of the sixth episode, at which point

he is “giving great glory and praise to the Most High for the wonders that he does from time to time” (13:57). The catalyst for Ezra’s consolation or conversion is his interaction with a mourning woman who is subsequently revealed to be Zion, after she is transformed into a glorious city before his eyes. Before that transformation, Ezra has no idea that he is talking to anyone other than an ordinary mother whose only son has just fallen dead on his wedding night (10:1). Ezra’s initial reaction to the mourning woman’s story seems callous, but his addresses to her crystallize the sources of his own grief. He argues that she has no right to mourn the loss of one son when “Zion, the mother of us all, is in deep grief and great distress” (10:7) and, moreover, the earth has seen “almost all” who have been “born of her . . . go to perdition” (10:8–11). Ezra projects his grief over the failure of nearly all human beings to keep the commandments, and hence to be saved, onto the earth. When the mourning woman is not persuaded that the earth has more cause to mourn than she does, he addresses to her his most emotional lament of the book, over the “adversities of Zion” (10:19–24). It is because of the depth of Ezra’s grief over Zion, Uriel says, that he is shown “the brilliance of her glory and the loveliness of her beauty” (10:50). The maternal imagery of the dialogues comes to a head in this central episode, in which there is a blurring of the identities of the mourning woman, Mother Earth, and Mother Zion.

4 Ezra: The Visions of the Eagle and the Man from the Sea (2 Esd. 11:1–13:58) The fifth and sixth episodes are dream visions, both loosely based on Daniel’s first dream, in Daniel 7. In the first case, the relationship to Daniel is explicit: the angelic interpreter explains to Ezra that “the eagle that you saw coming up from the sea is the fourth kingdom that appeared in a vision to your brother Daniel, but it was not explained to him as I now explain it to you” (12:11–12). The eagle is in fact a symbol for the Roman Empire (used by the Romans on their battle standards), and the various wings and heads (this is a three-headed eagle!) represent individual emperors and would-be emperors. Ezra witnesses the history of the Roman Empire in symbolic form (11:1–35), until a lion suddenly appears out of the forest and judges the eagle, leading to its apparently



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spontaneous combustion (11:36–12:3). In the interpretation of the dream, the lion is identified as the Messiah, whose role in the end time is to “judge” and “destroy” the Roman oppressors and then to “set free the remnant of my people” (12:33–34). A similar scenario unfolds in the second dream vision, in chapter 13. The “man” who comes up out of the sea in this vision is associated with the “one like a human being” in Daniel 7 by means of an allusion: he “flew with the clouds of heaven” (13:2–3; cf. Dan. 7:13). At the same time, the “man” is also presented as a divine warrior (13:4) and probably as a Davidic king (13:8–10; cf. Ps. 2; Isa. 11:1–9). The interpretation of the second dream makes clear that the “man” is the Messiah (“my son,” 13:32, 52; cf. 7:28–29), and his role of judging and destroying the attacking army (13:37–38) and protecting the remnant of God’s people (13:48–49) is very similar to that of the lion in the previous vision. In fact, the Messiah’s reproach of the enemy nations is symbolized in the vision by a stream of fire issuing from his mouth (13:10–11, 37–38), which helps explain the burning up of the eagle after it is judged by the lion. Another function of the Messiah in this vision is to gather to himself a peaceable multitude (13:12), which is explained in the interpretation as consisting of the northern tribes that were exiled by the Assyrians (13:39–45). In this account, they remained faithful to the covenant and will return to the Holy Land to receive the reward of the faithful in the messianic age (13:46–50). From a feminist perspective, these visions are interesting in that they envisage the overthrow of an oppressive imperial power without the use of military force. Although the eagle is violent and the other nations are depicted as an invading army, the Messiah is quite pointedly shown to conquer them through words of judgment, rather than weapons of war (see esp. 13:9, 37–38). Moreover, the multitude he gathers to himself is repeatedly called “peaceable” (13:12, 39; cf. 13:47). The visions also offer a more inclusive view of salvation than the dialogues, in which Uriel maintains that only a very few righteous individuals will be saved.

4 Ezra: The Restoration of the Scriptures (2 Esd. 14:1–48) The seventh and final episode of 4 Ezra tells a story that is only tangentially related to the

problems addressed in the rest of the book. The problem in this episode (mentioned in passing in 4:23) is that the Scriptures have been destroyed by the Babylonians along with the temple (14:21). This tradition is not biblical; it may have been invented by the author of 4 Ezra in order to elevate the importance of Ezra. The final episode also serves to establish a connection between the protagonist of 4 Ezra and the Ezra of Ezra–Nehemiah, who is “a scribe skilled in the law of Moses” (Ezra 7:6), who teaches the law to the people (Neh. 8). Now that Ezra has been consoled by the visions, he is depicted as a second Moses, taking charge of his people in exile and being inspired to dictate ninety-four books: twentyfour that are to be read by the people as a whole, and another seventy that are reserved for the wise (14:45–47). Twenty-four is a traditional number for the books of Scripture in rabbinic Judaism; seventy is a “complete” number, but it is not clear what the seventy books represent, although it seems that the author would include 4 Ezra itself among the books that are reserved for “the wise” (see 12:37–38). Although the exclusivity of the seventy secret books is not particularly appealing from a feminist point of view, it is worth noting that the idea of restoring the Scriptures comes from Ezra, and that he is motivated by a concern for “those who will be born hereafter” (14:20). The original ending of 4 Ezra, preserved in all the versions not dependent on the Latin, records that Ezra was “caught up, and taken to the place of those who are like him . . . and he was called the scribe of the knowledge of the Most High for ever and ever.” In other words, he was taken up to heaven alive and apparently continued to function as a scribe there. This ending is anticipated in 14:9. It was apparently removed from the Latin version when the last two chapters of 2 Esdras (6 Ezra), were added.

5 Ezra (2 Esd. 1:1–2:48) Although Ezra is once called a prophet in 4 Ezra (12:42), the notion that he is a prophet is developed more fully in 5 Ezra. At the same time, his genealogy (1:1–3) establishes that he is a priest, as he is in the canonical book of Ezra, in addition to being a scribe (Ezra 7:11). Like many prophetic books, 5 Ezra begins with God’s command to Ezra to declare Israel’s sins to them (1:5). Most of the first chapter is devoted to the

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contrast between God’s merciful acts toward Israel and Israel’s ingratitude and disobedience toward God. This is a familiar prophetic theme, but the Christian author of 5 Ezra draws a disturbing conclusion from it: God is rejecting Israel permanently and transferring their status as God’s people to “a people that will come, who without having heard me will believe” (1:35). Although this “people” is never identified explicitly, it is generally assumed to refer to Gentile Christians. On a more positive note, the author compares God’s love for Israel to that of a father, a mother, and a nurse (1:28) and continues with another maternal image for God: “I gathered you as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings” (1:30). The latter image is probably an allusion to the New Testament (Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34). There are a number of other parallels between 2 Esdras 1:28–37 and Matthew 23:29–39, including the motif of the killing of the prophets (2 Esd. 1:32; Matt. 23:30–35) and the desolation of God’s “house” (the temple; 2 Esd. 1:33, Matt. 23:38). The second chapter of 5 Ezra also makes extensive use of female personification. At first Jerusalem is personified as “the mother who bore [Israel]” who is “a widow and forsaken” (2:2; cf. Isa. 54:4–8). God then announces that “the kingdom of Jerusalem” will be given to God’s new people, the church (2:10). Subsequently, the prophet addresses the church as “mother” (2:15, 30) and “good nurse” (2:25). Fifth Ezra ends with an apocalyptic vision (2:42–48) that is reminiscent of Revelation 7:9–17 (cf. 4 Ezra 13:46–50): a “great multitude” gathers on Mount Zion, and the “Son of God” places crowns on their heads and palms in their hands (symbols of victory that came to be associated with Christian martyrdom).

6 Ezra (2 Esd. 15:1–16:78) Sixth Ezra begins abruptly, as if it were simply a continuation of God’s instructions to Ezra. Perhaps it had an introduction that was removed, along with the original ending of 4 Ezra (about Ezra being taken up to heaven), when 6 Ezra was attached to 4 Ezra. Sixth Ezra identifies itself as a prophecy (15:1), like 5 Ezra, and scholars have generally assumed that the author was also a Christian, because 2 Esdras as a whole was preserved only by Western Christians. There is no distinction in 6 Ezra between

Israel and God’s (new) people, however, and the author uses the exodus as a model for the coming redemption of God’s people (15:10–12) and emphasizes observing the commandments (15:24–25). While an apocalyptic text written in the third century is likely to be Christian, there is no definitive allusion that proves Christian authorship. Beginning in 15:28, the form and content becomes more apocalyptic, with mythic symbols like dragons, wild beasts, and storm clouds representing historical events, as in Daniel 7–12. The vision in 15:28–33 has been interpreted as referring to a battle that took place in the early 260s CE, which is the main evidence for dating this section of 2 Esdras. As in 4 Ezra (3:28–36) and Revelation 18, “Babylon” (15:46) almost certainly stands for the Roman Empire. The violent language of these chapters suggests that the author and audience experienced Roman imperial power as extremely oppressive. The oracle in 15:46–63 is directed against the Roman province of Asia Minor, criticizing it for adopting Roman customs. “Asia” is personified as a prostitute (15:55), but also as a mother who will be bereaved of her children (15:57, 63). The evocation of domestic violence in 15:51, “You shall be weakened like a wretched woman who is beaten and wounded, so that you cannot receive your mighty lovers,” is disturbing from a feminist perspective. This oracle is following a biblical tradition of female personification of the enemy that typically includes references to prostitution and sexual violence (cf. Isa. 47, Nah. 3, and Rev. 18). Perhaps even more disturbing is the language of 16:1–34, an oracle of doom against four nations that were included in the Roman Empire. The prophetic voice threatens that God will soon send calamities upon the whole earth, and both the human and the natural world will suffer desolation. The coming crisis is compared to birth pangs (16:38–39; cf. Matt. 24:8 and par.; 1 Thess. 5:3), because it is inevitable and will come suddenly. Another troubling feminine analogy occurs in the context of a warning to God’s people to “be like strangers on the earth” (16:40) in the last days. “Just as a respectable and virtuous woman abhors a prostitute, so righteousness shall abhor iniquity, when she decks herself out, and shall accuse her to her face” (16:49–50). The book ends with a warning to the elect against falling into sin in the “days of



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tribulation” that are coming (16:74–78). The final image comparing someone who has given in to temptation and doubt to a “field choked with underbrush” that will be “given up to be consumed by fire” (16:77–78) is reminiscent of the parable in Matthew 13:24–30, but a similar harvesting metaphor for the final judgment is found in 4 Ezra 4:28–32. While it is difficult to find a positive message in 6 Ezra, especially from a feminist perspective, it is worth noting that the author does not consider the salvation of the elect to be assured. Rather, they must be constantly on guard against temptation. At one point, the prophet voices his own anxiety about the last days: “Alas for me! Alas for me! Who will deliver me in those days?” (16:17). This lack of confidence about his own salvation connects the narrator to Ezra in 4 Ezra, and may arouse the reader’s sympathy.

Bibliography

Collins, John J. The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998. Hogan, Karina Martin.“Mother Earth as a Conceptual Metaphor in 4 Ezra.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 73 (2011): 72–91. Humphrey, Edith McEwan. The Ladies and the Cities: Transformation and Apocalyptic Identity in Joseph and Aseneth, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse and the Shepherd of Hermas. JSPSup 17. Sheffield: Academic Press, 1995. Longenecker, Bruce W. Second Esdras. Guides to the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Sheffield: Academic Press, 1995. Stone, Michael E. Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Book of Fourth Ezra. Hermeneia. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

Tobit Eileen M. Schuller

Introduction Tobit is one of the most popular and appealing books of the Apocrypha. A historical fiction about a pious Israelite and his family, it is a finely crafted narrative that speaks to fundamental religious questions about the suffering of the innocent and the justice of God. The book is not part of the Jewish canon, and there are few references to it in premodern Jewish sources. Five copies were found among the manuscripts recovered from the caves at Qumran, although it is impossible to know exactly what status the book had among the Jewish community that was responsible for the collection of manuscripts in these caves. It was popular in the Western church and was frequently quoted in various sources, beginning with the Didache; it seems to have been less well known and used in the Eastern church. Although Martin Luther, who adopted the Hebrew canon, did not consider it a biblical book, he praised it as “useful and good for us Christians to read.”

The Story Set in the late eighth and seventh centuries BCE, the story is of the pious Jew Tobit and his family, of the tribe of Naphtali, who have been taken to Nineveh as captives by the Assyrians. Two parallel scenes of distress are laid out, slowly brought together, and resolved. First, we see Tobit who, though a model of righteousness and virtue, is afflicted with blindness as a direct consequence of his good deed of burying the dead. Then we see the plight of Sarah, his niece, who is afflicted by a demon that has already destroyed seven husbands on their wedding

nights. Resolution comes as Tobit sends his son Tobias to a distant city in Media to collect some money owed him, and God provides a companion, the angel Raphael, who will save and heal both sufferers. Tobias meets Sarah and falls in love with her; thanks to the potion provided by Raphael, the power of the demon Asmodeus is destroyed, and the marriage consummated. After collecting the money, Tobias and his bride return home, where Raphael again supplies a potion that cures Tobit’s blindness. The book ends with a long hymn in praise of Jerusalem, and a brief recounting of the final years and deaths of the major characters.

Provenance and Date Nothing in the book allows us to establish the date or place of composition with any great precision. Certain features of the story, as well as the style of Aramaic in which it was written, suggest that it may have been composed as early as the fourth century BCE, or perhaps in the third or second century BCE. The generally confident sense that permeates the book, the assumption that it is possible (difficult perhaps, but possible) to live a full Jewish life in the midst of the Gentile world, suggests that the author had not had to confront the struggles and harsh persecution that marked the first half of the second century BCE. The place of composition is equally uncertain. It has often been assumed that the book was written in Syria or Mesopotamia, where Jews were living under Gentile rule. But Jews living in Palestine confronted many of the same

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issues around purity and family solidarity, and the book could have originated in a place like Galilee (especially given the interest in the tribe of Naphtali). The original language of composition was most probably Aramaic. Four copies in Aramaic (4Q196–199) and one copy (4Q200) in Hebrew were found in the Qumran caves; perhaps, like Daniel, this book circulated in both languages. The Dead Sea Scrolls copies are all very fragmentary; even with approximately sixty-nine fragments from five manuscripts, only about one-fifth of the original book is preserved. The only complete copies of the book are in Greek and Latin translation. Two versions of the Greek have come down to us: a shorter version in Codex Vaticanus and Codex Alexandrinus, and a considerably longer version in Codex Sinaiticus. This longer version is much closer to the Aramaic and Hebrew fragments, and thus is used as the basis of most modern translations (e.g., NRSV). In the fourth century CE, Jerome “devoted the work of one day” to translating an Aramaic version of the book into Latin, and this Vulgate translation became widely used and known. There is also an Old Latin version that predated Jerome and that he may have consulted.

Women in the Book Readers have often commented on the strong female element in this book. Sarah is a major character; her plight and prayer and deliverance provide one-half of the story, and she is clearly meant to be a counterpart to Tobit. But there are also a number of minor female characters, and all of them are more fully developed than most female characters in other biblical narratives. For example, in Genesis 22, Sarah is entirely removed from the picture when Abraham sets off with their son on their journey to the mountain; in contrast, when Tobit decides to send their son to a distant land, his wife Anna is very much present, weeping and lamenting and reproaching her husband (5:17–22). Tobit’s grandmother is the one who had taught the orphaned boy the law regarding the payment of tithes; although she is mentioned only once, her name, Deborah, is given (1:8). In Sarah’s house, her mother Edna not only interacts with her husband and daughter, but she is the first to question the unknown guests about their origin and background (7:3–5). Attention is paid

to both the men and women in even the smallest of details, for example, Tobias’s care to bury both his father and mother (14:11–12) and his father-in-law and mother-in-law (14:13). Tobit on his deathbed gives words of advice and instruction to his son, and as is typical in such “final testament” speeches, much of the advice is about women. The first five verbs of commands are with regard to his mother: honor her; do not abandon her; do what pleases her; do not grieve her; remember her, “because she faced many dangers for you while you were in her womb” (4:3–4). Endogamy, marriage within the family, is a value held in high esteem, and Tobias is admonished not only to marry a Jewish woman, but to take a wife who is specifically from his own tribe (4:12–13). However, the rhetoric about “the strange woman” (cf. Prov. 2:16–18; 9:13–18) and the graphic presentation of the dangers and snares of wicked women out to lead the innocent young man astray—a theme so common in many testaments from this period—is not part of the warning of father to son. The view of marriage in this book is surprisingly romantic: “she was set apart for you before the world was made” (6:18); “he loved her very much, and his heart was drawn to her” (6:18—though they have not yet met!). Tobias’s blessing on his wedding night is the earliest text we have that applies the creation story of Genesis 2 to the understanding of marriage: “Blessed are you, O God of our ancestors. . . . You made Adam and for him you made his wife Eve as a helper and support. . . . Grant that she and I may find mercy and that we may grow old together” (8:5–7). Yet the entire book is firmly set within the patriarchal family, and that worldview is never seriously challenged or critiqued. Male and female slaves are listed along with oxen, sheep, donkeys, and camels as possessions of Raguel that he gives to Tobias on his marriage (10:10). The figure of Sarah in particular illustrates the tension. On the one hand, as already noted, the narrator skillfully and carefully presents Tobit and Sarah as two parallel figures. The action takes place “on the same day” (3:7); both are pious and suffer unjustly; both are reproached by those around them (the words of Anna, in 2:14–15, and the maid of Sarah, in 3:8–9); both are saved by Raphael and his potion from the fish; even the cause of Tobit’s blindness from bird droppings may suggest the

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work of a demonic force associated with birds (Jub. 11:11) and thus a parallel to Asmodeus’s attack on Sarah’s husbands. Both offer extended prayers to God (3:1–6, 11–15) that focus on the reproaches they have suffered and propose death as a release. Yet the development of the characters Tobit and Sarah reveals the patriarchal outlook of the narrator and his society. For Tobit, concrete proof is given of his righteousness by his full enumeration of the concrete acts of piety upon which his reputation is based (1:5–11, 16–18; 2:1–5). For Sarah, on the other hand, all we hear is her own avowal, “You know, O Master, that I am innocent” (3:14), and her claim to innocence is linked explicitly to having preserved her virginity. In a number of places, Sarah is presented as having less knowledge than Tobias or than the reader of the narrative. For example, she does not seem to know of the existence of the male relative whom she could marry, although Tobias knows of her; it is not clear from her own words that

she knows that the demon Asmodeus is responsible for her plight. Sarah says little about her own emotions or reactions; even when driven to consider suicide, her concern is for the disgrace she will bring on her father in his old age (3:10). Although Sarah is present with the family when the guests arrive, she remains silent. Her father arranges the marriage; in contrast to the story of Rebekah and Isaac in Genesis 24, Sarah is never asked if she consents. When she is by herself, she speaks to God directly in prayer (3:11–15), but once she is with Tobias, she does not offer an independent prayer. Indeed, after Tobias appears on the scene, she does not speak again in the narrative except to answer “Amen” to his prayer on their wedding night. As the action draws to a close, the world of the narrative becomes increasingly male. Sarah and Anna are expressly excluded from the action at the moment of revelation when the angel Raphael tells his true identity (12:6), and there is no mention of Sarah’s death.

Comment Tobit’s Piety, Plight, and Prayer (Tob. 1:1–3:6) The first section of the book is centered on Tobit and details both his piety and his suffering. Tobit is the exemplar of virtue, fulfilling all the requirements of the law of Moses, even while living in a Gentile environment. His blindness is an undeserved suffering for which he can find neither explanation nor relief, and this section ends with his dramatic appeal for release from his suffering, “for it is better for me to die than to live” (3:6). In recounting how he kept the law, Tobit mentions explicitly his generosity to orphans, widows, and converts. He was acting “according to the instructions of Deborah, the mother of my father Tobiel” (1:8). That is, Tobit’s father had died and left him an orphan, and it was Deborah, his paternal grandmother, who had taught him. This detail is related in the specific context where Tobit is explaining how he has fulfilled exactly the complex regulations of the law concerning the giving of the three tithes. Apparently, Deborah was learned in such matters. Tobit took a wife from his own people, thus practicing the endogamy that he enjoins upon his

son (4:12–13): he married “a member of our own family” (1:9). In the best Greek manuscripts, she is not named here (although their son Tobias is), and she is introduced by her name, Anna, only later in the chapter. There seems to be an implicit contradiction between this first statement (1:20) that “nothing was left to me . . . except my wife Anna and my son Tobias,” and the later statement (2:1) that “my wife Anna and my son Tobias were restored to me,” but the text gives no clue as to whether some incident is presumed. It seems that Anna shared her husband’s piety, although this is not stated explicitly. She would have been the one who prepared the abundance of food on the table that allowed her husband to exercise hospitality by searching out the poor to join them at the table (2:2). The argument between Tobit and Anna is a puzzling incident (2:11–14). Being attacked by undeserved insults is one of the parallels between the sufferings of Tobit (3:6) and of Sarah (3:7, 13), but here Anna too suffers a similar fate, and the accusation comes from her righteous husband. Because of her husband’s blindness, Anna has gone to work “at women’s work,” that is, weaving cloth. This is understood as a part of Tobit’s suffering: the male is reduced

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to dependence on what the female can earn. (Cf. Sir. 25:22: “There is wrath and impudence and great disgrace when a wife supports her husband.”) Subsequently, the reader will learn that all this was really unnecessary, since there was money stored away in Media (4:1ff.). In a further heightening of the pathos, the blind Tobit does not know of the presence of the goat that his wife had been given until he hears it bleating. When he harshly accuses her of having stolen it, Anna utters the first words that we hear from her mouth to defend herself: “It was given to me as a gift” (2:14). The encounter ends with her having the last word, calling into question the very core of his charity and righteous deeds. Given the more favorable presentation of Anna everywhere else in the story, the reader’s sympathy is probably meant to be with her; perhaps the intent is to portray the righteous Tobit as a human, fallible figure, at the expense of his wife. The story may be influenced on some level by the even more acerbic encounter between Job and his wife (Job 2:9–10).

Sarah’s Piety, Plight, and Prayer (Tob. 3:7–17) The second scenario is parallel to the first, but much more concisely developed. In contrast to the first-person voice of Tobit that the reader encountered in 1:3–3:6, we meet Sarah through the words of the omniscient narrator rather than through her own words. Thus in this section there is often an ironic play between what the narrator (and the reader) knows, and what Sarah knows. The narrator describes Sarah’s plight and explains its cause as the work of the wicked demon Asmodeus, who has killed her seven husbands. Yet in her prayer it is not clear if Sarah knows the reason for her plight; she only talks explicitly of the consequences she has experienced: “Already seven husbands of mine have died” (3:15). Just as Tobit had to suffer his wife’s reproaches (2:14) and complained in his prayer, “I have had to listen to undeserved insults” (3:6), so Sarah is reproached by her own maid and accused of killing her seven husbands. This woman vs. woman attack is far more vicious than wife vs. husband. The single maid takes on the voice of many: “Why do you beat us?” (3:9). Anna attacked Tobit’s virtue (“acts of charity . . . righteous deeds,” 2:14); the maid attacks Sarah’s ability to bring forth new life and her very existence when she consigns her, in her childlessness, to the realm of her

dead husbands (3:8). Such reproaches become a major focus in Sarah’s response, as they did in Tobit’s prayer (3:6). Death will bring relief precisely because she will not have to listen to such reproaches any longer (3:10, 13), and the last phrase of her prayer returns once more to “their taunting of me” (3:15, my trans.). It is notable that she makes no response or denial to the charge of beating her servant. Although Tobit’s and Sarah’s states of grief are described in very similar terms (3:1, 10), only Sarah contemplates suicide as a response. The text does not condemn her for considering this option. She restrains herself, not for religious reasons, but out of concern for her father, specifically for his reputation, that he should not be reduced to suffering reproach as she has suffered. What is at stake is the honor of the male as patriarchial head of the family—no mention is made of what her death would mean to her mother. Sarah’s prayer is made “with hands outstretched” (a standard gesture for prayer) “toward the window,” perhaps implying toward Jerusalem (3:11). She prays in formal, liturgical language, beginning with the blessing formulary “Blessed are you.” This is the form that became the standard introductory pattern in many Second Temple and rabbinic prayers; it is the form used by Tobias on their wedding night (8:5) and in the thanksgiving prayer of Raguel (8:15). Tobit’s parallel prayer is somewhat more universal; he links his plight with that of the whole people, “my ancestors” (3:3–5). Sarah focuses on her personal innocence, and explicitly declares her virginity: “I am innocent of any defilement with a man” (and implicitly any hint or possibility of demonic sexual involvement). Tobit allows for only one option—death—while Sarah opens the way to other possibilities. She does not propose any concrete alternative resolution of the crisis, but allows that “if it is not pleasing to you to take my life,” God may hear her in some other way (3:15). Verses 16 and 17, which describe the reception of Tobit’s and Sarah’s prayers, tie both scenarios together and give the reader a preview of how the crisis will be resolved.

The Journey of Tobias (Tob. 4:1–7:9) Thinking that he is about to die, Tobit delivers his “last will and testament” to his son before sending him off on the journey to recover the

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money that had been left in trust in Rages in Media. Such deathbed testaments are common in Jewish literature of the period and treat a standard set of topics. The charge to take care of his mother (4:3–4) is given a prominent place, both in terms of length of discourse and as the first major item discussed; the dangers to the mother’s health in carrying a child through pregnancy are explicitly acknowledged. Perhaps because of the unmarried status of the recipient, the focus in the rest of the testament is less on sexual sin and more on the necessity of choosing a wife from his own people (4:12–13). The biblical stories relate how Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had chosen such wives; by including Noah as an example, Tobit may be drawing upon a tradition such as is found in the book of Jubilees that specifies that Noah married Emzara, his niece (Jub. 4:33). The immediate preparations for the journey, including the hiring of Raphael as a companion, conclude with a final farewell scene in which Tobias kisses his father and mother good-bye (5:17–6:1). Once again we find Tobit and Anna (unnamed in the Greek manuscripts) in conflict, now initiated by Anna’s implicit accusation that Tobit has put concerns for money above the welfare of her son. Unlike the earlier episode (2:11–14), this objection does not swell into mutual recriminations; rather, Tobit assures her of the boy’s safe return “for a good angel will accompany him” (5:22). The episode establishes Tobit as the dominant figure who can assuage his wife’s assumedly unnecessary fears, even as it reestablishes a tone of intimacy and affection between them (for the term “my sister” as an expression of affection for lover or spouse, see Song 4:9, 10, 12; 5:1, 2). On their way to Ecbatana, Raphael tells Tobias about his relative Raguel who has a daughter that Tobias is eligible to marry. Thus Sarah is reintroduced from the perspective of how she is seen by Raphael, just as in 3:7ff. she was introduced for the first time from the perspective of the third-person narrator. In the Greek text Raphael says simply (6:11) that Raguel “has a daughter named Sarah.” In the one Aramaic manuscript from Qumran that preserves this verse (4Q197 frag. 4 i 17) the text is “he has a beautiful daughter,” a reading also found in the Old Latin version. In a dramatic heightening of events, it is only on the very day that they are to reach

Ecbatana that Raphael tells Tobias about Sarah. Raphael marshals three distinct arguments in support of the proposed marriage: (l) legal right—Tobias is the one who has the legal right to marry her according to Mosaic law; (2) wealth—since she is without brothers, she will inherit her father’s possessions (Num. 27:1–11; 36:1–13); (3) Sarah’s own qualities—she is “sensible, brave, and very beautiful, and her father is a good man” (6:12). Beauty is an expected quality in a bride-to-be (cf. Sarah, Gen. 12:11; Rebekah, Gen. 24:16; Rachel, Gen. 29:17), but the qualities of sensibleness and bravery are not singled out in other stories. Again an Aramaic Qumran manuscript (4Q197 frag. 4 ii 1) has a slightly different final phrase, “and her father loves her.” When Tobias hesitates, out of fear for his life and because of the effect of his death on his parents, Raphael adduces a final clinching argument. In addition to the legal relationship, her wealth, and her personal characteristics, Raphael reveals that “she was set apart for you before the world was made” (6:18). The idea that God has determined from the beginning of creation the two people who are to marry each other seems to go beyond more general statements like that of Genesis 24:44, that “the Lord had appointed” Rebekah as Isaac’s wife. Perhaps it is closer to the view expressed in one of the regulations of the Damascus Document that a father is to give his daughter only to one who is “prepared” for her (4Q271 3 9). Ultimately, it is the fact that she is his kinswoman and that marriage to her would fulfill his father’s command that seem to be the determining factors in making Tobias love her “very much” (6:18), even before he has seen her. In the account of the arrival of Raphael and Tobias at the home of his future in-laws, there is some interesting variety in different versions of the text with regard to the female characters. In some manuscripts of the Greek, it is Sarah, surprisingly, who is sitting outside of the house and thus first meets and greets the travelers. Perhaps this is a secondary influence from biblical stories like Genesis 24:24 and 29:9, where Rebekah and Rachel move more freely in the public area; in the Aramaic version it is clear that it is Raguel sitting out in the courtyard. The Aramaic Tobit confirms that Edna takes the initiative to question the visitors (not Raguel, as in some Greek manuscripts).

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The Marriage (Tob. 7:9–8:21) Although this is one of the fullest accounts that we possess of how a marriage was arranged and celebrated in this period, it is simplistic to think that we can recover the precise details of actual Jewish marriage customs and halakic requirements from this type of narrative. There are factors here that are clearly out of the ordinary, including the absence of the groom’s parents and the haste of a single day, so that there is no period of betrothal. The giving of half the father’s wealth (8:21) to the husband (and nothing given to the daughter as a dowry) is completely without precedent, and it is probably a narrative flourish rather than a reflection of an established custom. The marriage is an arrangement between guardians (7:9): Raphael (as substitute for Tobias’s father) is to approach Raguel (Sarah’s father); there is no hint that Sarah or Tobias needs to meet or give consent (cf. Gen. 24:58, where Rebekah is asked specifically if she will go with the man). Raguel gives his daughter to Tobias with a simple declaration: “Take her to be your wife in accordance with the law and decree written in the book of Moses” (7:12). There is mention of a written document, a “marriage contract,” but again no technical, legal description of its content and intent. Since it is written by the bride’s father (not the husband), this is not the ketubah that became normative in later Jewish law. There is, in fact, considerable variation in different versions of the text in this verse; the shorter version of the Greek adds, “they [presumably both Raguel and Edna] set their seals to it.” After an emotional scene in which Edna brings her daughter to the bridal chamber and leaves her there with tears and admonitions to take courage, the actual magical rite of burning the fish’s liver and heart and the flight of the demon to Egypt are all quickly accomplished; the crisis is resolved expeditiously and in short order. Much more attention is devoted to the prayer of this wedding night. It is Tobias who utters the prayer, praying primarily as an individual (“I now am taking this kinswoman of mine” 8:7), although in the final petition he includes both of them (“grant that she and I may find mercy and that we may grow old together”). After the initial blessing formulary that is standard in most prayers of the book

(cf. 3:11; 8:15), the creation of Adam and Eve is retold in language drawn from Genesis 2:18, so as to draw an explicit parallel between the union of the first couple and this marriage that is now to be consummated. At the conclusion of the prayer, both answer, “Amen, Amen.” In fact, this “Amen” is the last word that Sarah will speak in the narrative. Only in the Latin, in the Vulgate version in 8:4–5, is there introduced the proposal of a three-day wait before the consummation of the marriage. Unfortunately, nothing of the text at this point is preserved from Qumran, but it is most likely that this was an interpolation introduced by Jerome that had its origin in Christian ascetic ideals. Considerable attention is paid to the women in the final tidying up of this segment of the story. An unnamed maid is sent in during the night to check on the newlyweds. In contrast to the dire predictions that a maid (the same maid?) had uttered earlier about what the future would hold for Sarah (3:7–9), now the maid becomes the one to bear the glad tidings that “nothing was wrong” (8:14). Edna is dispatched to bake many loaves of bread for the festivities (8:19). Tobias is called upon to rejoice in his new in-laws, for now “I [Raguel] am your father and Edna is your mother” (8:21). Sarah is strangely absent from the scene; she is encountered only indirectly when Raguel exhorts his new son-in-law to “cheer up my daughter who has been depressed” (8:20). It is not clear if her depressed state is understood to be a consequence of the traumatic experience that is now over or an anticipation of the prospect of leaving home.

The Return (Tob. 9:1–12:22) Juxtaposed in the midst of the description of the celebrations in Ecbatana and the final arrangements for the collection of the money is the contrasting scenario of what is happening back in Nineveh with Tobit and Anna. The pericope begins with a description of Tobit’s concerns and questionings (10:1–3), but it is Anna’s grief and anxiety that is highlighted (10:4–7) as she rushes out to watch the road by day and mourns and weeps sleeplessly by night. In the account of the final farewells and departure, the Greek text puts particular focus on Tobias’s concern for his blind father, whom he has left behind. However, the one Qumran

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Aramaic manuscript that is preserved at this point speaks of his concern at “how I have left them behind,” thus including both his father and his mother. Just as Tobit had given his son final words of exhortation before his journey (4:1–21), now his new in-laws give him their last words of advice. Particularly notable is Edna’s specific charge about how he is to treat his wife/her daughter: “Do nothing to grieve her all the days of your life” (10:12). Edna has no specific words for her daughter, who remains silent throughout the final departure. In the description of the homecoming, it is Anna who is sitting by the road and sees her son coming. The scene of the reunion of mother and son is clearly modeled on that of Jacob greeting his long-lost son (Gen. 46:29–30); like Jacob, Anna is ready to accept even death now that her son is home. Sarah does not intrude upon this scene, nor is she present for the wonderful restoration of Tobit’s sight, for she has been left further back, to approach slowly while Raphael and Tobias run ahead. Thus there is a separate moment of encounter between father-in-law and daughter-in-law, when Tobit blesses her and welcomes her into her new home (11:17). But Sarah and Anna are explicitly excluded from the final scene of revelation (12:6) when Raphael makes his real identity known (indeed Raphael never speaks directly to a woman). Thus this section concludes with the male characters blessing and praising God.

Hymn of Praise and Final Resolution (Tob. 13:1–14:15) It has often been questioned whether the long hymnic section in 13:1–17, particularly verses 9–17 with their specific focus on Jerusalem, was an intrinsic part of the book or a secondary addition. The evidence of the Qumran manuscripts establishes at least that it was part of the book from very early on, since portions are found in both Hebrew and Aramaic fragments. One of the functions of the chapter is to shift the focus of attention beyond this single family,

and to see their blessedness as a preview and pledge of the restoration of the whole people. In a book where so much attention has been paid to the female characters, it is perhaps fitting that we end with the restoration of Jerusalem, the city that is so often portrayed as a woman and mother (though this imagery is not highly developed in this poem). The final chapter ties up all the loose ends. The story began with Tobit performing the pious duty of burying the anonymous dead body; the book ends with his equally pious son performing the burial duties for his parents and his parents-in-law. The final sentences anticipate Tobias’s own death after the destruction of Nineveh; oddly enough, in this concluding section, no mention is made at all of Sarah or of her death. Bibliography

Bow, Beverly, and George W. E. Nickelsburg. “Patriarchy with a Twist: Men and Women in Tobit.” In Women Like This: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the GrecoRoman World, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 127–44. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Fitzmyer, Joseph. Tobit. Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature Series. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003. Levine, Amy-Jill. “Tobit: Teaching Jews How to Live in the Diaspora.” Bible Review 8 (1992): 42–51. ———. “Diaspora as Metaphor: Bodies and Boundaries in the Book of Tobit.” In Diaspora Jews and Judaism, edited by J. Andrew Overman and Robert S. MacLennan, 105–18. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992. Moore, Carey A. Tobit: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 40A. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1996. Ozten, Benedikt. Tobit and Judith. Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha Series. London: Sheffield Academic Press, 2002.

Judith Denise Dombkowski Hopkins

Introduction A pious widow beautifies herself, deceives the powerful enemy general terrorizing her people, and then beheads him. After being praised for her deeds, she retires to her estate once again to lead a celibate life. One of only four women for whom a biblical book is named (the others are Ruth and Esther in the Hebrew Bible and Susanna in the Apocrypha/Deuterocanon), the beautiful widow Judith has fascinated artists, writers, poets, and composers through the centuries. Their different interpretations of her as femme fatale, female warrior, feminist heroine, virtue personified, lying murderer, and saintly beauty have revealed more about their own times than about Judith herself. Judith was praised for her courage when the church was threatened by persecutions in the first century CE. As a type foreshadowing the Virgin Mary, Judith was honored for her chastity in support of a celibate priesthood. AngloSaxon interpreters valued her defense of her country, and the Renaissance produced portraiture and expensive bedroom and bathroom erotica of her. Judith was the queen of hearts in sixteenth-century French playing cards. Luther called Judith a “serious and brave tragedy,” yet Victorian England objected to Judith’s morals. She became a focus of nineteenth-century pornography. To interpret Judith today is not simply to determine whether Judith offers a positive or negative role model for women in her time or our own, but rather to recognize how she challenges all stereotypes. As she moves across the gender spectrum from widow to seductress to soldier, Judith subverts the presuppositions about gender that we bring to her text.

Though the book is not included in the Hebrew or Protestant canons, Judith became part of the Deuterocanon for Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians; Protestants place it in the Apocrypha. No ancient Hebrew or Aramaic manuscripts of Judith have been found; the early Christian church knew Judith through the Greek of the Septuagint. The book of Judith offers a popular example of the ancient Jewish novel in the Greco-Roman world between 200 BCE and 100 CE, when increased literacy among the upper classes (including women) and the rise of a class of merchants and bureaucrats created an audience that read for entertainment. Judith typifies the Jewish novel with its grand fictionalized sweep of history, depiction of dangers that threatened Jews as a group, and the predominance of a female protagonist who experiences the threat of her people. The novel eroticizes Judith’s beauty, which she uses as her weapon, unlike other biblical women, such as Sarah and Bathsheba, whose beauty makes them vulnerable. Yet Judith provides more than entertainment; she embodies and symbolically transforms the tensions of Jewish life, both on a national and personal level. On the one hand, she models Jewish identity in the Greco-Roman world by affirming traditional Israelite covenant theology: God puts people to the test, hears prayer, accepts sacrifice, and delivers God’s faithful people from foreign oppression. She also models traditional Jewish identity: prayer, keeping kosher, and affirming the centrality of the temple. On the other hand, Judith speaks like Woman Wisdom and takes charge, 383

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giving her people life (as Woman Wisdom does; Prov. 8:35) and challenging ideal conceptions of women in her time. Like Esther, Judith acts when Jewish males cannot. Her ambiguity invites multivocal interpretation.

Structure and Content The literary artistry of the book of Judith reveals itself in many instances of irony, suspense, double entendre, repetition, chiasm, and contrast, all of which serve to emphasize polarized gender stereotypes. Judith’s sixteen chapters can be divided into two balanced parts. The first seven chapters showcase men, war, and fear caused by the great army of King Nebu­ chad­ nez­ zar and his general, Holofernes, as they wage a campaign of conquest and revenge against the western nations of the Fertile Crescent, including Israel. By contrast, chapters 8–16 showcase women (Judith and her maid), beauty, and courage. Yet chapters 7–13 also form a coherent unit. These chapters are linked by drinking: the Jews thirst for water under siege (7:16–18), while Holofernes drinks too much wine (12:10, 20; 13:2); by the chronological framework of forty days; and by the theme of testing. Testing invites a comparison with Exodus 17 and suggests Judith’s role as a leader like Moses. When he expels the Ammonite leader, Achior, from the Assyrian camp for declaring that God will defend the Israelites if they have not sinned, Holofernes demands: “What god is there except Nebuchadnezzar?” (6:2). His theological question underscores the book’s central conflict: does power rest with Israel’s God or with the military might of Nebuchadnezzar? (see also 9:7, 14; 16:2, 5, 13, 17), a question arising often for Jews in the Greco-Roman world. The Bethulians under siege urge their leaders to surrender to Holofernes, believing that God has abandoned them because of their sins. Uzziah, a town elder, convinces them to hold out for five more days. Judith finally enters the story in chapter 8, when the suspense is at its peak; the people are “in great misery” (7:32) and ready to surrender. A threefold chiasm structures the story in chapters 8–16. First, a lengthy genealogy introduces Judith in chapter 8 (A). Second, summoning the town elders, she reproves them for putting God to the test, announces a secret plan, prays to God, and beautifies herself

in preparation for her journey (B). Finally, Judith leaves Bethulia with her maid (C), and is quickly captured by the Assyrians and taken to Holofernes’ camp, where she attends an intimate banquet and cuts off Holofernes’ head while he is “dead drunk” (13:2) (D). In reverse order, Judith returns to Bethulia with Holofernes’ head (C), meets with the elders and townspeople, gives instruction for the routing of the Assyrian camp, is praised in a victory celebration, and offers her own hymn of praise (B). Judith returns to her widowed seclusion and dies with honor (A). The beheading of the wicked Holofernes stands at the center of the chiasm, enveloped by the honorable Judith with her strategies and courage. The powerful Holofernes, who planned to seduce the helpless Judith, is instead seduced by her; he loses his head, figuratively and literally. Contrasts unite the book: men/women, war/ beauty, fear/courage, pagan/Jew. Irony permeates these contrasts and calls into question traditional binary oppositions. The Israelite men enjoy security behind their town walls and fortifications (7:32), while Judith and her maid leave that security in order to meet the enemy while the men watch (10:10). All the great victories of Holofernes’ army create a foil for Judith’s solitary, daring deed. Judith’s maid stuffs Holofernes’ head in her food bag (13:10), and Judith shows it to the Bethulians (13:15), while Achior faints at the sight of it (14:6) and the Assyrian soldiers flee in panic when they see that it is missing (14:18– 19; 15:1–3). The convert Achior provides a foil for both the pagan Holofernes and Judith; he switches roles with her in their new settings, as he befriends Bethulia and she kills in the Assyrian camp. Thematically and functionally, however, he is the mirror image of Judith the believer, not her opposite. The Ammonite Achior is a model character for non-Jewish readers, just as Judith is for Jewish readers. They both testify to the superiority of the Jewish God and Jewish beliefs in the pagan Greco-Roman world. In terms of Jungian psychology, Achior may also symbolize the Jewish psyche struggling with its shadow side (what it rejects or fears) in the midst of an identity crisis. Achior models separation from cultural norms and expectations in his conversion and comes to his true self, integrating animus (unconscious masculine characteristics in the female) and anima (unconscious female

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characteristics in the male). In this sense, his character may in fact be a model for Jewish readers facing the conflict of integrating traditional Jewish belief and practice with the cultural ethos of their Greco-Roman context.

Author, Date, and Canonicity Typical of the Jewish novel, historical inaccuracies abound in the first part of the book, inaccuracies that the audience would have understood as marking a fictional account. The book opens in “the twelfth year of the reign of Nebuchadnezzar, who ruled over the Assyrians in the great city of Nineveh” (1:1; see also 1:7, 11; 2:1, 4; 4:1). Yet Nineveh was destroyed in 612 BCE, before Nebuchadnezzar became king in 605 BCE; he ruled the Neo-Babylonian Empire from his capital city of Babylon. It is not possible that the Jews had just recently returned from exile and rebuilt their temple (5:18–19), since Nebuchadnezzar destroyed the temple in 587 BCE, and the temple was rebuilt between 520 and 515 BCE under the Persians, long after Nebuchadnezzar’s rule had ended. This technique recreates a virtual history that draws on and conflates Israel’s past under the Assyrians and the Babylonians and alludes to the profanation of the temple in 164 BCE by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, as well as the defeat of Alexander Jannaeus in 88 BCE by the Syrian Demetrius II. It does so in a free and playful (“ludic”) way to imagine a different, victorious outcome for Israel. Another fictional clue is the town of Bethulia, which is unknown. Since the novel’s concern is not historical, the reader is free to concentrate on what is really important: Jewish survival and identity in a Gentile world, and female survival in a man’s world. The anonymous author of Judith probably lived in Palestine, where most of the book’s action unfolds. Because 1 Clement, written in the first century CE, mentions Judith, the book had to have been written before that time, although exactly when is debatable. If the author correlates the virtual history in Judith with contemporary events, then Nebu­chad­nez­ zar may represent the Greek ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who persecuted the Jews after he assumed the throne in 175 BCE. Holofernes may represent Nicanor, the Syrian commander beheaded by Judas after the Maccabean revolt in 167 to 164 BCE; Nicanor’s army was totally

routed and his head displayed in Jerusalem (1 Macc. 7:33–50; 2 Macc. 15:35). Judith could also have been composed later during the Hasmonean dynasty (152–33 BCE), when the positions of high priest and ethnarch (civil leader) were held by one person (1 Macc. 14:41), which would explain why Joakim, the high priest in Jerusalem, gives military orders (Jdt. 4:6–8). Judith can be linked intertextually to 1 and 2 Maccabees, perhaps questioning Jewish selfdefinition among the Hasmoneans. In contrast to the forced circumcision carried out by the Hasmoneans, Achior converts by choice. Judith models ways to independent access of language taken over by political leaders. Most convincing is the argument for a date at the very end of the Hasmonean dynasty, during the reign of Queen Salome Alexandra (76– 67 BCE), just before the Roman Empire put an end to Judean independence in 63 BCE. Like Judith, Salome Alexandra was a widow who was loved by the multitude, organized a great army to defeat neighboring enemies, and died of old age. Pious like Judith, the queen’s piety was credited by the rabbis for miraculous harvests (Sifra Behuqotai 1:1; Lev. Rab. 35:10). Perhaps a Pharisaic circle produced Judith in the novelistic style of the time in order to promote the popularity of Queen Salome Alexandra, who granted the Pharisees so much authority during her reign. This honoring of a female leader would be in keeping with the increased significance of women generally in ruling circles during the Hellenistic period and their place in the historiography of the time (cf. Tomyris and Artemesia in Herodotus’s Histories and Salome Alexandra in the works of Josephus). At the very least, the book “textualizes” social elements associated with this period. It has been suggested that Judith is absent from the canon because of its theme of universalism, since Achior’s conversion (14:10) would be prohibited by Deuteronomy 23:3. Perhaps Jewish/Samaritan hostility kept Judith out; the town of Bethulia is described as in Samaritan territory (4:6). The possible association of the book of Judith with the Maccabean revolt and the festival of Hanukkah might suggest that Judith became unpopular when the Hasmonean dynasty ended. Feminists argue that Judith was simply “too radical” to be honored with canonical status. Her independent actions disturbed the status quo: she assumed

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a public, male role in Bethulia’s crisis, chastised the elders of Bethulia, and refused to remarry. Other feminists counter that Judith returns to her traditional role as widow at the end of the book, thereby subverting her challenge to

the male establishment. Nevertheless, Judith probably enjoyed a wide readership; its relatively late date may have prevented Judith from achieving the same status as the older books of Ruth and Esther.

Comment War, Women, and Children (Jdt. 1–7)

Judith Introduced (Jdt. 8)

Although men take center stage in the early chapters of Judith, women are not entirely absent. One can assume that among those who welcomed Holofernes as he marched along the seacoast were Phoenician women (3:6–7), since tambourines were used often by dancing females (see Exod. 15:20–21; Judg. 21:21; men and women dance with tambourines in 2 Sam. 6:5; Pss. 149:3; 150:4). As the terrified Jews prepare for Holofernes’ invasion, a sadly comical picture unfolds of all of the men of Israel “and their wives and their children and their cattle” putting sackcloth around their waists as a traditional sign of distress, mourning, confession, and petition (4:10–11; cf. Jonah 3:7–8). Women in Israel often carried out funeral rituals and sang laments for the dead (Jer. 9:17; 2 Chr. 35:25). The unison prayer of the men, women, and children of Jerusalem that their infants not be carried off and their wives not “be taken as booty” (4:12) acknowledges the vulnerability of women and children in war. If Judea were conquered by Holofernes, the women were sure to be captured, raped, and perhaps killed as the spoils of the winners. The women are part of the public “assembly” in Bethulia that questions Achior (6:16) and rebukes Uzziah (7:23–29). Yet Uzziah does not respond to the women; his word is “Take courage, my brothers” (7:30). Women are grouped in a traditional way with infants and youths who faint and collapse in the streets from thirst (7:22). At the end of chapter 7 the women and children are sent home, following Uzziah’s orders, while the men are posted on the walls and towers (7:32), thereby creating a backdrop to showcase Judith’s radical actions. Noteworthy is the fearmongering generated by Nebuchadnezzar’s violently graphic orders to the army in 2:5–13; the “other” is caricatured in this story as an irrational brute.

Judith is introduced abruptly in chapter 8: “Now in those days Judith heard about these things,” a summarizing reference to the first seven chapters. Judith’s genealogy, the longest of any biblical woman, ties Judith to ten of the twelve tribes of Israel, Hasmonean history, and Tobit and Susanna in the Deuterocanon. Given that Bethulia is in Samaritan territory, the genealogy may legitimize Judith as an authentic Jewish heroine. Judith’s tie to Jacob, the cheater and trickster, may foreshadow Judith’s own deception of Holofernes. Her genealogy also serves to halt the male war action and increase the suspense; everyone has surrendered to Holofernes up to this point, so that all resistance is concentrated in the figure of Judith. The name “Judith,” as a feminine form of the masculine name “Judah,” may be chosen so that her deeds can be tied to those of “Judah” the Maccabee in winning Jewish political independence (see 1 Maccabees). On the other hand, “Judith” also means “Jewess” and as such may function generically to represent the nation Israel, cowering before the onslaught of Holofernes. The community Israel was often personified by female figures such as the virgin (Lam. 1:15; 2:13; Jer. 14:17), harlot (Hos. 1–3; Ezek. 16), widow (Lam. 1:1; Isa. 54:4–8), and bride (Jer. 2:2–3; Hos. 2:15). One can question just how vulnerable Judith is and how fully she represents the nation as a whole or the other women of Israel. She is distanced from the men of Bethulia by her courage. Sackcloth links her with the other women (and men), but she soon removes it. Childless in a time when women were defined by their husbands and children, she has lived an almost ascetic existence in a tent on the roof of her house during the three years and four months (forty months) since the death of her husband, Manasseh, wearing sackcloth and widow’s clothing, fasting except on festival days (8:5–6).

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Yet she is also wealthy; she lives secure on her dead husband’s estate because of his generous bequest to her (8:7). As a wealthy widow, she is able to anoint herself with “precious ointment” and dress with a tiara, anklets, bracelets, rings, earrings, and other jewelry in order to entice Holofernes (10:3–4). She bathes herself with water, which she does not share with the thirsty women and youth who are fainting in the streets. Her wealth and widowhood give her the freedom to act boldly on Israel’s behalf in ways closed to most women of her time. Thus Judith’s identification with Israel and with other women is ambiguous at best. Her only worthy counterpart is God. Judith’s beauty also challenges her identification with other women. She is described as “very lovely to behold” (8:7) before her intentional beautification; after it, the elders, Assyrian soldiers, and Holofernes are dazzled by her (10:7, 14, 19, 23; 11:21, 23; cf. 16:7–9). Her piety also makes her superior: “No one spoke ill of her, for she feared God with great devotion” (8:8). The ambiguity of gender roles and her separation from other women emerges when Uzziah praises publicly her “true heart” and “wisdom” (8:28–29) but then immediately dismisses her rebuke of the elders for putting God to the test and directs her instead to pray for rain to fill the cisterns (8:31). Judith persists in pressing her plan upon the elders, demanding: “Listen to me. I am about to do something that will go down through all generations of our descendants. . . . [T]he Lord will deliver Israel by my hand” (8:32–33). Like the personified Woman Wisdom of Proverbs, she speaks with authority, using the formula that introduces instruction: “hear” or “listen” (Prov. 1:8, 20–21, 23; 5:1; 8:6, 32, 34). On the one hand, Judith seems to be an ideal woman for her time—beautiful, loyal, pious, intelligent, and initially silent—who remains in her house when she is widowed, leaves it only in this time of crisis, and returns to it after she is lauded for her victory. Her portrayal anticipates the respectability surrounding widows in early Christianity. On the other hand, she challenges the ideal by putting her unnamed maid “in charge of all she possessed” (8:10) and by wrapping herself in the mantle of Woman Wisdom to rebuke the town elders (who were summoned by her maid!) for promising to surrender. Judith boldly tells the elders

that what they have said to the people “is not right” (8:11); like Woman Wisdom, she speaks “what is right” (Prov. 8:6). She insists that “the Lord scourges those who are close to him in order to admonish them” (8:27), just as Woman Wisdom admonishes (Prov. 3:12; 9:8). In fact, Judith’s interaction with other characters suggests that the violence and deceit she employs to defeat Holofernes may not be a product of circumstances but “intrinsic” to her character. She manipulates people and vacillates between proclaiming her subservience to God and her own initiative. The book creates a dissonance between the reader and the characters in terms of our perception of Judith. God remains in the background in the story, while Judith pushes herself forward, challenging us to confront her complexity rather than to idolize her piety. Judith aligns herself with the famous men of Israel’s past. Like Moses (Deut. 6:16), Judith warns them against putting “God to the test today” (8:12). She invokes the memory of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob (8:26) and claims connection with the male elders when she exhorts them: “my brothers, let us set an example for our kindred” (8:24). Ironically, Judith speaks like Woman Wisdom to claim power that is not customarily hers; yet it is the wisdom tradition that preserves the status quo of the male elite with which she aligns herself. Binary oppositions are again muddled.

Judith’s Prayer (Jdt. 9) Judith may be separated from the men and women of Bethulia, but she draws close to God, offering her prayer “at the very time when the evening incense was being offered in the house of God in Jerusalem” (9:1). She prays to the God of her ancestor Simeon, who avenged the rape of the virgin Dinah (Gen. 34). Judith invokes her widowhood twice (9:4, 9) as a special warrant for God to listen to her prayer for success against Holofernes, for God is the God “of the lowly, helper of the oppressed, upholder of the weak, protector of the forsaken” (9:11). Despite her great beauty, wealth, and piety, which separate her from other women, Judith deliberately aligns herself with the traditional understanding of widows as weak and vulnerable in order to highlight God’s saving power. Yet again, however, this metaphor of vulnerable widow Israel is subverted when she refuses

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to name Dinah in her prayer and refers to her simply by the generic “virgin,” thus robbing Dinah of her personhood. She equates Dinah’s rape with the siege of Bethulia (which may be related to the Hebrew word for “virgin”), but Judith takes Simeon’s role as protector-avenger, not Dinah’s role as victim. In this role, Judith shows no empathy for the wives and daughters of the Shechemites who defiled Dinah (cf. Sisera’s mother in Judg. 5:28–30), even though she is in similar danger from Holofernes. She views them as booty to be divided among the winners, Simeon’s tribe (9:4). Judith appeals to “the Lord who crushes wars” and sends down retributive wrath (9:7, 9). She wants God to crush Holofernes’ arrogance “by the hand of a woman” (9:10; celebrated in 16:5), a shameful end that recalls Abimelech’s death (Judg. 9:53–54). In her prayer, Judith holds in tension weakness (in emphasizing her status as widow) and power (in calling for revenge). The God to whom she prays reflects this tension as refuge of the weak and warrior.

Judith’s Deceit (Jdt. 9–12) Judith twice prays that God will endorse her deceit (9:10, 13) so that Holofernes can be defeated. She lies outright to the Assyrian patrol when they encounter her (10:12–13). In Holofernes’ presence, Judith lies that her people are about to sin and incur God’s wrath by eating consecrated firstfruits and tithes (11:11–15), directly contradicting her own denial of the people’s sin as a reason for their plight (8:18– 19); she lies to him again in 11:17–18. In addition, Judith’s conversations with Holofernes are saturated with double meanings. She promises Holofernes that “I will say nothing false to my lord this night” (11:5), but “my lord” may refer to Holofernes or to God (as in 11:6 and 12:14), to whom she prays each night outside the camp. God will indeed “accomplish something” through Holofernes (11:6; also 11:16), but not what Holofernes intends. The night of the banquet “is the greatest day” in Judith’s whole life (12:18), not because Holofernes will seduce her, but because she will kill him. Rather than Woman Wisdom, as she was to the elders, Judith becomes the dangerous Woman Stranger to Holofernes (Prov. 7; 9:13–18). Among interpreters, Judith’s lying has been condemned as morally weak (she is no better than Holofernes, who lies in 11:1, 23) or

defended as necessary for the survival of underdog Israel and its covenant against the stronger power of Holofernes. In her defense, commentators compare her to Rebekah (Gen. 27–28), Tamar (Gen. 38), and the midwives, mother, and sister of Moses (Exod. 1–2), women who lied for the good of Israel. Rather than viewing lying as a particularly female trait used as a weapon by Judith, one can place Judith’s deceit within the pattern of deception tales as a whole that helped Israel to understand its threatened place in the world over against God’s promises. Judith lies so that all will come to “know and understand that you are God . . . and that there is no other who protects the people of Israel but you alone!” (9:14).

Judith Beheads Holofernes (Jdt. 13–14) The story of Deborah and Jael in Judges 4–5 may have provided the model for Judith’s beheading of Holofernes. Both stories involve a political struggle with a foreign power, end in a victory song, and focus on the motif of a woman’s hand: Jael “took a hammer in her hand” (Judg. 4:21; 5:26), and Judith declares that “the Lord will deliver Israel by my hand” (8:33; 9:13–14; 13:4, 14). Both Sisera and Holofernes are killed in tents, sustain a head injury, and drink (goat’s milk, wine) before they die. Sexual themes permeate both stories. Both Jael and Judith act on their own initiative, rather than upon God’s commission. The male leaders in the two stories, Barak and Uzziah, initially hesitate to listen to the women (Deborah and Judith). Interpretive responses to both women have often been negative. Jael is censured for violating the law of hospitality; Judith is censured for lying. Other models for Judith suggest themselves. Renaissance art paired Judith with David in his confrontation with Goliath (1 Sam. 17). Both the widow Judith and the young boy David symbolize the challenge of the lowly against the mighty and the subversion of cultural norms and expectations. Both arm themselves (with beautification and a slingshot, respectively), enter into a verbal exchange with the enemy, immobilize him, and bring dishonor to their foe by decapitating him. Another parallel is Abigail (1 Sam. 25). Beautiful and wealthy Abigail takes the initiative to approach David and warn him about avenging himself on Nabal, her husband. David praises her wisdom and the drunken Nabal later dies, struck down by God.

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Judith prays twice before slicing off Holofernes’ head, and her prayers express the tension in her role. The first time, she boldly asks God to “carry out my design” (13:5); the second time she simply prays, “Give me strength” (13:7). Artists have been particularly fascinated with the decapitation scene, for the loss of Holofernes’ head and sword represent symbolic castration. Upon Judith’s return to Bethulia, Uzziah does not dismiss her, as he did in 8:31. Instead, he blesses her, and the people worship the God they thought had abandoned them (13:17). One more time Judith instructs the townspeople, “Listen to me” (14:1), as she outlines her plan to take advantage of the certain Assyrian panic when they find Holofernes with his head missing. When Achior meets Judith to identify Holofernes’ head, he faints, highlighting her courage in slicing it off (14:6). Judith is clearly in charge; the men of the story fade into the background.

Victory and Praise (Jdt. 15–16) After the Bethulians plunder the Assyrian camp, the high priest, Joakim, comes to bless Judith (15:8–10), and she is given the plunder from Holofernes’ tent. Through Joakim’s blessing, God endorses what Judith has done. She does not keep the plunder, but dedicates it to God (16:19), following the practice of herem (the “ban,” i.e., dedicating the spoils of war to God) in the book of Joshua, and the prerogative of kings in the period of the monarchy (1 Sam. 25–30). Joakim’s blessing and the ban stand in tension with the idea that Judith’s subversion of gender roles is so threatening to Israelite society that she must give up the tokens of her leadership in the public sphere. With her offering she may consciously be taking her place publicly alongside the priests, or simply indicating that she has no need of Holofernes’ wealth, since she is already a wealthy widow. Like Miriam (Exod. 15:20), Judith leads all of the women in the dance, crowned with olive wreaths, while “all the men of Israel followed” (15:13). Here women take the lead; before, they had followed men’s orders and separated themselves from the action. Just as the songs women sang to David after his victory over Goliath angered Saul (1 Sam. 18:6–9), the dancing may have taunted the men of Bethulia. Judith’s praise psalm in chapter 16 may be modeled on the Song of Moses (Exod. 15) or

the Song of Deborah (Judg. 5). Judith herself emphasizes how unusual her murderous act was (16:6); beauty, not strength or youth, struck down Holofernes. Is this, as well as her refusal to marry (16:22), a reinforcement of traditional gender roles and a domestication of Judith, or a way of preserving her own autonomy as a wealthy widow by highlighting her uniqueness? Judith may not have changed the gender situation in Israel (each man goes home to his own inheritance after the celebration in Jerusalem, 16:21), but she certainly enhanced her own situation: “for the rest of her life she was honored throughout the whole country” (16:21c). Her burial in the cave of her husband, Manasseh (16:23), does not necessarily signify her conformity with the traditional wifely role; her relationship to her husband was significant in the story only because he was dead, and his wealth and absence allowed her the freedom to act boldly on Israel’s behalf. Judith’s story ends with the affirmation: “No one ever again spread terror among the Israelites during the lifetime of Judith, or for a long time after her death” (Jdt. 16:25), an echo of the Deuteronomistic Historian’s cycle of history (“the land had rest for forty years,” Judg. 5:31). Judith’s identification with the judges speaks positively of God’s saving power for a faithful people in crisis and negatively of the anticipated breakdown of the cycle of history and Israel’s descent into chaos at the end of period of the judges, perhaps foreshadowing the end of Queen Salome Alexandra’s reign, when the Hasmonean dynasty ends and Rome asserts control.

Observations The story of Judith is steeped in gender tension that generates contradictory interpretations. Because Judith is central to the plot, some feminists consider her a role model, while others consider her return to widowhood at the end of the story a sign of her domestication. Judith as Woman Wisdom seems to challenge patriarchy, but her seduction of Holofernes seems to demean women and frighten men with a negative stereotype of dangerous beauty and deceit. As a violently aggressive female warrior, Judith is censured because she identifies too closely with male traits and values, and lauded by others for shattering female stereotypes. Perhaps Judith transcends masculine and feminine

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altogether as archetypal androgyne, asexual at the beginning and end and merely playacting seductress and assassin in the middle. As female warrior, Judith may represent a reversal of the exodus rescue story in which the male hero (the Lord) rescues a female figure (Israel) from captivity. Because Judith credits God for her victory (11:16; 12:4; 13:14; 16:5), she appears to some as the weaker helper/seducer for the male hero God, serving the interests of the male characters and thus antiwoman. Yet piety is not necessarily a sign of weakness. On the other hand, Judith manipulates people to see her as she wants to be seen, putting readers on their guard about her piety. The complex ambiguity of Judith’s character helped Israel to deal with its uncertain situation in the GrecoRoman world. She is more complex, perhaps, than modern readers would like, but this is what makes the book bearing her name such an entertaining and challenging one. Judith’s complexity cautions us not to diminish her with a one-dimensional reading. Bibliography

Brine, K., E. Ciletti, and H. Laehnemann, eds. The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across

the Disciplines. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010. Craven, Toni. Artistry and Faith in the Book of Judith. Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series 70. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1983. Day, Linda. “Faith, Character and Perspective in Judith.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha (2001): 71–93. Eckhardt, Benedikt. “Reclaiming Tradition: The Book of Judith and Hasmonean Politics.” Journal for the Study of Pseudepigrapha 18, no. 4 (2009): 243–63. Efthimiadis-Keith, Helen. The Enemy Is Within: A Jungian Psychoanalytic Approach to the Book of Judith. Leiden: Brill, 2004. Esler, Philip. “Ludic History in the Book of Judith: The Reinvention of Israelite Identity.” Biblical Interpretation 10, no. 2 (2002): 107–43. Paterson, Dilys. “Remembering the Past: The Purpose of Historical Discourse in the Bible.” In The Function of Ancient Historiography in Biblical and Cognate Studies, edited by P. Kirkpatrick and T. Goltz, 11–123. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2008. Wills, Lawrence. “The Book of Judith.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, 3:1073–183. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999.

Judith and Her Interpreters Nicole Tilford

Though many scholars believe the book of Judith was originally written in Hebrew, no extant Hebrew version survives; it is one of the books included in the Septuagint (Greek) version of the Old Testament. The character of Judith is absent in much of early Jewish literature: the Dead Sea Scrolls (ca. 150 BCE–68 CE) make no mention of her; Philo (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE) and Josephus (ca. 37 CE–100 CE) do not include her in their writings; and she does not appear in the stories of the Mishnah, Talmud, or other early rabbinic sources. Yet, beginning in the late first century CE and continuing well into modernity, the figure of Judith has captured the minds of Christian and Jewish interpreters alike. Her story has inspired a plethora of artistic renditions—commentaries, dramas, artwork, architecture, political pamphlets, musical compositions, and even playing cards. Although each of these interpretations reflects the particular concerns of the time and community in which it was produced, as a whole they tend to focus on the figure of Judith as either an (1) exemplar of chastity and virtue, (2) a triumphant liberator, or (3) a positive or negative sexual entity.

Judith as Chaste Exemplar In early Christian interpretation, Judith is esteemed primarily as an exemplar of chastity, lauded alongside such individuals as John the Baptist, the Virgin Mary, and Susanna (e.g., Tertullian, De Monogamia, late second to early third c.). Her chastity and devout prayer life after her husband’s death lead some commentators to declare Judith an example for all widows to follow (e.g., Apostolic Constitutions, third c.), while her purity in the camp of Holofernes proves a similar model for men (Ambrose, De virginibus, fourth c.). Jerome (late fourth to early fifth c.) declares Judith a “paradigm” of chastity for men and women alike. He and his near contemporary Prudentius (Psychomachia, fourth c.) extol Judith as Chastity incarnate, whose sword pierces the breast of Lust.

Early and medieval interpreters allegorize Judith’s chastity to transform her into a “type” for the Virgin Mary, Jesus, or the Christian church. Clement of Alexandria (Stromata, second c.), for instance, labels Judith a type for the church, who cuts off the head of Satan. Likewise, in tombs, church architecture, and illuminated manuscripts, Judith crushes the head of her enemy under her heel, just as the virgin crushes the serpent in Revelation (e.g., Judith frescos in Santa Maria Antiqua, Rome, eighth c.; Speculum Humanae Salvationis, fourteenth c.). Similarly, the captions for Herrad von Landsberg’s Hortus Delicarum (twelfth c.), an illuminated encyclopedia for the training of religious novices, identify Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes with Jesus’ human nature conquering Satan. Well into the twentieth century, such commentators as A. Deprez (“Le Livre de Judith,” 1962) and Brian McNeil (“Reflections on the Book of Judith,” 1978) equate Judith with Jesus, the Christian church, and Mary. Other interpreters expand these themes, transforming Judith into an exemplar of wisdom, marital integrity, and virtue par excellence. In the Tale of Melibee, Chaucer (fourteenth c.) casts Judith as “Good Counsel,” thereby exemplifying her as a Wisdom figure. Because of her chastity, the widowed Judith becomes a symbol of marital fidelity, especially among sixteenthcentury Protestants of northern Europe (e.g., Helen Branch, “Virtuous Life and Godly Death,” 1594; household decor such as ceramic tiles, tapestries, and carved armoires). A popular series of tapestries from the sixteenth century depicts Judith as Fortitude, and the twelfth-­ century Speculum Virginis, a guide for women pursuing a religious life, depicts Judith as Humility.

Judith as Triumphant Liberator Alongside images of Judith as chaste female stand depictions of her as a triumphant liberator, freeing her country from a ruthless invader. As early as 1 Clement (late first c.), Judith’s 391

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“manly” courage and godliness identify her as the praiseworthy savior of her people. Beginning in the ninth century, illuminated biblical texts frequently illustrate the initial letter of the book with a vignette of Judith beheading Holofernes, thereby emphasizing her courage and strength over her chastity. Throughout history, artists continue these associations, frequently depicting Judith in sculpture, paintings, architecture, stained glass, manuscripts, and tapestries decapitating Holofernes or standing with upraised sword holding his head (e.g., “Judith with the Head of Holofernes,” stainedglass window, Cathedral of Saint-Pierre-etSaint Paul de Troyes, twelfth to fifteenth c.;

Ghiberti, “Gates of Paradise,” bronze panels, fifteenth c.; Caravaggio, “Judith Beheading Holofernes,” oil painting, seventeenth c.). For many commentators, Judith’s courage prefigures contemporary leaders. Early promonarchial literature, for instance, identifies Judith with the contemporary queen as a way to emphasize the monarch’s power to protect her people. Thus Hrabanus Maurus (ninth c.) commemorates the Carolingian empress Judith as her namesake’s reincarnation. Likewise, when the Vikings invaded England around 1000 CE, Judith’s courage became a model of valor and hope for local lords and their ladies; the latter often had to manage their territories in their

Judith holds the head of Holofernes in one hand and his sword in the other in an initial letter C from Ecclesiastica historia by Matthias Flacius Illycrius (1520–1575).

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husbands’ absence (e.g., Judith, Nowell Codex, tenth c.; Ælfric, On the Old and New Testament, late tenth to early eleventh c.). By the sixteenth century, Judith’s regal association was common enough that the queen of hearts in French playing cards was typically identified as Judith. Other commentators view Judith as a model of resistance, a tyrannicide who could free her people from the oppressive and morally corrupt ruling body. Medieval Jewish commentators connect Judith’s ability to save her people to Hanukkah, a festival commemorating the triumph of the Hasmoneans during the second century BCE (e.g., Megillat Yehudit, ca. 1402; Judith midrashim, eleventh–sixteenth c.; Hanukkah lamps, eighteenth c.). At least two Jewish liturgical poems contain similar interpretations, drawing upon the story for the first and second Sabbaths of Hanukkah (Joseph ben Solomon of Carcassonne, Odecha ki anafta, eleventh c.; Menachem ben Machir of Ratisbon, Ein Moshia veGoel, twelfth c.). In fifteen-century Christian Florence, Donatello’s bronze statue depicting Judith’s decapitation of Holofernes becomes a similar symbol of civic pride and resistance to oppression after the popular expulsion of the Medici family; its accompanying inscription proudly proclaims: “Kingdoms fall through Luxury; Cities rise through Virtue: Behold the Neck of Pride severed by the hand of Humility.” During the Reformation, Judith continued to be a prime image of resistance and revolt. Guillaume de Saulluste du Bartas uses Judith as a symbol of French Protestant resistance to the Catholic monarchy, with such leaders as Jeanne de Navarre and Marguerite de Navarre each being understood as Judiths (Judit, 1574). Du Bartas’s influential poem inspired other Protestants across Europe to develop this topos, such that Judith frequently appears as a symbol for the Protestant Reformation in the visual arts (e.g., Maerten Jacobsz van Heemskerck, “Judith Slaying Holofernes,” engraving, ca. 1564), popular dramas (e.g., Holofernes, 1572), and political pamphlets (e.g., Martine Mar-Sixtus, 1591). The prevalence of Judith in Protestant interpretation may also help explain the popularity of her image in the iconography of lockets, embroidery, and drinking vessels of the time. Counter-Reformationists responded by co-opting Judith for their own propaganda. The Jesuits, for instance, produced at least ten plays between 1565 and 1654 casting Judith as the Catholic Church and the Protestants as the

tyrannical Holofernes. Iconography and ballads praise Mary I as the chaste and wise Judith who liberated her people from the tyrannical Protestants (e.g., “Ave Maria in Commendation of our Most Virtuous Queen,” ca. 1553). Similarly, contemporaries declared Joan of Arc a “second Judith” (e.g., Pierre Le Moyne, La Gallerie des femmes fortes, 1647). Eventually the Protestants abandoned their appropriation of Judith, either because of her apocryphal designation, her close associations with Mary, or the CounterReformationists’ adoption of her. Following the Second World War in the twentieth century, the portrayal of Judith as liberator became prominent once more, especially in pro-Zionist circles. Novels (e.g., André Schwarz-Bart, The Last of the Just, 1959), ballets (e.g., Martha Graham, Judith, 1962), and films (e.g., director Daniel Mann, Judith, 1965) draw upon the image of Judith as a means to confront the horror of the Holocaust and to justify the political and military action of the Israeli state. Judith thus became a symbol of Judaism more broadly, while her story acted as a model for the self-preservation of Israel.

Judith: Femme Fatale or Feminist Hero? The Greek text presents Judith as not only chaste and triumphant, but also exceedingly beautiful. Indeed, her sexual appeal functions as one of the primary weapons by which she defeats Holofernes. This theme did not escape commentators. For good or ill, Judith’s beauty became a subject of intense discourse. While medieval artists focus on Judith’s virtues, Renaissance interpreters transform Judith into a popular erotic image. Renaissance paintings, for instance, often depict her in the nude at her bath or toilette. Although nudity was in keeping with artistic conventions of the time, the depiction of Judith’s beautification process emphasized that her power as a conqueror came from her sexual prowess (e.g., Jan Metsys, Judith, sixteenth c.). Commentators like Joseph Swetnam underscore this message, listing Judith as one woman among many who ruined important historical or biblical men through their feminine wiles (The Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, 1615). Judith thus becomes a warning to men against the dangers of feminine beauty. Similarly, paintings juxtaposing the youthful Judith with an aged crone warn against vanity and the

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transience of youth (e.g., Berndardo Strozzi, Judith with the Head of Holofernes, seventeenth c.). On the other hand, because of the strong sexual connotation of Judith imagery in this time period, Venetian courtesans like Laura da Dianti (sixteenth c.) happily embraced and capitalized upon this imagery, commissioning portraits of themselves in the likeness of Judith

in order to attract clients. Whether displayed in bedrooms, bathhouses, or the antechambers of brothels, such paintings simultaneously transform Judith into an advertisement of female beauty, a warning about the allure of women, and a caution against female vanity. Some interpreters of the time attempted to use Judith as a positive symbol of female

A victorious Judith displays her trophy in Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, an engraving by Gustave Doré (1832–1883) that was published in The Holy Bible containing the Old and New Testaments, according to the authorised version (London: Cassell, 1866).

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strength. Margaret Fell, for instance, draws upon the figure of Judith to argue for the spiritual equality of men and women (Womens Speaking Justified, Proved, and Allowed by Scriptures, 1666). Likewise, Artemisia Gentileschi (seventeenth c.) finds in Judith a psychological release from the restrictions of male-dominated society and the rape she experienced as a young woman. However, in the late 1800s to early 1900s, Judith interpretations became increasingly morbid and misogynistic. The influential play by Friedrich Hebbel (Judith, 1840) depicts Judith as a conflicted woman, left as a virgin by her first husband and consumed by her desire to kill Holofernes and to be dominated by him. The play only ends when Judith, pregnant by her encounter with the general, is “refeminized” into Hebbel’s vision of the “proper” female. Drawing upon this play, Freud (late nineteenth to early twentieth c.) finds in Judith proof of “female hysteria”; her symbolic castration of Holofernes arises from penis envy and the taboo of virginity. Novelists like Leopold Sacher-Masoch (Venus in Furs, 1870) and artists like Gustav Klimt (Judith I, 1901; Judith II, 1909) depict Judith as a sadistic mistress, reveling in Holofernes’ death. In the twentieth century, modern feminists began to reclaim Judith. Now holding a gun, Hollywood’s Judith stands alongside her male counterparts to defend herself and her country (e.g., director H. Zieff, Private Benjamin, 1980). In novels, Judith figures become common heroines in romantic fictions (e.g., D. Orridge, A Girl Called Judith, 1988) and a symbol of feminist awareness and autonomy (e.g., Aritha Van Herk, Judith, 1978). Among scholars and theologians, Judith becomes a strong female authority, who theologically outmaneuvers men in their interpretation of God’s will (e.g., Elisabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza, In Memory of Her, 1983). Without divesting her of her sexuality, these modern interpreters find in Judith a model for

the contemporary woman: wise, beautiful, and in control of her own destiny. Whether as a model of chastity, a triumphant liberator, or a sexual being, the figure of Judith has captivated interpreters throughout the centuries. For artisans, commentators, filmmakers, and musicians, she exemplifies the contradictory potentialities of humankind, male and female alike, to be beautiful and intelligent, powerful and dangerous, pious and bold. A simple Jewish widow, Judith defies the limitations of her station and grows to embody the vast possibilities inherent in humanity. Bibliography

Bal, Mieke. “Head Hunting: ‘Judith’ on the Cutting Edge of Knowledge.” In A Feminist Companion to Esther, Judith, and Susanna, edited by Athalya Brenner, 253–85. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995. Brine, Kevin, Elena Ciletti, and Henrike Lähnemann, eds. The Sword of Judith: Judith Studies across the Disciplines. Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2010. Elder, Linda. “Transformations in the Judith Mythos: A Feminist Critical Analysis.” PhD diss., Florida State University, 1991. Radavich, David Allen. “A Catalogue of Works Based on the Apocryphal Book of Judith, from the Mediaeval Period to the Present.” Bulletin of Bibliography 44 (1987): 189–92. Stocker, Margarita. Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Stone, Nira. “Judith and Holofernes: Some Observations on the Development of the Scene in Art.” In No One Spoke Ill of Her: Essays on Judith, edited by James Vanderkam, 73–93. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992.

The Greek Book of Esther Adele Reinhartz

Introduction The Greek Book of Esther is one of several Hellenistic Jewish novels contained in the Apocrypha. It is distinguished from other books in this genre, such as Tobit, Judith, and Susanna, in that it has a counterpart in the Masoretic Text of the Hebrew Bible (MT). The Greek and Hebrew versions of Esther have a number of features in common, including the characters and many details of setting and dialogue. They also tell a similar story. An extravagant and rather foolish Persian king disposes of one wife and holds a beauty contest to acquire another. The winner is a young Jewish woman named Esther, whose guardian, Mordecai, becomes a courtier in the process. The villain of the piece is the king’s vizier, Haman, who, feeling slighted by Mordecai the Jew, manipulates the king into issuing an edict of destruction against the Jews. With great drama, the plan is thwarted by Esther, the Jews have their revenge, and the celebration of the feast of Purim is instituted. The Greek version of Esther’s story is based on a translation of a Hebrew original that is similar but not identical to the MT. It is possible that this Hebrew original postdates the MT, though this cannot be determined with certainty. In addition to numerous minor differences, Greek Esther differs from MT Esther in two significant ways. First, Greek Esther contains six major narrative segments not found in the MT. These segments, usually referred to as Additions, or, occasionally, Expansions, frame as well as amplify the basic story outlined above. Second, Greek Esther contains more than fifty references to God, both in the additions and in the body of the story itself. This contrasts

with Hebrew Esther, in which God is never mentioned explicitly. These changes, while not altering the basic plot, influence the reader’s interpretation. By introducing and emphasizing the notion of divine agency, Greek Esther places its own particular story in the larger context of the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. The additions to the Hebrew story modify the characterization of the central figure, Esther, and focus the reader’s attention on her relationship with her guardian Mordecai. The additions also add a dark humor and irony to the story, though in other respects Greek Esther eliminates some of the exaggeration that is a source of humor in the MT. Although novelistic tendencies are already present in the MT, Greek Esther has many elements in common with the Hellenistic Greek novel: a chaste and righteous female protagonist who uses wile and wit to vanquish the villain; numerous changes of clothing that signal changes in scene; the theme of love and undercurrent of erotic tension; and a happy ending after a reversal of fortune. The six major additions are as follows:

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A. Mordecai’s dream and the plot of the two eunuchs against the king (11:2–12:6) B. The text of the king’s edict authorizing the destruction of Persian Jewry (13:1–7) C. The prayers of Mordecai and Esther for averting the tragedy (13:8–14:19) D. Esther’s unauthorized approach to the king, which puts in motion the plans of Esther and Mordecai to save the Jews (15:1–16)

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E. The edict reversing the decree of destruction (16:1–24) F. The interpretation of Mordecai’s dream, followed by the scribe’s concluding note (or colophon) about the origin of the manuscript (10:4–11:1) Additions A and F frame the body of the story, while the other additions are inserted into the flow of the narrative and amplify elements present in Hebrew Esther. All the additions are secondary to the body of the text and were not present in the Hebrew version from which Greek Esther was apparently translated. Though no Hebrew parallels exist for the additions, their imagery and literary style suggest that Additions A, D, and F were composed originally in Hebrew, and Addition C in Aramaic. Additions B and E were likely originally Greek compositions, perhaps created by the one who translated the rest of the book from Hebrew to Greek. These latter two additions also exhibit some striking similarities to the apocryphal book of 3 Maccabees, prompting suggestions that their author drew directly from that book. All six additions, whether originally composed in Hebrew or in Greek, reflect the issues and concerns of Diaspora Jewry. Their numbering in the Septuagint, which is adopted in this commentary (as in the NRSV), stems from their placement at the end of the canonical portion of Jerome’s Latin translation (ca. 404 CE). The additions are considered to be “deuterocanonical” by the Roman Catholic Church and “apocryphal” by Protestant churches. The latest possible date for Greek Esther is about 93–94 CE, when the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus used Additions B, C, D, and E in his paraphrase of the Esther story. A more precise dating, however, may be suggested on the

basis of the colophon, which is found at the conclusion of Addition F in the Septuagint version of Greek Esther. (The colophon is absent from a second Greek version of the book, generally referred to as the Alpha Text or AT Esther.) The colophon claims that the Greek translation of Esther was brought to Egypt by a priest and Levite named Dositheus in the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra. This reference narrows the field to the eras of those Ptolemies who had wives named Cleopatra and reigned for at least four years. Candidates are Ptolemy VIII Soter II (ca. 114 BCE), Ptolemy XII (ca. 77 BCE), and Ptolemy XIV (ca. 48 BCE). Although the identity of the royal couple is impossible to discern with any certainty, this list places the book in the late second or early first century BCE. Of course, this calculation is valid only if the colophon is genuine, an assumption that is open to question, given the imaginative nature of the book as a whole. Nevertheless, considerations of style and genre also support this dating. The royal edicts, Additions B and E, may stem from a major Jewish center in the Diaspora, such as Alexandria, though this is not certain. Their formal content and language impart an aura of authenticity and historicity to the story, while their allusions to contemporary events allow readers to see their own times and circumstances reflected in this book. The other additions may originally have been composed in Palestine and later incorporated into the overall narrative; the theology expressed in these additions is similar to that of other Palestinian texts of this period, such as Judith and the Qumran writings. The content and emphases of the book as a whole, however, reflect the concerns of a Diaspora Jewish community attempting to define appropriate behavior and attitudes amidst a Gentile majority.

Comment The following comments on Greek Esther refer to the Septuagint version, as translated in the NRSV.

Addition A: Mordecai’s Dream (Gr. Esth. 11:2–12); the Eunuchs’ Plan (Gr. Esth. 12:1–6) Addition A functions as a preface to the story proper. It begins by introducing the figure of

Mordecai, outlining his genealogy, ethnic identity, status, occupation, and personal history, which connects him to the generation of the Babylonian exile. It then describes two events in which Mordecai is a central player. The first is his dream, in which two great dragons get ready to do battle, causing the nations to prepare for a war against “the righteous nation” (11:7). God answers the righteous nation’s call

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for help: a great river springs forth, accompanied by light, sun, and the exaltation of the lowly, who devour those held in honor. Mordecai recognizes in this dream an intimation of God’s plan vis-à-vis the exiled people, and he seeks “to understand it in every detail” (11:12). The second incident concerns the plot of two of Artaxerxes’ eunuchs to lay hands on the king. (The king is called Ahasuerus in the Hebrew version but Artaxerxes in the Septuagint.) As part of his reward for foiling this plot, Mordecai is granted a position in court. Unfortunately, his role in this event also earns Mordecai and his people the hatred of Haman, a man “in great honor with the king” (12:6). This preface primes the reader by providing four important pieces of information. First, it introduces Mordecai as the hero of the piece. He is well connected not only in human circles but also with the Divine, for he is the recipient of a prophetic dream. Mordecai’s own family experience of exile from Judea places the story within the historical experience of the Diaspora. The dream itself situates the story in a broader context that owes much to apocalyptic imagery; it also promises divine salvation and thereby assures the reader that all will be well in the end. Finally, the events in the court demonstrate Mordecai’s righteousness, lay the groundwork for the rivalry and enmity between Haman and Mordecai, and hint at the main plot of the book, which will focus on the plan invented by Haman to destroy Persian Jewry.

Setting the Stage (Gr. Esth. 1:1–3:13) After these introductory matters, the Greek story, like its Hebrew counterpart, begins with a lavish description of the king’s drinking party, at which Vashti refuses to “display her beauty to all the governors and the people of various nations” (1:11). The potential threat her defiance poses to marital harmony, and especially to male authority throughout the kingdom, is averted by Vashti’s banishment from the king’s presence and by a royal decree requiring all women to “give honor to their husbands, rich and poor alike” (1:20). This farcical sequence paints the king as a gullible and malleable buffoon. Whereas the Ahasuerus of Hebrew Esther later remembered, and perhaps regretted, Vashti’s fate (Heb. Esth. 2:1), the Artaxerxes of the Septuagint forgets about her and proceeds immediately with plans for the selection of the

new queen (Gr. Esth. 2:1–4). These plans set the stage for the primary and secondary plots of the book as a whole. Although Mordecai has already been introduced in Addition A, he is presented here again without any reference to his previous appearance in the story (2:5). Along with him appears his beautiful and obedient ward, Esther, who becomes the prime candidate in the contest by which the new queen will be selected. While she undergoes elaborate preparation for the competition, Mordecai watches over her from his vantage point in the courtyard of the harem. Whereas the MT clearly states that Mordecai took Esther as his daughter, the LXX, equally clearly, states that he took her as his wife. This latter tradition is also reflected in later midrashim, suggesting that at least some ancient readers read the Hebrew bat (“daughter”) as bayit (“household”). If this reading is correct, the implication may be that Mordecai took Esther in as a ward in the expectation that he would marry her when she was of age. While this interpretation makes sense of the differing versions, it also creates some ambiguity: if Mordecai wished to marry Esther, why would he have enrolled her in the beauty pageant and tolerated her marriage to the king? After Esther’s selection as queen, she continues to fear God and to keep his laws, as she had done when under Mordecai’s care (2:20). Mordecai’s continued watchful presence in the royal precincts is fortunate for the king when Mordecai is instrumental in foiling the assassination plotted by two of the king’s eunuchs. A memorandum in praise of Mordecai is placed in the royal library. After this event, the last major character is introduced. Haman, having just been appointed chief “friend” (cf. the Hebrew: vizier) of the king, becomes incensed at Mordecai’s refusal to pay obeisance to him (3:2–6). Haman generalizes this anger to the Jewish people as a whole, for he perceives that it is Mordecai’s Jewish identity that lies behind his refusal to give Haman his due honor (3:4). Haman succeeds in persuading the ever-gullible king that the destruction of the Jews, who “do not keep the laws of the king,” will be beneficial to the kingdom. Added incentive is the ten thousand talents of silver which Haman promises to pay to the king’s treasury if the Jews are destroyed. Giving Haman his signet ring, the king authorizes him to do whatever he wishes with “that nation” (3:10–11). The

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fourteenth day of Adar is chosen by lot as the date for the Jews’ destruction. This section of Greek Esther parallels Hebrew Esther in setting up the main and secondary plots of the story but in doing so contradicts some of the information provided by Addition A. Whereas Addition A attributes the enmity between Mordecai and Haman to Mordecai’s involvement in the plot of the two eunuchs (though without explaining why Haman would have objected to Mordecai’s actions), this section, like Hebrew Esther, ascribes it to Mordecai’s affront to Haman’s dignity. Of greatest interest, however, is the portrayal of Esther. Whereas Vashti was defiant, Esther is compliant and obedient. She participates gracefully in the lengthy and arduous process of beautification and endears herself to the chief eunuchs and evidently to Artaxerxes as well. Further, she continues to obey both Mordecai, who had asked that she not divulge her people or her country, and God, whose laws she maintains despite her residence in the harem of a foreign king. Although she is now the wife of the king, Esther’s principal relationship continues to be with Mordecai, who exercises moral authority over her in spite of her elevated social status. Esther, unlike Vashti, is no threat to the hierarchy of male-female relationships.

Addition B: The King’s Edict against the Jews (Gr. Esth. 13:1–7) In fulsome, pompous prose, Addition B claims to provide the text of the kingdom-wide letter authorizing the massacre. Though speaking in the name of the king, the edict clearly reflects the hand and point of view of Haman. The letter justifies the king’s decision to act against the Jews on the grounds that such action will restore peace to the land (13:2); it praises Haman as the wise and resourceful leader who fashioned this plan (13:3); and it vilifies the Jews, who are portrayed as disturbing the tranquility of the land (13:4–5). These accusations against the Jews, echoing the views expressed by various Greco-Roman writers, would have rung true to Diaspora Jewish readers. Comparing their experience with that of the intended victims of Haman’s destructive plot, the Diaspora audience may also have drawn hope for divine deliverance such as that which eventually spares the Jews of Artaxerxes’ Persia. This message may have been of particular significance to Jews in

places such as Alexandria, which experienced frequent tensions between Jews and Gentiles until at least the second century CE.

The Plot Is Revealed (Gr. Esth. 3:14–4:17) Facing imminent destruction, the Jews of Susa enter a state of mourning. Barred from the court due to his mourning garb, Mordecai can communicate with Esther only through her eunuch, Hachratheus. Reminding her of “the days when you were an ordinary person, being brought up under my care,” he urges her to “call upon the Lord; then speak to the king in our behalf, and save us from death” (4:8). In the face of Esther’s fear that entering the king’s presence unbidden will arouse his anger, Mordecai warns that she herself will not escape; if she does not cooperate, he threatens, help will come to the Jews “from another quarter,” perhaps intending here a reference to divine intervention, as the A text asserts. If this occurs, Mordecai warns, Esther herself will perish (4:14). Mordecai then exhorts her by suggesting that her selection as the royal consort may indeed have been for the very purpose of saving Israel from Haman’s cruel evil scheme. This statement implicitly ascribes the entire chain of events to divine providence. Esther is persuaded, and asks only that the Jews of Susa join her and her entourage in a three-day preparatory fast. Although Esther alone is in a position to be the human agent of her people’s salvation, it is Mordecai who conceives of the plan and secures her cooperation. The detailed exposition of the plan, absent from Hebrew Esther, illustrates both Mordecai’s powers of persuasion and the continued authority that he held over Esther and thereby adds drama as well as divine intentionality to the story as a whole. In portraying God as the possible mastermind behind the events that included Esther’s marriage to a Gentile king, the book may also be suggesting that when national or personal survival are at stake, it is permissible, indeed, necessary, for Jews to resort to measures such as marriage to a Gentile.

Addition C: The Prayers of Mordecai and Esther (Gr. Esth. 13:8–14:19) The prayers attributed to Mordecai and Esther during the three-day fast are similar in style and content to other prayers in the apocryphal

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literature in which faith in God’s saving acts is a central theme (cf. Jdt. 9 and Tob. 3:1–6, 11–15). In his prayer (13:8–18) Mordecai turns to God as Lord, creator, and savior, begging God to save Israel as in the time of the exodus and defending his refusal to bow down to Haman. Mordecai insists that he refused to bow to Haman, not as an act of insolence or self-promotion, as Haman perceived it, but as an expression of his belief that honor is due to God alone. Mordecai’s plea that God step in to save the descendants of the exodus would have resonated with Diaspora Jews, especially those in Alexandria or elsewhere in Roman Egypt during times of difficulty. (The book of Judith similarly draws explicitly upon exodus imagery; cf. Jdt. 16.) Esther’s prayer (14:1–19) expands upon these motifs. Donning “the garments of distress and mourning,” and anointing herself with ashes and dung (14:2), Esther deliberately sheds the accessories of beauty instrumental in her selection and continued role as queen. Doing so expresses her profound fear and despair, as well as her strong identification with her people. Esther speaks of her lifelong belief in God’s election of Israel and the fulfillment of the divine promises to Israel, and she views the current situation as a battle between God, the true king, and a foreign ruler, who himself claims to be God. Finally, Esther prays for eloquent speech, essential to the success of her mission. Esther, like Mordecai, uses the prayer as an occasion for justifying and explaining her past behavior in the court. Far from enjoying her newfound wealth and status, Esther abhors the “splendor of the wicked,” “the bed of the uncircumcised,” and the royal crown, which she calls a “filthy rag” (NRSV; literally, menstrual rag; 14:15–16). While her situation has required her to sleep with the Persian king, she has not transgressed the dietary laws or drunk the wine of libations to the gods. In this way, the readers, who may otherwise disapprove of Esther’s marriage to a decadent Gentile king, are reassured that she nevertheless maintains her ancestral faith in God and adherence to some of the principal tenets of Jewish law that may have been the most difficult to observe as a minority group in a Gentile environment. Finally, Esther’s words show that she is engaging in a spiritual resistance to her role as the consort of a Gentile king, in a situation in which physical resistance might well have had deadly consequences, as Vashti’s experience showed.

These prayers also convey two general messages to the Diaspora Jewish audience. First, in a time of crisis, it is not only possible but necessary to cry out to God, as did Esther and Mordecai. Just as God listened to the outcries of Israel enslaved in Egypt before the exodus, so will God hearken to the pleas of Mordecai and Esther, and to all who cry out. Second, it is not only desirable but also possible to observe the dietary and other laws in a Gentile environment, though in extreme cases such as Esther’s, some unpalatable compromises may be necessary.

Addition D: Esther’s Approach to the King (Gr. Esth. 15:1–16) In contrast to Hebrew Esther 5:1–2, this section describes Esther’s approach to Artaxerxes in lavish detail. In preparation for her plan, Esther changes from the humble clothing appropriate to the attitude of prayer and humility into the resplendent apparel needed to approach the king. This change of clothing anticipates an important turning point in the narrative and in the fate of the Jews in this story. With one final invocation of God’s aid, and supported by two maids, Esther enters the presence of the king, who, seated on his throne in royal array, cuts a majestic and terrifying figure. Her prior fears that the king will exercise the right to punish her for coming to him unbidden seem initially to be warranted. As he gazes at her in anger, Esther falters, pales, and faints upon one of her maids. But at this point God intervenes and changes the king’s spirit to one of gentleness (15:8), perhaps a playful allusion to the exodus story, in which, by contrast, God hardened Pharaoh’s heart against Moses. Taking her in his arms, Artaxerxes comforts her and reassures her that she will not die for her bold act (15:10). Esther revives, expresses her awe of his glory and splendor, and promptly faints a second time, inspiring further attempts to revive and comfort her. While commonsense explanations have been suggested concerning her likely weakness after three days of fasting, Esther’s behavior nevertheless surprises. Does her double fainting spell indicate that God has not provided her with the strength for which she had prayed and fasted so ardently? On the contrary, it may be argued that in fact the fainting was needed precisely as the human channel through which God could

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transform Artaxerxes’ initial anger and hence gain her the sympathetic hearing necessary to activate the plan by which the divine salvation would be accomplished. If her prayer in Addition C reflects Esther’s true feelings about the king and her own royal position, then Addition D portrays her as a consummate actress. Esther emerges as a figure who, when need be, will play, and play upon, the role of the feminine and beautiful queen through her attire, her behavior, and her flattery, in order to achieve her goals and remain alive in the process.

The Villain Is Unmasked (Gr. Esth. 5:3–8:12) At this point, the attention turns to the subplot concerning the conflict between Haman and Mordecai. Just when Haman is about to ask for permission to hang Mordecai, the king is reminded of the fact that Mordecai had once saved his life by exposing the assassination plot of his eunuchs. Rather than be his executioner, Haman must now become the instrument of Mordecai’s public honor, robing him, leading him on a horse through the town, and proclaiming Mordecai’s greatness. Haman’s fortunes continue to fall when his wickedness is exposed by Esther as the one who could destroy her and her people. Both the primary and the secondary conflicts, in which Haman plays the role of villain, are finally resolved by Haman’s execution on the gallows upon which he had hoped to have Mordecai hung. This reversal of Haman’s fortunes is in keeping with the comedic nature of the book as a whole and may represent a playful use of the peripeteia (reversal of fortune) that is characteristic of ancient Greek tragedy. The final step in the Jews’ salvation is to avert the evil decree. To do so, the king authorizes Esther to compose an edict replacing his earlier notice (7:7–10; 8:1–12). The king bestows his ring upon Mordecai, and Esther gives Mordecai authority over Haman’s estate. In these ways Mordecai is elevated to a status that parallels Esther’s, an act that restores congruency between his moral relationship to her and his legal one. But this change is also matched by a change in the characterization of Esther. No longer playing the part of the fearful and submissive beauty, she exercises royal authority as the author of the letter and the one who bestows Haman’s estate upon Mordecai.

Addition E: The Official Repeal of the First Edict (Gr. Esth. 16:1–24) Haman was aggrandized in the first edict, but his reputation is undone in this second edict, which annuls the planned destruction of the Jews announced in the first edict. It was not the Jewish community but Haman who posed the real threat to the tranquility of the kingdom. Devoid of Persian kindliness, Haman wanted only to usurp the power of the throne from its rightful Persian king and transfer it to the Macedonians from whom he was descended. This comment may reflect ancient tensions between the Persians and the Macedonians, or at least a desire on the part of the narrator to deflect blame from the Persians to the Macedonians (and thereby perhaps to the Greeks). The edict also permits the Jews to live under their own laws and to defend themselves from attack on the appointed day. The thirteenth day of Adar is transformed from a day of mourning to a day of joy, not only for the Jews but for the entire empire. Again, one may see the importance of this edict for Diaspora Jewish readers. It describes and mandates the celebration of Purim, confirms faith in God’s saving acts with respect to God’s people, and reinforces the conviction that Jews should live by their own laws, even in the Diaspora. The deflection of blame from the Persians to a Macedonian may also imply that the danger that Jews face in their Diaspora homes does not come from the local indigenous populations but from outside influences that threaten not only the Jews but the local Gentile community as well.

Events of Adar (Gr. Esth. 8:13–10:3) The story proper concludes with the events leading up to and including the fourteenth of Adar. The Persians’ fear of the Jews, and of Mordecai in particular, is recounted with some relish, as are the numbers of dead. The Purim festival is described, including its institution and practices, such as merrymaking and the giving of gifts. In this section too Esther displays the authority and self-assurance of her royal state, and indeed is portrayed in the role of royal adviser. The king seeks her advice on how to proceed after the first day of revenge, when the Jews killed five hundred people in Susa, and complies with her demand that the Jews be allowed to do the same on the morrow

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and that the bodies of Haman’s sons be hung up (9:13). The aura of vengeful glee in this passage may make modern readers uncomfortable. The passage must be read, however, in the context of ancient sensibilities, not our own. Delight at the downfall of one’s enemies is a common motif in biblical literature, for example, in Moses’ triumphant song at the sea, which glories in the drowning deaths of the Pharaoh and his armies (Exod. 15:1–18).

Addition F: Interpretation of Mordecai’s Dream (Gr. Esth. 10:4–13); Colophon (Gr. Esth. 11:1) This section forms an inclusio with Addition A by explicating the dream that introduced the book as a whole. The river in the dream is Esther, while the two dragons are Haman and Mordecai. The righteous nation is Israel; the surrounding nations—the Gentiles—are her enemies. The Lord rescued Israel, an event that led to joyous celebration on the thirteenth and fourteenth days of Adar. The dream and its interpretation act as a frame: they place the events in the larger context of salvation history and implicitly make assurances of salvation to their Diaspora Jewish readers. As noted above, the concluding verses of Addition F in the Septuagint version of Greek Esther are a colophon, which may, if authentic, provide an approximate date for the book. Even if inauthentic, the colophon serves to lend an air of authenticity to the text as well as to state explicitly that this text, like Sirach, is a translation from the Hebrew.

Conclusion In the specific events, their order, and their outcome, Greek Esther presents fundamentally the same story as its Hebrew counterpart. The inclusion of more than fifty references to God has a significant effect on the evaluation and understanding of these events, however, particularly in light of their Diaspora context. Mordecai’s dream in addition A and its interpretation in Addition F frame the narrative, placing it firmly within the covenantal relationship between God and Israel. This frame, as well as many of the specific details of the book, expresses the theological conviction that God listens to the lament of the people and works through history to rescue them from destruction.

The additions, large and small, redraw the character of Esther. As in the MT, the figure of Esther is a counterpoint to Vashti. Vashti is beautiful but defiant, her refusal to obey the king’s command a threat to male status throughout the empire. Esther is also beautiful, but, outwardly at least, cooperative and compliant. Whereas Vashti balked at exposing herself to a drunken male crowd, Esther willingly participates in the elaborate, arduous, but arguably no less degrading process of making herself sexually attractive to the king. Yet ultimately Esther too defies the king’s authority, not only in spirit, as her prayer (Addition C) makes clear, but also in deed. Whereas Vashti had refused to come when bidden, Esther comes when she is not bidden; only divine intervention prevents the king from acting on his initial angry impulse and thus saves Esther from the consequences of her disobedience. The farcical tone attending the king’s concerns about Vashti’s act, and the centrality of Esther’s more subtle defiance of the king to the plot of the book, might suggest that Greek Esther not only recognizes but also celebrates the courage and ability of these women to challenge male authority. But this is true only with respect to the Persian king, who despite his royal status is an easily manipulated buffoon surrounded by pompous and self-seeking cohorts. No such challenge is mounted with respect to Mordecai, the only Jewish male figure of the story. Greek Esther takes great pains to assure that the hierarchy of the relationship between Mordecai and Esther, as guardian and ward, is fundamentally undisturbed by Esther’s entry into King Artaxerxes’ harem. Esther’s transformation from a submissive member of the harem to an assertive, aggressive, and vengeful queen occurs only after Mordecai achieves social parity by taking Haman’s position and wealth. In these respects, Esther bears a strong resemblance to other women protagonists of the Hellenistic Jewish novels, most notably Judith. Judith, like Esther, is a woman of prominence, the only person capable of saving her people from annihilation. Her act too is preceded by a prayer and involves calculated beautification, mortal danger, as well as a potentially erotic connection to the Gentile leader, Holofernes, whom she must confront and deceive. The extraordinary acts of Esther and Judith both play upon and lift them out of the patriarchal strictures of male-female relationships. Nevertheless,

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the crossing of boundaries is tolerated only with respect to the enemy, whose actions, if unstopped, will lead to the destruction of the Jewish people. In their relations with Jewish men, the women remain within the boundaries of their prescribed roles, Judith as the celibate widow who honors her husband’s memory forever, and Esther as the ward of Mordecai, to whose word she remains obedient. Such a portrayal, of course, is apt for the Jewish Diaspora context in which these works were popular. The shame and disgrace of the Gentile oppressors in these stories are compounded by the fact that the instruments of their destruction are not powerful male warriors but beautiful and (ostensibly) sexually available women (cf. Judg. 9:54, where the shame of being killed by a woman is expressed explicitly). Yet the apocryphal women, who outwit and unman their powerful Gentile oppressors, pose no threat to the established male-female hierarchy within the Diaspora community itself. In her respect for Mordecai, the Jewish male authority figure in her life, as well as by her assiduous observance of the dietary laws and passionate commitment to her people, Esther both models and supports the prevailing values and social structures of this community. The Greek book in which she stars provides not only entertainment but also a literary means of coping with the Diaspora, portraying the desired defeat of

the hated enemy. In doing so it expresses a deep conviction concerning the divine role in the life of Israel and a strong desire for internal order and stability in the midst of a Gentile majority. Bibliography

Day, Linda. Esther. Abingdon Old Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005. Gruen, Erich S. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Hellenistic Culture and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998. Hacham, Noam. “3 Maccabees and Esther: Parallels, Intertextuality, and Diaspora Identity.” Journal of Biblical Literature 126 (2007): 765–85. Levenson, Jon. Esther. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. Moore, Carey A. Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions. Anchor Bible 44. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1977. Reinhartz, Adele. “The Greek Book of Esther.” In The Oxford Bible Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Wills, Lawrence. The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

The Wisdom of Solomon Sarah J. Tanzer

Introduction Title and Place within the Canons The title, “The Wisdom of Solomon,” comes from the second part of the book, in which the unnamed king is easily recognized as Solomon, who had a reputation in Judaism for bringing together the best of human wisdom with faithfulness to God. This title comes from the Septuagint, while another, “The Book of Wisdom,” is used in the Vulgate. Although not a part of the Jewish Bible (the Tanakh), the book is studied by Jews who are interested in the Hellenistic period. For Christians, the canonical status of the Wisdom of Solomon hinges on the acceptance or rejection of the wider canon of the Septuagint. This debate goes back to the early church, when the book was included in the Muratorian Canon. Augustine thought its canonical status was revealed through its long history of use in the liturgy, while Jerome preferred the shorter set of twentytwo books found in the Hebrew Canon. Ultimately, the Roman Catholic Church accepted it as part of the canon (Council of Trent, 1546), with the Orthodox Church first accepting it a century later (1672), but from the eighteenth century on debating the issue of its inspiration. The Protestant and Reformed churches followed Jerome’s and Martin Luther’s preference for the shorter canon, denying the Wisdom of Solomon canonical status, yet following Luther’s lead in accepting it as inspired reading.

Genre, Structure, and Contents The Wisdom of Solomon has at its core both implicit and explicit exhortation. It combines

elements of an exhortatory discourse (protreptic), urging its audience toward particular courses of action, thinking, and speech, with praise of Wisdom (encomium), demonstrating the way she works. These genres point to the author’s fluency in Aristotelian rhetoric. The book divides into three parts. The first, 1:1–6:21, is an address in the second person to “you rulers of the earth,” exhorting them to seek justice; the second, 6:22–10:21, is a first-person speech in which the speaker identifies himself as a king who describes the gift of wisdom and her attributes; the third, 11:1–19:22, is a narrative detailing God’s rescue of the people from Egypt and God’s judgment of the ungodly.

Author, Place, and Date The unmistakable allusions to Solomon as the unnamed king in the second part of the book (6:22–10:21) are intended to suggest King Solomon as the book’s author. Much in this section seems to fulfill Solomon’s requests to God for wisdom, knowledge, and understanding (1 Kgs. 3:3–15; 2 Chr. 1:7–13). However, the Wisdom of Solomon is at once profoundly Greek (written in a rich and fluid Greek, showing substantial borrowing from Stoic and Platonic philosophy and a mastery of rhetoric) and also intensely Jewish (reflected, e.g., in its recounting of the history of the people and God’s rescuing of the people in the exodus). These qualities suggest that the author was a learned Hellenistic Jew whose name remains unknown. Though once contested, it is now generally agreed that the Wisdom of Solomon is a unified

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and carefully constructed composition. There is a coherence of language, themes, and style, centered around the efficacy of righteousness and a love of wisdom, wisdom’s role in the universe and in history, and wisdom’s value for human conduct and for seeking a relationship with God. Though the evidence is inconclusive, most commentators advocate an Egyptian provenance, specifically Alexandria, the largest center of Judaism in the Diaspora. There are several reasons for this: the extended and primarily negative portrayal of Egypt and the Egyptians, similarities to the Alexandrian Jewish philosopher Philo, and the profound antipathy toward idolatry, especially the worship of animals, for which Egypt was known. Although the date is also uncertain, with suggestions ranging from 220 BCE to 50 CE, recent discussions focus on the early Roman period (30 BCE–40 CE). Certain vocabulary and usages in the Wisdom of Solomon do not appear in Greek literature before the first century CE. It was also at this time that the legal status of Alexandrian Jews took a turn for the worse, leaving them in an unstable situation and vulnerable to expulsion. Such a situation would correlate well with the author’s hatred for the Egyptians.

Audience and Purpose Despite the opening address to “you rulers of the earth,” the true addressees were likely educated Alexandrian Jews who found Hellenistic culture and thought appealing. This community, which had been moving toward greater social and cultural standing among the Greeks of Alexandria, found themselves reduced to the status of aliens and foreigners in the late first century BCE, demoted from their previous status as resident aliens. With their hopes dashed, the community now faced persecution (cf. the persecution of the righteous in chaps. 1–5). On the one hand, hellenized Jews undergoing persecution are reminded of what their traditional faith offers: that righteousness is rewarded by friendship with God and immortality, and that despite suffering at the hands of the ungodly, they are the righteous who are privileged with “the secrets of Solomon’s wisdom and success” (Kloppenborg, 64). They are encouraged not to fall away, recognizing that God has rescued the people in every period of history (chaps. 10–19). On the other hand, the annihilation of those who have persecuted the righteous

(chap. 5), the judgment against the lawlessness of pagan kings (chap. 6), the lengthy polemic against idolatry (13:10–14:31 and 15:7–19), and the punishments and destruction of the Egyptians (chaps. 10–19) reveal the tensions between the Jews and their Egyptian neighbors and set boundaries between them. At the same time that the book addresses such social tensions, it may also be drawing a fine line between native Egyptians, regarded as historical enemies and barbarians, and the cultured Greeks of Alexandria from whom the Jewish community was seeking acceptance, in spite of the currently uncomfortable situation. An odd universalism and particularism plays a role in this careful balancing act. The book is universal, in that Israel is never mentioned by name, references to the law seem to refer to natural law, not Mosaic law, and no names are mentioned in the recital of Israelite history; instead the exodus story is used to illustrate the contrasting fates of the righteous and the ungodly. God loves all creation and God’s “immortal spirit is in all things” (12:1). It is particular in the ethnic animosities aimed at the Egyptians (and sometimes, Canaanites), “for they were an accursed race from the beginning” (12:11). But this is a particularity that does not look down on non-Jews for failing to observe the Sabbath or to keep the dietary laws; rather it is a reaction to the hostility toward the Jewish community in Roman Alexandria. The story of the exodus as told here ends not with a conquest, but with a deliverance (Collins, 221), reassuring to a community facing persecution. Wisdom of Solomon negotiates an integration of Judaism with attractive aspects of Hellenistic culture. The melding of Judaism with ideologies of Hellenistic kingship, the appropriation of elements of Greek philosophy, and the enhancement of Woman Wisdom with traits and patterns derived from the Hellenistic Egyptian goddess Isis (see below) all served to make Judaism intellectually respectable in a hellenized setting. In spite of the persecutions, the aspirations of Alexandrian Jews continued to be set toward the cultural and political status of their hellenized neighbors.

The Wisdom of Solomon and Women The Wisdom of Solomon presents the paradox of a male-dominated text from which real women are largely absent but in which

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an abstract female figure, Woman Wisdom, is described in goddess-enhanced language and plays a powerful role. Actual women are mentioned in only three places. In 3:12 the wives of the ungodly are characterized as “foolish” and their children as “evil.” In contrast, in 3:13 the woman who has led an “undefiled” life is considered blessed, even if she is barren. Women, like men, are judged by whether they are among the righteous or the ungodly. Finally, in 9:7 Solomon addresses God, saying, “You have chosen me to be king of your people and to be judge

over your sons and daughters.” To the extent that the book has in mind God’s people as its audience, one may see women as included among the addressees, though the historical addressees were probably men. While the universal aspects of the text provide a sense of inclusion, the historical situation that gave rise to the more particularistic language must also be kept in view. Since there is little reference to actual women, however, the focus in what follows will be on the characterization of Woman Wisdom.

Comment Exhortation to Righteousness (Wisd. Sol. 1:1–6:21) The first part of the book addresses “you rulers of the earth,” urging them away from the death they have invited by their ungodly lives and toward the gift of immortality that comes with righteousness and wisdom. It is framed by two speeches to the rulers in 1:1–15 and 6:1–21. Between these two speeches a drama is narrated about the unrighteous rulers (a critique of Roman rule?) and the righteous man who is made to suffer by them (1:16–5:23). At points, in typical diatribe fashion, the unrighteous are allowed to speak in order to demonstrate the reasoning behind their actions and to confess the error of their ways and their dreary doom. The drama demonstrates that appearances are deceptive: the unrighteous do not know the purposes of God and are aligned with judgment and death, whereas the righteous man who seemed to die is in fact in God’s hand and is aligned with immortality. Safe in God’s presence, the righteous man will judge the unrighteous. Righteousness is a key theme in chapters 1–5, but in the concluding address in 6:1–21 wisdom becomes prominent, personified as a woman (6:12–21) to be sought, whose laws are to be followed. A strikingly new feature of personified wisdom (by comparison to Prov. 8 and Sir. 24) is that by loving her and following her laws, one will achieve immortality and nearness to God (6:18–19). Wisdom makes possible union with God, the ultimate source of sovereignty; therefore rulers are advised to honor wisdom if they wish to “reign forever” (6:21).

Woman Wisdom (Wisd. Sol. 6:22–10:21) The beginning of the second part of the book is signaled by a shift from second-person exhortation in 1:1–6:21 to first-person-singular speech. The speaker identifies himself first as a mortal and then as a king. Only gradually does the reader become aware that this is not just any king but the great king Solomon (though he is never named). The focus of the king’s speech is his search for wisdom, the many attributes of wisdom, and wisdom’s course. Continuing the personification begun in 6:12–21, wisdom is represented as a woman. Through his search for wisdom the king provides a model for the “rulers” and “kings” addressed by the book, “for God loves nothing so much as the person who lives with wisdom” (7:28). This section is more loosely framed than the first but is guided by the king’s statement that he will trace Woman Wisdom’s “course from the beginning of creation” (6:22). Repeatedly, one is reminded that God is the source and guide of Woman Wisdom (e.g., 7:7, 15, 25; 8:21; 9:4, 10, 17) and that only if God sends her forth does one “obtain friendship with God” (7:14; cf. 7:27). In chapters 7–9 Solomon recites Woman Wisdom’s twenty-one attributes (7:22– 23), gives a five-part description regaling her essence and all that she is capable of achieving (7:24–8:1), describes his desire to take her as his bride, recognizing her many benefits, including immortality (8:2–21), and prays to God to send Woman Wisdom, God’s throne companion, to him (9:1–18). In chapter 10 Solomon describes Wisdom’s “course,” as he tracks Woman Wisdom’s consistent rescue of the righteous from

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Adam through the exodus from Egypt (though the biblical figures are not named). The Qualities of Woman Wisdom

Jewish background. In the Wisdom of Solomon many of Woman Wisdom’s characteristics build on traditions of personified wisdom found elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible and Apocrypha (Prov. 1, 8, and 9; Job 28; Sir. 24; and Bar. 3 and 4). In this tradition Wisdom is described as having come forth from dwelling with God to be associated with humans. She is present among all generations, accessible to all who seek her (although not so in Job 28). Woman Wisdom is associated with God’s creative activity but also teaches humans righteousness and offers counsel. People are urged to seek her, for she is worth more than all wealth and precious materials, since she offers long life. The portrayal of Woman Wisdom is significantly extended in the Wisdom of Solomon. In this work she is presented as at once more abstract and yet definitely female, with many personal and mythic qualities. She is the “fashioner of all things,” possessing a “spirit that is intelligent, holy, unique, manifold” (7:22), “a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty” (7:25). Woman Wisdom makes the righteous “friends of God” (7:27) and is given by God (8:21). She is pursued as “mother” of all good things (7:12) and as “bride” (8:2). The relationship between Woman Wisdom and God is described in various ways. It is God who ultimately decides who shall possess Woman Wisdom (e.g., 8:21). Yet God’s work is hardly distinguished from Wisdom’s work, “for [God] is the guide even of wisdom. . . . For it is [God] who gave me unerring knowledge of what exists, . . . I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me” (7:15, 17, 21–22). This symbiosis between God and Woman Wisdom is evident also in the way both are described as sought by humans (1:1–2 and 6:12–16) and accessible to those who seek sincerely; involved in the processes of creation (1:14; 7:22; 8:6; 9:2, 9; 11:17); rewarding the righteous with immortality (5:15–16; 6:18; 8:13); protecting and rescuing the righteous man and Israel from their enemies (4:15; 9:18–10:21; 11:1–19:22). Many of the powers attributed to Woman Wisdom (e.g., granting immortality, saving the righteous) are elsewhere typically reserved for God,

as are others: being the source of all good things (7:10–11) and pervading and penetrating all things (7:24). Perhaps none of this should be surprising. Woman Wisdom is God’s heavenly throne companion (8:2–9; 9:4, 10), “an initiate in the knowledge of God, and an associate in his works” (8:4).

Woman Wisdom, God, and Hellenistic philosophy. The symbiotic relationship of Woman Wisdom and God accords well with Middle Platonism, a philosophic school (ca. 80 BCE–220 CE) known for its combination of Stoic and Platonic ideas. Platonic ideals are found in the basic structure of the book, with its emphasis on immortality of the soul but also on a creator God who is beyond this world. Wisdom is related to this transcendent creator as she is described in 7:25–26: “a breath of the power of God, and a pure emanation of the glory of the Almighty; . . . a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness.” On the other hand, the description of her as “a holy and disciplined spirit” (1:5), “kindly” (1:6), and as “the spirit of the Lord, . . . that which holds all things together” (1:7) fits Stoic philosophy. The various epithets of Woman Wisdom’s spirit in 7:22–24 also echo Stoicism and include traits (e.g., “intelligent, holy,” 7:22) typically used to describe God’s spirit: subtle, mobile, pervading and penetrating all things. She teaches the familiar fourfold philosophical virtues: “selfcontrol and prudence, justice and courage” (8:7). This reliance on Middle Platonism in depicting Woman Wisdom would have made her readily comprehensible and respectable in Hellenistic Alexandria. Woman Wisdom and Isis. Other features of Woman Wisdom resonate with the personal and mythical qualities of the Hellenistic Egyptian goddess, Isis, enriching her character and strengthening the rhetorical impact of the book for the hellenized Jews of Alexandria and their neighbors. This is especially true of Isis’s role as bride and wife in Egyptian royal ideology. Wisdom of Solomon is an address to the kings of the earth, commending the benefits of wisdom to them, and the prominence of this combined kingship/wisdom theme, while no doubt suggested by Solomon, is enhanced by the association of Isis with kingship. Woman Wisdom’s relationship with God (8:3–4; 9:4, 10: living with

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and being loved by God, God’s associate, “an initiate in the knowledge of God,” and sitting by God’s throne) is analogous to Isis’s relationship with the Egyptian sun god, Re, just as her relationship to earthly kings, and specifically Solomon (8:2, 9, 16: loved, desired, bride, living with him, companion), is similar to Isis’s relationship to the earthly king Osiris (Kloppenborg, 73–78). It is Woman Wisdom’s relationship to God that makes her desirable as bride to earthly kings. Woman Wisdom, like Isis, is portrayed as the means by which the king attains kingship (6:20– 21). She makes it possible for him to judge and rule (8:10–16; 9:10–12). Through her he acquires wisdom, prestige, and power (8:3–21), as well as immortality (8:13, 17) and eternal kingship (6:21). This double relationship of Woman Wisdom as throne companion to God and to earthly king follows closely the pattern of Isis’s relationships. Just as Woman Wisdom is valued for the “good counsel” (8:9) she brings as companion to the king, so too Isis: “Isis, excellent in counsel . . . without whose knowledge no plans are made, from heaven to the earth and [the underworld]” (Kloppenborg, 75). Isis was also well known as “savior” and is acknowledged as such in dedicatory inscriptions like this one from Medinat Madi (Kloppenborg, 68): As many as are in prison, in the power of death, and as many as are in pain because of long, troubled sleepless nights, All who wander in foreign lands, and as many as sail on the Great Sea in winter when men are destroyed, their ships broken and sent below, all these are saved when they pray that you be present.

She saves those who call upon her. In the Wisdom of Solomon, Woman Wisdom saves and rescues the righteous—a role not given to personified wisdom in earlier texts. The saving role she exercises here is reserved for God in biblical texts. In 9:18–10:21, however, Woman Wisdom displaces God in that role. In seven scenes of rescue drawn from biblical history, beginning with Adam and ending with the exodus, Woman Wisdom’s saving role is depicted. She is portrayed as always with the righteous, even in prison. She helps them to overcome the ungodly and enemies, all of whom perish because “they

passed wisdom by” (10:8). “Those who served her” (10:9), on the other hand, “were saved by wisdom” (9:18). Although the stories in 10:1–21 are well known, the details that receive attention here are not, and they seem odd choices until one recognizes that these are the sorts of incidents from which Isis saves. For example, Woman Wisdom’s saving of Noah (10:4) “by a paltry piece of wood” echoes the language used for Isis’s guiding of sailors. Woman Wisdom’s presence with Joseph in prison (10:14) is evocative of Isis’s presence with prisoners who call on her (Kloppenborg, 70–71). This allusive retelling of biblical history so that it resonates with the Isis myth enriches it, making it all the more attractive to its hellenized audience.

The History of the People and Their Enemies in the Exodus (Wisd. Sol. 11:1–19:22) The third part of the Wisdom of Solomon is marked by the sudden eclipse of Woman Wisdom, as God acts directly on behalf of the people. Wisdom, which dominated chapters 6–10, is mentioned only a few times in these nine chapters and from a very different perspective: “wisdom was the artisan . . . but it is your providence, O Father, that steers its course” (14:2–3). These chapters take up the last episode of the historical summary in 10:15–21, the exodus. In contrast to chapter 10, in chapters 11–19 it is not Woman Wisdom who rescues, but God. This section is structured as a series of seven comparisons between God’s treatment of the Egyptians and the Israelites. As elsewhere in the book, no names are mentioned, but one can discern implicit references to Moses and Aaron, the Egyptians, and the Israelites. The overarching theme of these comparisons is found in the introduction to this section: “For through the very things by which their enemies were punished, they themselves received benefit in their need” (11:5). There are seven Egypt/ Israel antitheses: (1) God turned the Nile into blood for the Egyptians, but for the Israelites God provided water from the rock (11:6–14). (2) God tormented the Egyptians by the animals they worshiped, and they lost all appetite, but God provided for the Israelites’ hunger with quail (15:18–16:4). (3) The Egyptians were killed by locusts and flies, but the Israelites, who suffered briefly from the bites of serpents, were healed by God’s word (16:5–14). (4) God

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punished the Egyptians with heavy storms that destroyed their crops, but the Israelites enjoyed a rain of manna (16:15–29). (5) God plagued the Egyptians with darkness, but gave a brilliant light and a pillar of fire to guide the Israelites (17:1–18:4). (6) God slew the firstborn of the Egyptians, but when a plague came upon the Israelites in the wilderness, God spared the people when Aaron intervened (18:5–25). (7) God drowned the Egyptians in the Red Sea, but delivered the Israelites unharmed (19:1–9). Set into these Egypt/Israel antitheses are two excursuses: an illustration of the nature of God’s mercy that offers the sinful every opportunity to repent (11:15–12:27), and an exploration of the nature and origins of idolatry (13:1–15:17). The final line of the book sums up this part of the Wisdom of Solomon: “you [God] have not neglected to help them [your people] at all times and in all places” (19:22).

Conclusions and Questions The personal and mythic dimensions of Isis that resurface in Woman Wisdom make her a much more powerful and personal divine figure than she appears in other Jewish texts. In the Hellenistic world, where people were used to Greco-Roman cults that offered a personal relationship with a divine figure who could protect and save, this text shows that Judaism could also offer this in Woman Wisdom. But what are we to make of this more personal and powerful Woman Wisdom? We know that upper-class

women in Ptolemaic Egypt benefited from the power of Isis (e.g., Cleopatra VII portrayed herself publicly as Isis), but Isis also may have reinforced traditional patriarchal roles for women (wife, mother, etc.). Unfortunately, we do not know what effect this figure of Woman Wisdom had on the lives of real Jewish women, and as with the portrayal of Isis, the possibilities are both empowering (advocating for greater autonomy and authority; respecting the counsel of women) and more traditional (idealizing women in their roles as bride and wife). BIBLIOGRAPHY

Collins, John J. Jewish Wisdom in the Hellenistic Age. Old Testament Library. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1997. Kloppenborg, John S. “Isis and Sophia in the Book of Wisdom.” Harvard Theological Review 75 (1982): 57–84. Kraemer, Ross Shepard. Her Share of the Blessings: Women’s Religions among Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Greco-Roman World. New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1992. Schroer, Silvia. “The Book of Sophia.” In Searching the Scriptures, vol. 2, A Feminist Commentary, edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 17–38. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Winston, David. The Wisdom of Solomon. Anchor Bible 43. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1979.

Sirach Pamela Eisenbaum

Introduction Like Proverbs, Sirach is a loosely structured work that strings together proverbial recommendations for living and observations on a wide variety of topics. It includes teachings on religious piety and morality, especially regarding almsgiving and the treatment of the poor, as well as such things as table etiquette, the proper handling of money and property, the raising of children, relations with friends and neighbors, and, notably, the treatment of women. But ­Sirach is not merely a list of practical teachings; it contains sophisticated poetry, and its language is often quite beautiful. Among the books of the Bible, ­Sirach easily stands out as the most misogynistic. There is nothing subtle or reserved about such statements as “Better is the wickedness of a man than a woman who does good; it is woman who brings shame and disgrace” (42:14), and “From a woman sin had its beginning, and because of her we all die” (25:24). So negative are ­Sirach’s views on women that one scholar has argued that the text reveals an author whose misogyny is pathological, even by the male-dominated standards of the author’s own day (Trenchard). Most scholars, however, consider S­ irach’s negative attitudes toward women typical of the ancient world, rather than idiosyncratic. Commonly known as Ecclesiasticus in the Roman Catholic canon, S­irach constitutes a collection of wisdom teachings generated during the Hellenistic period. Typical of Wisdom literature, its teachings are conventional, traditional, and generic enough to have broad, multicultural appeal. Still, ­Sirach displays knowledge of most of Hebrew Scripture and even connects

the Torah with Wisdom personified. Distinctly Jewish, yet broad in scope, the wisdom of S­ irach represents an amalgamation of Jewish tradition and Hellenistic culture. When speaking of hellenization or Hellenistic Judaism, scholars do not simply refer to an overlay of Greek culture upon Jewish culture, but rather to the mutual interaction between Hellenism and Judaism. S­irach reflects this interaction. Although the author has nothing critical to say regarding his Jewish tradition, beliefs, and practices, his teachings betray a way of life that has been significantly altered by hellenization.

Social and Historical Context The text of ­ Sirach provides more historical information than is typical of Wisdom literature. “Jesus son of Eleazar son of ­Sirach of Jerusalem” is named as the book’s author (50:27; 51:1; hereafter referred to as “Ben Sira”). The Prologue, which was written by Ben Sira’s grandson, explains that he translated his grandfather’s originally Hebrew work into Greek late in the second century BCE while in Egypt. ­­Sirach’s origins can also be specified with considerable precision. The lengthy catalogue of biblical heroes found in chapters 44–50 ends by eulogizing the high priest Simon II. Simon, though not a biblical character, presided over the Jerusalem temple from 219 BCE until 196 BCE. Because ­Sirach ends with Simon’s eulogy, the majority of scholars assume it was written shortly after Simon’s death, between 190 and 180 BCE, when the land of Israel was controlled by the Seleucid dynasty.

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Although Israel experienced major cultural and political upheavals as it passed from one Hellenistic dynasty to another, the first quarter of the second century BCE was calm compared to what came both before and after in Jewish history. Prior to Simon II’s reign, during the high priesthood of Onias II, the Jerusalem aristocracy extended its power by brutal forms of taxation. Later, in 167 BCE, a popular and eventually successful revolt ensued under the leadership of Judah the Maccabee and the Hasmonean dynasty. This rebellion arose in response to an attempt at a thoroughgoing cultural and religious campaign of hellenization by the Seleucid ruler Antiochus IV Epiphanes and the Jewish aristocracy loyal to him, including the high priest, Jason, who was, ironically, Simon II’s son. Ben Sira’s tone is neither polemical nor apologetic; it reflects the period of relative peace that characterized Simon’s reign. The extent to which the Jews of the early second century were hellenized is not clear. It is probably safe to assume that people experienced varying levels of cultural transformation, depending on social position and residence in city or country. As a well-educated scribe who was probably a teacher (34:9; 38:24) and perhaps also a priest, Ben Sira was surely a member of the upper echelon of Jerusalem society and consequently exposed to Hellenistic practices, values, and aesthetics, even as he was unambiguously attached to the Torah and Jewish identity.

Honor and Shame The inherent connection between the acquisition of honor and the construction of masculinity in the honor/shame system illumines Ben Sira’s gendered perspective. The public values of honor and shame help create solidarity among male elites who have a vested interest in political, social, and economic alliances. For Ben Sira, mastering the wisdom of the world meant becoming a man who could successfully make his way in society and thereby earn honor and a lasting name. The attainment of an honorable name took on particular importance in light of the fact that Ben Sira does not believe in life after death. A man achieves immortality when he acquires sufficient honor such that his name is glorified by future generations. The book culminates with the famous “Hymn in Praise of the Ancestors,” a litany of biblical heroes and their

accomplishments, which constitutes a “great men” summary of Israelite history. It begins with these words: “Let us now sing the praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations. The Lord apportioned to them great glory” (44:1–2). The pursuit of wisdom is the central theme of ­Sirach, but being remembered with honor is the ultimate goal toward which the pursuit of wisdom points. “One who is wise among his people will inherit honor, and his name will live forever” (37:26). There are no women named among the ancestors listed chapters 44–50, because they cannot accrue honor for themselves; their actions serve only to add or detract from the man’s honor. As the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss long ago pointed out, in the social economy women are objects of exchange, while men are the subjects who exchange them. ­Sirach reflects such a social system: “A woman will accept any man as a husband, but one girl is preferable to another” (36:26). In other words, women function as commodities from among whom men choose wives, whereas wives cannot choose their husbands. Indeed, men create and maintain relationships among themselves through the exchange of women. Women are not only objects in the exchange of property, however; they also facilitate the exchange of honor. Wives especially are symbolic possessions who help to “place” their husbands in the social hierarchy. In the world of Ben Sira women are a means—or a hindrance—to the goals of the appropriately socialized male. If a woman behaves as she should, she aids in the acquisition of her husband’s or her father’s honor. Conversely, if she behaves badly, she detracts from the man’s honor and brings shame upon him, which can ruin his good name. When a woman behaves inappropriately—for example, when she displays sexual license—she shames herself and her husband or father; if she behaves appropriately, her good behavior accrues only to the man’s honor. In other words, shame is something that applies to both women and men, but honor belongs exclusively to men. The result of this social system from Ben Sira’s male-­dominated worldview is that women are accorded no respect as autonomous human beings. In light of the nearly exclusive portrayal of women as objects of exchange, a reader with feminist sensibilities will find little of redeeming value in Ben Sira’s comments on women. To some degree, the attitude present in ­Sirach

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stands within the traditions of the Hebrew Bible. The last of the Ten Commandments in Exodus lumps women together with other possessions in the injunction against coveting: “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife” (Exod. 20:17). But other biblical texts lead us to believe that women were not literally considered property, even if men have authority over them (Num. 30:3–15; Deut. 21:10–14). Many of the women in biblical narratives, notably the matriarchs, are portrayed as powerful actors who influence some of the most important events in the history of Israel. Moreover, other texts contemporary with ­Sirach, such as Judith, offer a more positive attitude regarding women.

­Sirach may be typical in its reflection of the honor/shame complex and views on women, but this work does not reflect the sum total of that society’s valuation of women. Rather, ­Sirach reflects one dimension— albeit the dominant one—of Second Temple Jewish society. ­Sirach is not necessarily a description of reality. It is, rather, a text composed of prescriptions addressed exclusively to men and reflective of explicitly masculine ideals, which is likely the primary reason ­Sirach’s patriarchal perspective is so extreme. The energy Ben Sira expends, however, teaching young men how to maintain control of their women may mean that women of his time exercised some tangible domestic power.

Comment Like much other Wisdom literature, the teachings in S­irach do not follow a logical order. Texts on various topics of relevance to women and gender are scattered throughout the book. Hence this commentary will proceed in thematic rather than sequential order.

Mother (Sir. 3:1–16; 7:27–28; 23:14) Mothers are the only women who remain untouched by negative criticism in Ben Sira’s text. He mentions mothers, however, only in conjunction with, and as secondary to, fathers. No doubt underlying all comments on mothers in ­Sirach is the biblical command to honor one’s mother and father (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16). ­Sirach 3:1–16 is the most extensive treatment of the role of mother, although the terms “mother” and “father” must be read together, reflecting the standard practice of parallelism in Hebrew poetry. In some cases, the terms “mother” and “father” are used interchangeably in parallel lines to mean “parents,” as in verse 2: “For the Lord honors a father above his children, and he confirms a mother’s right over her children.” In other instances, however, the parallelism serves to draw distinctions between father and mother and paints mothers in a negative light. Verse 9 reflects this type of parallelism: “For a father’s blessing strengthens the houses of the children, but a mother’s curse uproots their foundations.” In either case, both parts of the verse make up one compound statement. The particulars of

each line are not necessarily gender specific. In other words, the terms “mother” and “father” are used interchangeably to mean “parents.” Still, in the two cases where the parallelism reflects a contrast (3:9, 11), “mother” appears in the line containing the negative warning about family life. The Fifth Commandment, concerning the honoring of one’s parents (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16), is especially significant for Ben Sira, because it explicitly deals with honor. The aspiring male head of household, or patriarch, may one day be required to care for aging parents (3:12–13). Such familial obligations lead not only to material blessings (3:14–15)—as the biblical commandment itself says explicitly— but to opportunities for the accrual of honor: “The glory of one’s father is one’s own glory, and it is a disgrace for children not to respect their mother” (3:10–11). Ironically, appropriate expressions of humility earn one glory (1:27; 3:17–18; 4:10; 10:19). By fulfilling the commandment to honor one’s parents, a man demonstrates his respect for the social hierarchy. Of course one also acquires honor by humbling others. The demonstration of appropriate respect and complete deference by women and children to the patriarch will help to manifest his glory. The English words “glory” and “honor” usually translate the Hebrew word kabod, or the Greek word doxa. In ­Sirach (as well as in many other biblical texts), this term, which also occurs in a verbal form meaning “to glorify,”

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frequently describes God, as in 3:20: “For great is the might of the Lord; but by the humble he is glorified.” As is reflected in this verse, one way the Lord acquires glory is through acts of worship practiced by human beings. Worshipers thereby humble themselves in order to elevate God’s glory. Similarly, the members of a man’s household enrich his glory by means analogous to worship, that is, by demonstrating deference and respect. The correlation between giving glory to God and honor to men is a significant indicator of a deeply embedded patriarchal theology.

Wife (Sir. 23:22–26; 25:16–26:9; 36:26–31) In ­Sirach, there are two kinds of wives, the good and the bad. Eschewing finer distinctions, Ben Sira’s characterization of each amounts to the polar opposite of the other. Chapter 26 provides the most substantial description of the good wife, who possesses the following qualities:   1. She makes her husband happy and can lengthen his life (26:1–4).   2. She cooks well and keeps a tidy home (26:13, 16b).   3. She holds her tongue and possesses selfcontrol (26:14).   4. She is chaste (26:15).  5. She has a beautiful face and body (26:17–18; cf. 11:2). Additionally, in 36:29–30, she is called a “helper” and “pillar of support,” and is regarded as a stabilizing force: “where there is no wife, a man will become a fugitive and a wanderer.” In stark contrast to the good wife, a bad wife is a woman who defies her husband’s control. “A bad wife is a chafing yoke; taking hold of her is like grasping a scorpion” (26:7). Warnings about the defiant wife more than once involve analogies with poisonous creatures: “There is no venom worse than a snake’s venom, and no anger worse than a woman’s wrath” (25:15). Of course a husband need not be irredeemably burdened by such a woman; he can dissolve an undesirable marriage in most cases, if he so chooses. If she talks too much (25:20), drinks too much (26:8), or is unchaste (26:9), the Jerusalem sage recommends exercising the prerogative of divorce (25:26). The worst-case scenario of the bad wife is the “woman who leaves her husband and

presents him with an heir by another man” (23:22). ­Sirach 23:22–27 does not simply represent another warning against an unchaste wife. Here the issue is not a wife whose sexuality is unchecked (cf. 26:9), but an illicit heir. The man to whom this text is directly addressed seems to be a husband who colludes with his wife’s adulterous behavior. Two recent interpretations are offered by scholars to explain why a man would encourage such seemingly disloyal behavior. The first suggests that an infertile couple desirous of an heir might choose to send out the wife to engage in intercourse so as to produce a child (cf. Wisd. Sol. 3:13). The second interpretation points to evidence that in eastern Mediterranean society the wives and daughters of poor men sometimes engaged in prostitution with wealthier men in order to supplement the household income. If such a social reality lies behind ­Sirach, then the unintended result could be children fathered by another man. Two difficulties arise from the first interpretation. First, it assumes a recognition of male infertility—which seems unlikely (cf. the assumption of female infertility in the narratives concerning Sarah in Gen. 16 and Rebekah in Gen. 25). Second, given the patriarchal structure of the society and its views on adultery, it seems unlikely that an Israelite man would agree to another man impregnating his wife. Hence the second interpretation offers a more plausible explanation, though there is minimal evidence for the practice in Hellenistic Jewish texts. Ben Sira would presumably disapprove of any kind of prostitution, but he would surely condemn poor married women having sexual relations with wealthy men, because such conduct introduces the added danger of relinquishing economic control of the household to the wife (25:21–22). Furthermore, since the paternity of any child born to the wife/prostitute would be in question, the husband might end up giving his estate to another man’s child. Because the male loses control of his property, dishonor results. As a deterrent, then, Ben Sira warns that the shame brought on by such an illicit union is irrevocable; the resultant children can never be a credit to one’s name (23:24–26). In addition to his discussion of good and bad wives, Ben Sira discusses other aspects of the marriage relationship. In 25:1, Ben Sira claims to value marital harmony, although the list of the attributes of the good wife makes it evident that such harmony results from the

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contentment of the husband alone. Indeed, the total absence of any mention of pleasing one’s wife (e.g., a woman’s conjugal rights) is noteworthy. In the teachings of Ben Sira, a husband has virtually no obligations to his wife (cf. Prov. 31:28–31). In fact, much more is required of a householder vis-à-vis his slaves (33:25–33). Ostensibly, sexuality is the one arena in which Ben Sira circumscribes a man’s behavior toward his wife. The sage cautions strongly against adultery (9:8–9; 25:2c). Yet, because adultery is traditionally defined as having sexual relations with another man’s wife, it does not constitute an offense against one’s own wife, but is viewed as a violation of another man’s property rights. Ben Sira goes further, by discouraging sexual relations outside of marriage in general (23:18; 41:17), but, again, not because it would hurt one’s wife. For him submission to sexual desire reveals a lack of self-control. It therefore hurts the husband by diminishing his honor and potentially leads to ruin (18:30–19:3). Another interesting omission—though perhaps not without precedent in Wisdom literature (cf. Prov. 31)—is the lack of mention of a wife’s fertility or her child-rearing skills. It is a reasonable assumption that fertility would be important, even from a patriarchal point of view, because one’s children aid in the preservation of one’s name (40:19; 44:9–14). In ­Sirach, however, the emphasis falls on earning a good name, not through descendants but through accomplishment and status (33:23–24; 39:8–11; 44:1–8). The catalogue of heroes in chapters 44–50 reflects this emphasis. Although wives are essential for the preservation of the family line, Ben Sira has no appreciation of their procreative role. In addition, a wife’s parenting skills are not of much concern to her husband, especially for the rearing of boys. Since the wife/mother cannot earn honor for herself through guiding children to adulthood, any involvement she has in raising children is subject to the husband/ father’s authority. The father hopes to maintain ultimate authority over the children, so as to ensure that they do not dishonor him. The wife’s authority over her children (3:2) simply assists in this process. In 36:29 Ben Sira seems to accentuate the romantic connection between husband and wife by echoing Genesis 2:18: “He who acquires a wife gets his best possession, a helper fit for

him.” But his understanding of that connection is based on the domestic hierarchy as well as a sense of ownership. Since the wife is the husband’s possession, she is not supposed to demonstrate autonomy; her will is not her own. The good wife in ­Sirach is an extension of her husband’s personhood—which is certainly one way of reading Genesis 2:18–25! The husband must, therefore, maintain complete control over his wife and household.

Daughter (Sir. 7:24–25; 22:3–5; 26:10–12; 42:9–14) Unlike mothers and wives, daughters do not receive a single appreciative comment in ­Sirach. On the contrary, “the birth of a daughter is a loss” (22:3) and something to be feared. They create anxiety for their fathers for a host of reasons enumerated in a poem on the dangers of daughters in 42:9–14. Why is Ben Sira so vitriolic concerning daughters? The answer lies within the realm of economics as well as the honor/shame system. Economically, a daughter counts as a deficit. She has no earning power but must be clothed, fed, sheltered, and protected from anything that could damage her ability to be married. If she never marries, she remains her father’s responsibility. If she marries but turns out to be flawed in some way—not a virgin, unfaithful, or barren—she can be divorced by the husband and forced to return to the charge of her father. A daughter, therefore, has the potential to be a lifelong financial drain on her father. More threatening than the economic burden is the girl’s potential to dishonor her father through her sexuality. While an unfaithful wife can be divorced and a widowed mother does not usually carry the potential for sexual deviance, a nubile daughter with sexual propensities can spell disaster (42:11b). The only hope a father has for relieving his anxiety consists in literally controlling his daughter’s body (7:24; while the NRSV reads “chastity” here, “body” or “flesh” is the more literal translation). In 42:9–14, Ben Sira recommends keeping the girl as confined as possible. The focus of his concern does not lie with her being unwillingly defiled, seduced, or raped, but rather with her powers of attraction, which she might use to fulfill her own sexual desires (42:11c–12a). Thus a daughter must not have contact with married women (42:12b), because their knowledge and

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sexual experience could exacerbate what Ben Sira believes is a young woman’s natural tendency toward unrestrained sexuality. Indeed, Ben Sira views the daughter as the paradigmatic lustful woman who knows no sexual restraint. “As a thirsty traveler opens his mouth and drinks from any water near him, so she will sit in front of every tent peg and open her quiver to the arrow” (26:12). Although some have argued that this verse was originally meant to apply to the wicked wife and not the daughter, the analogy and the not-so-subtle genital metaphors make it in any case the most obscene comment in ­Sirach.

Women and Sex An honor/shame social system may include two kinds of shame: in Ben Sira’s words, “there is a shame that leads to sin, and there is a shame that is glory and favor” (4:21). The latter amounts to an acquired, sophisticated knowledge of the rules that govern social intercourse and their implementation. In fact, teaching these rules is Ben Sira’s ultimate purpose throughout his text. In a few places the sage lists specific behaviors of which one should be appropriately ashamed. He commands men to be ashamed of such things as ignorance (4:25), breaking agreements (41:19), and meddling with servant girls (41:22). As a characteristic of women, shame is analogous to modesty. A woman must be aware of her humble status, which she displays through restraint of her own desires. Possessing this kind of shame prevents a woman from engaging in behavior that could lead to shame of a different kind. In contrast to “shame that is glory and favor,” there is shame that is the opposite of honor; it consists in the public defacing of an individual, resulting in the degradation of that person’s social status. Behaviors that cause such shame certainly include any criminal or sinful act, but, more significantly, they include any infraction of the rules of social intercourse as mapped by the honor/shame system. Shame of this sort means public embarrassment at the very least and could mean complete ruin of the person’s reputation. Many kinds of improprieties can bring shame upon a man and his household, but the greatest threat to his honor resides within the realm of sexuality. Thus the goal of a patrician male is the complete control of his own sexual

drive as well as the sexuality of all the women for whom he is responsible. The Jerusalem sage’s preoccupation with the control of sexuality appears throughout the pages of S­ irach and at times seems almost driven by paranoia. Do not fall into the grip of passion, or you may be torn apart as by a bull. Your leaves will be devoured and your fruit destroyed, and you will be left like a withered tree. Evil passion destroys those who have it, and makes them the laughingstock of their enemies. (Sir. 6:2–4)

In addition to generic admonitions concerning a man’s need to restrain his sexual desires, the author gravely warns his readers about specific seductive situations and the wiles of women. As already mentioned, Ben Sira believes women have an almost unrestrainable sexual urge. Thus Ben Sira’s trepidation is not confined to women at home but extends to those outside the household as well, that is, prostitutes, adulteresses, or “strange” women in general. Chapter 9, for example, provides a litany of warnings similar to those in Proverbs to avoid such women and the places they frequent. Ben Sira, however, may have reasons for his anxiety that did not exist for the compiler of Proverbs. The sage’s detailed concern for table manners elsewhere in ­Sirach betrays knowledge of Greek-style banquets popular at the time (31:12–32:13). These banquets often involved the copious consumption of wine (warnings about the dangerous combination of women and wine appear in 19:2), as well as the presence of courtesans and female entertainers. The aspiring scribal elites addressed in ­Sirach must have attended such banquets, because they provided an opportunity to make important contacts, to demonstrate one’s refinement, and, ultimately, to trade in the commerce of honor. The sage in no way forbids participation at such festive meals; he simply circumscribes the behavior of his readers so as to ensure the best possible gains and mitigate the potential losses (13:8–13). As his views of banquets demonstrate, Ben Sira’s concern for self-discipline does not extend to ascetic extremes. Ben Sira appreciates many of life’s pleasures, such as food, wine, and companionship (30:25; 40:18–27). Reflecting popular Greek ethics, he advocates moderation as the guiding force in a man’s social life (31:22b).

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With regard to sexuality, however, Ben Sira’s teachings reflect a relentless emphasis on restraint. Although he never argues for abstention from sexual intercourse, nowhere does he reveal an appreciation for sexual pleasure. He describes the good wife as beautiful, but does not connect her appearance with sexual desire (the one exception may be 36:27). In general, Ben Sira demands the avoidance of anything that might inspire sexual desire. Sex is necessary and sexual desire is very real, but in distinction to, for example, food and the desire for food, sexual pleasure is too dangerous to enjoy.

Wisdom Personified as a Woman As in the book of Proverbs, wisdom is personified as a woman in ­Sirach (1:1–20; 4:11– 19; 6:18–37; 14:20–15:10; 24:1–22, 30–34; cf. Prov. 1–9). Unlike Proverbs, however, S­irach does not contain Woman Wisdom’s alter ego, Dame Folly (Prov. 9:13–18). Instead, Ben Sira’s portrait of Woman Wisdom functions as the antithesis of ordinary human women, whose sexuality so frightens him. More specifically, in place of a man feeling the power of sexual desire for women—which is far too threatening— Ben Sira substitutes a man’s quest for possessing Woman Wisdom. When Woman Wisdom speaks in praise of herself in ­Sirach 24:1–22, she describes her ability to attract the potential seeker of wisdom in terms ripe with sexual imagery: Like a terebinth I spread out my branches, and my branches are glorious and graceful. Like the vine I bud forth delights, and my blossoms become glorious and abundant fruit. Come to me, you who desire me, and eat your fill of my fruits. For the memory of me is sweeter than honey, and the possession of me sweeter than the honeycomb. (Sir. 24:16–20)

While Woman Wisdom is the object of pursuit, she actively beckons her pursuer, much as the dangerous seductress (9:3; 26:9; cf. Prov. 7:6– 23; 8:1–21). But Wisdom’s appeal is delighted in, not feared. Similarly, when Ben Sira describes how a man should pursue Woman Wisdom, his language echoes that which he so staunchly warned against elsewhere (e.g., 22:16)—the

feeling of reckless abandon that often accompanies sexual desire: Happy is the person . . . who reflects in his heart on her ways and ponders her secrets, pursuing her like a hunter, and lying in wait on her paths; who peers through her windows and listens at her doors; who camps near her house and fastens his tent peg to her walls. (Sir. 14:20–24)

Again, as in 26:12, the tent peg functions as a phallic metaphor. Ben Sira also describes Woman Wisdom as mother (4:11; 15:2a), bride (15:2b), and wife (14:26–27). Since she is not a threatening figure, she can sometimes take on dangerous characteristics that men experience as problematic in ordinary women. The best example of this is the description of Wisdom as a controlling, binding force to which a man should succumb: Put your feet into her fetters, and your neck into her collar. Bend your shoulders and carry her, and do not fret under her bonds. (Sir. 6:24–25)

Comparing these comments with the one in 9:2—“Do not give yourself to a woman and let her trample down your strength”—highlights the antithetical nature of Woman Wisdom and woman-as-sexual-being. The sage encourages, on the one hand, complete resistance to the allure of real women, and, on the other, total submission to Woman Wisdom. Ben Sira’s interest in cultivating the perfect man, under constraints operative within the honor/shame social system, incited a profound fear of women and sex. Desire, however, has not disappeared; it has only been redirected. The language and imagery used to describe Woman Wisdom suggest that male sexual desire has been, in psychological terms, sublimated in the pursuit of Woman Wisdom. The figure of Woman Wisdom in ­Sirach is notable for reasons other than the striking sexual imagery. The twenty-two-line poem in which Wisdom speaks of herself in the first person goes beyond mere metaphor. It constitutes a form of theological reflection about the nature of God in feminine terms. In contrast

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to Job, where she eludes human beings (Job 28), Wisdom is accessible to them in ­Sirach, as is already evident from the language quoted above. While Proverbs 8 also describes Wisdom as accessible, the portrait of Wisdom in ­Sirach displays distinctive elements that become influential in future Jewish and Christian tradition. Although Wisdom is witness to creation and initially dwelt in the heavens (24:4–5), God commands her to descend to earth and dwell among Israel: “Make your dwelling in Jacob, and in Israel receive your inheritance” (24:8). More specifically, she makes her home in the Jerusalem temple (24:10–12). Such imagery effectively set the stage for the rabbinic idea of the Shekinah, understood literally as the presence of God that abides in the temple, but more broadly as the divine (feminine) presence in creation. Moreover, Ben Sira is the first piece of literature to claim that Wisdom is the Torah. Immediately after the poem in chapter 24, Ben Sira says, “All this is the book of the covenant of the Most High God, the law that Moses commanded us as an inheritance for the congregations of Jacob” (24:23). In postbiblical Judaism, especially in rabbinic literature, the Torah itself is elevated to divine status, conceived as the divine word, even though it is now the possession of humans. The intermediary role of Wisdom we find in S­ irach, where she is divine but dwelling among humans, no doubt influences the idea of the Logos, a very important concept for the first-century Jewish philosopher Philo, as well as for early Christianity, where the Logos is equated with Christ (John 1). Many have observed that Wisdom and the Logos play the same intermediary role, except the gender has been switched from female to male. Nevertheless, readers can appreciate the beautiful description of Woman Wisdom in ­Sirach 24,

where the author is able to transcend his fear of the human feminine in his reflections of the divine feminine. Bibliography

Camp, Claudia. “Becoming Canon: Women, Texts, and Scribes in Proverbs and Sirach.” In Seeking Out the Wisdom of the Ancients: Essays Offered to Honor Michael V. Fox on the Occasion of His Sixty-fifth Birthday, edited by Ronald L. Troxel, Kelvin G. Friebel, and Dennis R. Magary, 371–87. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 2005. ———. “Understanding a Patriarchy: Women in Second Century Jerusalem through the Eyes of Ben Sira.” In “Women Like This”: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 1–41. Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature 1. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991. Coggins, Richard J. Sirach. Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic, 1998. Olney, Dominique. “The ‘Torafaction’ of Wisdom in Ben Sira.” In Patriarchs, Prophets, and Other Villains, edited by Lisa Isherwood, 50–68. London and Oakville, CT: Equinox, 2007. Schäfer, Peter. “Lady Wisdom.” In Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine Images of God from the Bible to the Early Kabbalah, 19–38. Prince­ ton, NJ: Princeton University, 2002. Skehan, Patrick W., and Alexander A. Di Lella. The Wisdom of Ben Sira. Anchor Bible 39. New York: Doubleday & Co., 1987. Trenchard, Warren C. Ben Sira’s View of Women: A Literary Analysis. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982.

Baruch Patricia K. Tull

Introduction Baruch is traditionally associated with the book of Jeremiah. According to its opening paragraph, it was composed in Babylon by Jeremiah’s secretary and friend Baruch “in the fifth year” after Jerusalem was burned (i.e., 582 BCE). The narrative describes Baruch reading his scroll to the exiled king and people, who in turn send it to the Jerusalem community, along with the captured temple vessels and money for offerings, requesting prayers on the exiles’ behalf. Numerous historical inaccuracies, however, alert readers that history is not the book’s chief concern. According to Jeremiah 43:5–6, Baruch was taken not to Babylon but to Egypt. According to Ezra 1:7–11, the temple vessels were restored much later, in the time of Cyrus of Persia. Baruch’s designation of Belshazzar as Nebuchadnezzar’s son, rather than as the son of

the later, unrelated king Nabonidus (an error shared with the book of Daniel), collapses the exile into one generation and simplifies Babylonian politics. Interpreters view the situating of the book in exilic times as a literary fiction through which typological parallels were drawn between the sixth century and the audience’s own time of continuing distress. Most scholars place the book’s origin in the second century BCE, and believe it to have been assembled by an editor from shorter compositions. Manuscripts have survived only in languages used by early Christians, but forms and usages suggest Hebrew as its original language. After 70 CE it may have been used along with Lamentations to lament the temple’s destruction. Today Baruch’s final section serves as an Advent lectionary reading for Catholics and Episcopalians.

Comment After a narrative introduction (1:1–14), three distinct sections constitute the book: a prose prayer of confession reminiscent of Deuteronomy and Daniel 9 (1:15–3:8), in which the Deity is called “the Lord” and “the Lord our God”; a wisdom poem reminiscent chiefly of Job, Proverbs, and Sirach (3:9–4:4), invoking only “God”; and a poem concerning Jerusalem/ Zion as grieving mother, reminiscent of Lamentations and Isaiah 40–66 (4:5–5:9), using Isaiah’s terms “the Holy One” (Isa. 40:25) and “the Everlasting” (Isa. 40:28), as well as “God.”

Despite these distinctions, the three sections have much in common: all three are deeply exegetical, making liberal and creative use of Scripture to forge new meanings; all derive major themes from Deuteronomy; and all begin with the exile, interpret its meaning, and offer alternative visions for the future. Thus Baruch creates out of three different media a consistent message: Israel’s urgent need to learn from their ancestors’ mistakes and to live henceforth by the Torah, so that they might see glorious restoration.

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Narrative Introduction (Bar. 1:1–14) The introduction calls to mind several figures associated with the exile. Jeremiah is invoked through the use of Baruch, and three Judahite kings are quickly named. More subtly, the book’s precise dating in relation to historical events, its Babylonian riverbank venue, and its message of repentance all link it with Ezekiel. Resemblance to Ezra in Nehemiah 8 is similarly drawn as the people assemble to hear the public reading and are moved to repentance. Just as several former leaders are compressed into one and history is collapsed by the many echoes of the past, so also geographical distinctions become blurred, as those in Jerusalem are asked to confess both their own sins and those of the exiles. Ultimately, the book suggests, all these distinctions matter less than the great unity of God’s overarching choice of Israel.

Prayer of Confession (Bar. 1:15–3:8) The prayer that follows weaves a contrite response to the warnings of Deuteronomy 28, echoing closely the penitential prayer of Daniel 9: “The Lord our God is in the right, but there is open shame on us today . . . because we have sinned before the Lord” (1:15–17; 2:6; see Dan. 9:7). Remorse is sincere but mostly unspecific: the people repent of disobedience (1:18; see Dan. 9:10), of serving other gods and doing evil in the Lord’s eyes (1:22; see Deut. 4:25; 11:16), and of failing to heed God’s command to submit to Babylon (2:24; see Jer. 27:13). God’s saving deeds are recalled word for word: God “brought our ancestors out of the land of Egypt” (1:20; see Josh. 24:17) to “a land flowing with milk and honey” (1:20; see Deut. 11:9). God’s punishment is articulated in detail: the curse declared by Moses has come about (1:20; see Dan. 9:11) in unparalleled immensity (2:2; see Dan. 9:12); the Lord has driven people to cannibalism (2:2, 3; see Deut. 28:53); has scattered them among the nations (2:4; see Deut. 28:64); has left the land a desolation without inhabitants (2:23; see Jer. 9:11). Nevertheless God is just (2:9; see Dan. 9:14), kind, and compassionate (2:27; see Deut. 30:3), intending to give them a new, obedient heart (2:31; see Ezek. 36:26), to return them to their land (2:34; see Jer. 32:37), and to make an irrevocable covenant with them (2:35; see Jer. 32:38–40). The

prayer ends with reminders of the urgency of the exiles’ crisis and the sincerity of their plea. Though the particulars of the prayer may seem foreign to modern readers, certain aspects are quite instructive. Confession of sin figures prominently in exilic and postexilic literature. Rather than admiring and emulating this critical self-examination, Christian triumphalism has for centuries used confessions like this as opportunities to discredit Second Temple Judaism. Readers of Baruch would do well to contemplate the courage of a vassal nation determined, despite prolonged hardship, to fulfill its ancient calling with self-critical integrity. The exiles’ prayer reactualizes tradition both textually and thematically, asserting a vocation that transcends generations and even centuries. Such a transcendent viewpoint encourages the community both to recognize the roots of their struggles in the pain and persistence of predecessors and to labor for gains that will be realized only long after their own time. This prayer may remind modern readers of the importance of retaining and retelling the stories of former generations, whether bleak or bright, in order both to understand one’s own place in history and to prepare the path for one’s descendants.

Wisdom’s Gift (Bar. 3:9–4:4) Baruch’s second major section takes the form of a riddle, or a catechesis, in which questions guide readers to the desired response. In Deuteronomy 4:6 Moses had linked obedience to the law with wisdom, saying of the commands, “You must observe them diligently, for this will show your wisdom and discernment to the peoples, who, when they hear all these statutes, will say, ‘Surely this great nation is a wise and discerning people!’” Here the link is explored in a poem drawing on Job, Deuteronomy, and Proverbs. Beginning with the peculiarly Deuteronomic “Hear, O Israel” (obscured in the NRSV; see Deut. 5:1; 6:4, etc.), this poem retells the first section’s concerns in a different idiom: Israel is “in the land of enemies” (3:10; see Lev. 26:34, etc.) because they “forsook the Fountain of Wisdom” (3:12; see Jer. 2:13; Deut. 4:6; 32:6, 29 on wisdom). She, Wisdom, was not to be found by mighty rulers or wise seekers in surrounding nations (3:16–23; see Ezek. 28:2–10; Jer. 49:7), nor by those in Teman known for their wisdom (3:22–23; see Jer. 49:7 and Obad. 8–9), nor by

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giants of old (3:26–28; see Gen. 6:1–4; Wisd. Sol. 14:6). She could neither be bought with gold nor found by quest (3:15–31; see Deut. 30:12–13; Job 28:12–21). This Wisdom, found only by the creator (3:32–34; see Job 28:23) and given to Israel (3:24; see Isa. 41:8; Neh. 8:1; Sir. 24:8), is the Torah herself (4:1; see Sir. 24:23), giving life to all who hold her fast (4:1; see Deut. 30:16–18). This fervently sought being has many names in Baruch. She is not only Sophia (“wisdom,” 3:12, 23; Prov. 1:20) but also Phronēsis (“understanding,” 3:9, 14, 28; Prov. 3:13), Synesis (“intelligence,” 3:14, 23, 32; Prov. 9:6), Ischys (“strength,” 3:14; Prov. 8:14), and Epistēmē (“knowledge,” 3:20, 27, 37; Job 28:12)—all feminine nouns. Even with this profusion of synonyms, the feminine pronoun—repeated eighteen times—remains singular, referring to one integrated subject, variously described. Only in the final four verses are readers told outright what was hinted at in the poem’s beginning (3:9) and middle (3:29–30): Wisdom is none other than “the book of the commandments of God, the law that endures forever” (4:1; cf. Sir. 24:23). The feminine term for “book” (biblos), rather than the much more common neuter term (biblion), is paralleled by the one masculine synonym, nomos (“law,” translating the Hebrew feminine torah). These terms are followed by four more repetitions of the feminine singular pronoun, emphasizing that here gender designation transcends grammatical determination. Though Wisdom is discussed elsewhere, Baruch treats the subject distinctively. Unlike Proverbs and Sirach, this text does not make God the creator of a wisdom self-evident in the universe. Rather, introducing a synergy between Job 28:12–21, which claims that no human, but only God, knows the way to wisdom, and Deuteronomy 30:12–13, which claims that it is unnecessary to go up to heaven or over the sea to find God’s command, Baruch makes wisdom a hidden quality, which cannot be found by humans, whether powerful or rich, which even the creator must discover before presenting it to Israel as the gift of Torah (see Job 38:35–36). To this writer, wisdom is neither information nor cleverness. It cannot be gained through wealth or power. It does not even consist of aphorisms based on observation of the created world or human behavior. Rather, wisdom consists entirely of adherence to God’s

Torah commandments. Following the law is not presented as a means to avoid divine punishment, but as the only coherent means to understanding life itself. The recovery of Woman Wisdom as a divine figure has been widely welcomed, but justified ambivalence exists over her presentation in Proverbs, where she is offered as a quasi-sexual partner for the male audience, in contrast with a negative, lustful female. In Baruch, however, Wisdom is commended to “you, Israel” (second common plural), and has no evil counterpart. Sexual innuendo, if present at all, is quite submerged (e.g., 3:32, in which God “knows” her; 4:1, 2). Though largely forgotten today, this section of Baruch became a crucial text in the early church’s christological discussions. The apostle Paul, creating a new synthesis of Deuteronomy and Baruch in Romans 10:5–8, transformed Wisdom/Torah into Christ (see also 1 Cor. 2:6–12). Irenaeus, Clement, Origen, Tertullian, Ambrose, Hilary, and several others appealed to this passage (esp. “she appeared on earth and lived with humankind,” 3:37; cf. John 1:14) to support a variety of viewpoints concerning the preexistent Christ. Today the particulars of their constructions are less striking than the fact that they appeared untroubled by this feminization of the Divine.

Zion’s Sufferings and Comfort (Bar. 4:5–5:9) Nowhere else in the Bible do personified Wisdom and personified Zion/Jerusalem appear side by side. While Wisdom evidently derived many of her attributes from goddesses in neighboring cultures, Mother Zion is thought to have arisen from the Near Eastern tradition of city goddesses who interceded before the divine council for their suffering peoples. In both cases, Israelite monotheism modified the status of these figures, while retaining both their gender and their intercessory roles. As beneficial as Wisdom may be as a figure for contemporary women’s contemplation, Zion may be even more important, expressing eloquently the problem of human suffering and divine compassion. Personified Zion has previously appeared in Psalms, 2 Kings, and several biblical prophets, but is most prominent in Lamentations and

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Isaiah 40–66. Here in Baruch she is introduced with an allusion to the same setting to which the previous sections were tied: the exile, as understood through Deuteronomy. Her children are told they were sold to the nations because “you provoked” the creator (4:7; see Deut. 32:16) “by sacrificing to demons” (4:7; see Deut. 32:17); “you forgot the Everlasting God, who brought you up, and you grieved Jerusalem, who reared you” (4:8; see Deut. 32:18). The antecedent passage in Deuteronomy, rife with divine mother imagery, provides Baruch a significant opportunity: the verb here attributed to God (tropheuō) is attested otherwise in the Septuagint only to describe Moses’ mother, the “nursing woman” (Exod. 2:7); in addition, Zion is introduced as God’s coparent, who “reared” them. (See Ps. 23:2; Isa. 49:21; Prov. 23:24 for both divine and paternal parallels.) Additionally, a subtle wisdom theme emerges in the reminders to please both father and mother (see Prov. 1:8, etc.). This section’s theology of sin and repentance is consonant with that of previous sections of Baruch, though the lens and language through which this theology is viewed differ. After her introduction, Zion speaks at length about and to her children, whose sins have caused her sorrow. Daughters as well as sons are specifically mentioned (4:10, 14, 16), and “children” appears seven times as the neuter term tekna rather than huioi, “sons.” Here Zion endures none of the sexually abusive imprecations of Hosea, Jeremiah, and especially Ezekiel, in which the mother herself is at fault, gender is integral to sin, and God is the jealous, aggressive husband, silencing any protestations. Rather, sexually abusive terminology is omitted, and a distinction is drawn between the mother and her erring children. She suffers innocently from their disregard for God’s commands. Confession of sin and hope for restoration have already appeared in the initial letter and prayer (1:1–3:8). The path of wise obedience has been traced (3:9–4:4). Now a mother’s pathos creates a relationship within which straying Israelites can envision themselves assuming responsibility for their society’s welfare. Bereaved Zion expresses deep sorrow over God’s decree of exile, yet mediates this decree to her children, bidding them to go (4:19), and maintaining that the only help she can offer is her intercession: “I have taken off the robe of peace and put on sackcloth for my supplication;

I will cry to the Everlasting all my days” (4:20). In fact, however, she does more, expressing confidence in God’s rescue, recommending patient endurance as her children await God’s deliverance (4:25), and exhorting them to “cry to God,” who will remember them (4:27). Though portrayed as a mother weeping and sorrowful (4:11), widowed, bereaved, and desolate (4:12), Zion neither accuses nor excuses her straying children, but urges acceptance, repentance, and expectancy. Midway through her speech, Zion reaches a turning point, finding joy in God’s mercy and articulating hope for the future: “I sent you out with sorrow and weeping, but God will give you back to me with joy and gladness forever” (4:23; see Isa. 49:22; 51:11). Though her words echo the suffering that was so brutally articulated in Lamentations when the exile was still new and shocking, in Baruch time and distance have conferred on Zion more dignity, control, and motherly counsel. Whereas in Baruch’s first section the people are forced to articulate their own sorrow, and in the middle section a more dispassionate speaker touches only briefly on present sufferings, Zion as mother represents transcendent compassion, moved by human suffering, grieving both over and with her children. She mediates the tension between respect for divine order (which leads her to plead with her children) and compassion for human failure (which leads her to plead with God). Though citing past iniquity, she stresses future deliverance. Reinforcing the pathos of this strong, sorrowful figure, the other speaker returns in 4:30 to complete her poem, comforting Jerusalem with the same words with which she has twice comforted her children: “Take courage” (4:30; 4:21, 27). This comforter of Jerusalem does not nullify, contradict, or replace her voice (as in the prophets), nor plead with her to speak (as in Lamentations). Rather, it complements her speech, transforming future hope into eminent reality, bidding her “look . . . and see” (4:36) not her children’s departure, which she has already so vividly described, but now their return. As before in Isaiah, God is expected to become Jerusalem’s comforter (4:30; Isa. 51:12). Her oppressor will be ruined (4:31–35; Isa. 47:11); her children will gather (4:36–37; 5:5; Isa. 49:18), carried in glory (5:6; Isa. 49:22; 60:4) and led joyfully by God (5:9; Isa. 52:12; 55:12), while Zion dons splendid clothing (5:1–3; Isa.

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52:1–2) and acquires a new name (5:4; Isa. 62:2, 12). The poem ends with a panoramic view of creation’s response: helped by mountains and valleys (5:7; Isa. 40:4), woods and fragrant trees (5:8; Isa. 55:12–13), Zion’s children are led back by God “with the mercy and righteousness that come from him” (5:9). Thus Jerusalem is pressed forward to represent both chastening sorrow and comforting hope. Hovering at the book’s end is the expectation that hearers in a distant century, beckoned by the vivid recollection of such variety of scriptural idiom, will once again reclaim their heritage. They are invited to reclaim it in the person not just of one but of two female figures, not only Torah Wisdom, by which they live, but also Mother Zion, whose flesh they are, who bore and reared them, whose intercession has sustained them, and within whose comforting walls they will once again fulfill their divine calling.

Bibliography

Burke, David. The Poetry of Baruch: A Reconstruction and Analysis of the Original Hebrew Text of Baruch 3:9–5:9. Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Studies 10. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982. Harrelson, Walter. “Wisdom Hidden and Revealed according to Baruch (Baruch 3:9–4:4).” In Priests, Prophets, and Scribes, edited by E. Ulrich et al., 158–71. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 149. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. Metzger, Bruce. An Introduction to the Apocrypha. New York: Oxford University Press, 1957. Tov, Emmanuel. The Book of Baruch. Missoula, MT: Scholars Press, 1975.

The Letter of Jeremiah Patricia K. Tull

Introduction The Letter of Jeremiah is a short treatise on the absurdity of idol worship. Though a freestanding book in the Septuagint, it was appended to Baruch in the Vulgate and the KJV (hence its chapter numbering in the NRSV). According to its introduction, the letter was written by the prophet Jeremiah for Judeans being exiled to Babylon. Though actually composed considerably later, the letter echoes and expands upon criticisms of idol worship found in both Jeremiah and Second Isaiah (Jer. 10:1–16; Isa. 40:18–20; 42:17; 44:9–20; 45:16–20; 46:1–7) as well as some late psalms (Pss. 115:3–8; 135:15–18). Its introduction is modeled on a letter Jeremiah is reported to have written to those exiled in 597 BCE (Jer. 29:1–23). Jeremiah expected the exile to last seventy years (Jer. 29:10); the apocryphal letter revises the duration to “up to seven generations”—that is, about 280 years (Let. Jer. 6:3). For this reason many scholars date the Letter of Jeremiah to the late fourth or early third century BCE. The letter warns the audience of the forms of worship they will see in Babylon, exhorting them to resist worshiping “gods of silver and gold and wood,” and to worship Judah’s God alone (vv. 4, 11). Ten reflections on the uselessness of idols follow, punctuated by periodic refrains. The first three and final two refrains exhort: “From this it is evident [or from this you will know, etc.] that they are not gods; so do not fear them” (vv. 16, 23, 29, 65). The middle several refrains are rhetorical questions, such as “Why then must anyone think that they are gods, or call them gods?” (v. 40). These

“do not fear” refrains, combined with negative comparisons to Judah’s God, keep the contrast alive between the gods who are too powerless to inspire fear and the invisible God of the Jews. The rhetorical questions suggest ignorance on the part of those who worship these gods. The letter offers four arguments repeated in various forms:   1. Idols are shaped by human hands from perishable materials: their gold tarnishes, their clothing rots, they do not even notice that their hearts are “eaten away when crawling creatures from the earth devour them” (v. 20).   2. Idols are powerless to move, protect, or help either themselves or their worshipers. They cannot speak, much less make or depose kings, give wealth, save anyone from death, rescue the weak, restore sight to the blind, answer prayers, provide rain, judge, or deliver. In fact, others must dust and clean them, lock them away from thieves, light lamps for them (though they cannot see), carry them, and pick them up when they fall.   3. Less useful than the most humble utensils, less useful even than a house’s door that at least protects its contents, idols instead consume worshipers’ attention and efforts.   4. The practices of idol worshipers offend Judean sensibilities. The tone of the letter ranges from ironic to satirical to sarcastic to imperious, and repetition abounds. 423

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Comment The letter presents a complex text for women in that it intersects splendidly with some widely held feminist values while rather deeply offending others. The wastefulness of rendering service to idols is set over against the needs of those toward whom the Torah explicitly commends mercy. The idols do not rescue the weak from the strong, take pity on widows and orphans, or judge evil. Even worshipers derive no benefit, since the idols fail to protect from harm, but must themselves be protected. Food and clothing given to the idols are consumed by priests and their families. Priests even steal from them to give to prostitutes, thus siphoning off worshipers’ bounty for themselves, rather than benefiting society’s needy. Worship of idols is thus represented as undermining basic concerns for justice in the Torah that contemporary feminists continue to hold dear. The amusing verbal image of bats, birds, swallows, and cats perched on the heads of Babylonian gods demonstrates the author’s keen grasp of the rhetorical power of satirizing a dominant culture’s sacred institutions. Feminists, alert to the constructed, constricting nature of any human representation of God, have often engaged in similar demystifying hermeneutical strategies. At the same time, the writer’s intolerance of non-Israelite religious practices merits critical examination. The letter describes idol worship as fetishism, as absurd equation of the invisible Divine with lifeless objects. Idolatry’s inner logic appears unfathomable to the writer, who asks four times, “Why then must anyone think [idols] are gods?” (vv. 30, 40, 44, 56). Yet the very repetition of the question creates an air of disingenuousness: if idols really posed so little threat, why did they inspire such vigorous protest? Recent archaeological studies reveal a situation far more complex than the letter suggests. Both within and around Israel, iconic worship was more varied and subtle than this dichotomy between senseless pagan fetishism and enlightened Israelite iconoclasm suggests. Moreover, Babylonian texts portray a detailed rite of idol initiation, in which carpenter and goldsmith ritually deny having made the statue, and the Deity is invited to descend from heaven to dwell in it, indicating clearly the worshipers’ awareness of the distinctions between idol and god. To their worshipers, idols were of course

wood and stone, and yet more besides. Analogies to the Torah as more than mere parchment and ink, or the Eucharist as more than mere bread and wine, might well be drawn. The letter’s silence on rituals that might have illuminated the idols’ meaning, despite intimate knowledge of their creation and maintenance, shows a decided disengagement from the idolaters’ own self-understanding. Explicitly aimed at undermining the attractiveness of foreign religion, the letter demonstrates both the interpretive pitfalls inherent in describing religious systems from the outside and the easy temptation to denigrate what is different on the basis of one’s own system of values. To resist this temptation, and instead to seek interfaith understanding, necessarily involves empathic suspension of one’s own system and willingness to inquire into the meanings that structure the worldviews of others. Here, however, the letter illuminates another tension in feminist values: not only do worldviews differ, they also offend. On this point the letter’s descriptions of women’s roles are particularly instructive. The author finds it offensive that women execute priestly functions (v. 30), even during their periods (v. 29)—practices modern women welcome or even take for granted. The author also describes women waiting in public for men to choose them for sex (vv. 42–43)—a practice modern women might also find offensive, though for different reasons. (Herodotus, Histories, I.199, describes, with more sympathy toward the women, a strikingly similar scenario.) Yet the letter attacks women’s sacred and sexual roles alike with equal vigor, rendering it difficult for modern readers to take sides, exposing the culturally specific sensibilities not only of idolater and author but of readers as well. The Letter of Jeremiah thus becomes a distant mirror illuminating a prominent dilemma of feminist interfaith thinking: the problem of entering into dialogue with sisters whose faith practices offend cherished ethical viewpoints, especially on justice toward women. Bibliography

Jacobsen, Thorkild. “The Graven Image.” In Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, edited by P. D. Miller

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et al., 15–32. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987. Mettinger, Tryggve. No Graven Image? Israelite Aniconism in Its Ancient Near Eastern Context. Coniectanea Biblica Old Testament Series 42. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1995.

Moore, Carey A. Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions. Anchor Bible 44. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1977. Saldarini, Anthony J. “The Letter of Jeremiah.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, edited by Leander E. Keck et al., 6:985–1010. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001.

The Greek Book of Daniel Nicole Tilford

Introduction The Greek book of Daniel reflects the ongoing anxieties of Jewish communities as they struggled to adjust to the increasing influence of Hellenism. With its incorporation of material from several periods, the book is of interest to feminist scholars both for its depictions of women and for its portrayal of a minority group’s attempt to survive in the shadow of a ruling majority.

Composition and Historical Context The earliest Daniel material, preserved in both the Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint, consists of six, loosely connected short stories (Dan. 1–6) about four Jews who are taken to Babylon as captives during the reign of King Jehoiakim. In Babylon, the young men serve in the court of King Nebuchadnezzar and his successors, where their lives are constantly threatened by the ruling majority, which attempts to impose its dietary and religious customs on the four men. Daniel and his companions persevere despite these threats. They resist the customs of their neighbors and are rewarded for their unfailing loyalty to the God of Israel. Although set in the sixth century BCE, these stories were likely composed during the third or fourth century BCE and reflect the interests of Jewish Diaspora communities who struggled to maintain their cultural heritage in light of increasing Hellenistic influences. The narratives of Daniel 1–6 encouraged their readers to maintain their cultural heritage, even while embracing the new possibilities for advancement in their changing environment.

During the Seleucid persecutions of the second century BCE, four apocalypses were added to these narratives. Claiming to be written by Daniel himself, these apocalypses contain a series of symbolic visions (Dan. 7, 8) and direct angelic revelations (Dan. 9, 10–12) that foretell the coming destruction of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who plundered the Jewish temple and persecuted Jews who failed to abandon their ancestral customs. Although presented as sixth-century prophecies of future events, these visions were probably composed shortly before Antiochus’s death (ca. 164 BCE) and use the narration of past events to promote the political aspirations of the author and his community. Just as God “foretold” the destruction of the Babylonians, Medes, and Persians, God would intervene to destroy the Seleucids. Only by rejecting the traditions of the majority culture could the Jewish people survive and prosper. While the Masoretic Text preserved in the Hebrew Bible ceased to develop the Daniel tradition any further, Greek versions include two additional prayers (The Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Jews) and three short stories (Susanna, the Priests of Bel, and The Dragon). Each of these probably circulated independently before their insertion into the Daniel text during the second or first century BCE. As they were incorporated into the Daniel tradition, they too came to reflect the concerns of Jews in the Hellenistic world. The prayers themselves barely refer to the Daniel narratives, instead praising God more generally and reflecting on the sin of the

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speakers. However, when they were inserted into Daniel between 3:23 and 3:24, connecting narrative material and references were added to relate these prayers to Hananiah’s (=Shadrach), Azariah’s (=Abednego), and Mishael’s (=Meshach) experience in the fire. For Jews living in a Hellenistic environment, who may have been familiar with similar liturgical prayers, the heightened religiosity of the three young men emphasized that God’s goodness continued despite human adversity. Similarly, the story of Susanna probably originated as an independent folktale whose unnamed heroine was saved from false accusation by an unnamed “wise man” (perhaps a divine interlocutor). These unnamed figures were later recast as the Jewish Susanna and Daniel, and the story became attached to the Daniel tradition. The Old Greek version, which is fortysix verses long, placed the story after the apocalypses (as Dan. 13 in the Septuagint). Other Greek manuscripts, including Theodotion’s second-century-CE version, expanded the narrative to sixty-four verses and placed it at the beginning of the Daniel narratives (as Dan. 1). Around 250 CE, Theodotion’s edition replaced the Old Greek in the Septuagint, and most English translations today (including the NRSV) are based upon it; however, they follow Jerome’s Vulgate edition in placing the story as chapter 13. Although there are important differences between the two versions of Susanna, both use the figure of Daniel to emphasize that a righteous minority can overcome the injustice of a majority group. Unlike the rest of Daniel, however, there is no external threat to the Jewish community here. There is no pressure to conform to the religions or expectations of their

neighbors. Rather, the majority voice comes from within the Jewish community itself, which is self-governing and able to punish its own offenders. Many early Jewish communities probably enjoyed such privileges in the Hellenistic world, making this story a warning against the abuse of power that could occur even among the Jewish people. The final two Greek narratives also likely circulated independently and were later attached to the Daniel tradition after the apocalypses (as Dan. 14). In the Priests of Bel (14:1–22), Daniel proves that the Babylonian deity Bel did not consume the daily sacrifices offered to him by exposing the nocturnal theft of the sacrifices by Bel’s priests. In The Dragon (14:23–42), Daniel proves that a dragon is not a deity by feeding him cakes of pitch, fat, and hair, which causes the dragon to burst into flames. It is unclear whether these two stories began as Daniel narratives or were folktales that were later attached to his name. Yet, like the narratives of chapters 1–6, they use Daniel to encourage the Jewish communities to trust in the power of the Jewish God and maintain their cultural heritage. Since they draw upon the Hebrew Bible, Jewish translations of Daniel (e.g., the Tanakh) do not contain the Greek additions. Protestant translations (e.g., NRSV, REB, NIV) likewise preserve the Hebrew Bible’s version of Daniel, although they print the Greek additions separately in the Apocrypha. Roman Catholic translations (e.g., NAB, NJB) follow the Greek Septuagint (with Theodotion’s edition of Susanna as Dan. 13) and therefore incorporate the Greek additions into the text itself. The result is a text without a single canonical form, either in antiquity or in modernity.

Comment The Power of the Minority For women and other minority groups throughout history who have felt like their voices have been marginalized by larger societal pressures, the Greek book of Daniel offers various examples of individuals who make their voices heard without compromising their core beliefs. Like the Jews of the Hellenistic era, readers can find within these diverse texts models of both resistance and accommodation.

On the one hand, the book of Daniel reminds its readers that it is sometimes necessary to reject the established power structures of society. As the dreams of chapters 1–6 and the apocalypses of chapters 7–12 illustrate, worldly power is transient, and it is sometimes necessary to resist established conventions and work toward the implementation of a new, more just system. On the other hand, Daniel reminds its readers that a minority voice can succeed while operating within the established parameters

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of society, accommodating to its structure while resisting its abuses. The main characters of the narratives maintain their ancestral customs (Dan. 1), refuse to bow to the pressures of their contemporaries (Dan. 3, 6), and speak out in the face of injustice (Dan. 13); yet, they do so from within the Babylonian court or Israelite legal system. Daniel and his companions work with the palace master to ensure that their needs are met (1:8–17) and follow established legal structures to protect the rights of others (Dan. 13). Although minorities, Daniel and his companions are able to negotiate the complicated power structures of their society and make their voices heard. Indeed, the book of Daniel reminds the reader that it is not always the power structure that inhibits the mobility of its members but, rather, individuals who manipulate the system or who mindlessly follow the unjust whims of others. Daniel is not persecuted by the foreign court but by specific court officials who manipulate the law against him. Finding “no grounds for complaint or any corruption” in Daniel (6:4), the presidents and satraps persuade the king to sign an edict that would punish anyone who worships any entity other than the king. The king himself was “very much distressed” and “made every effort to rescue” Daniel (6:14), but is trapped by the schemes of the court officials. Similarly, Susanna is threatened not by the law of adultery itself but by elders who manipulate the law and the people who follow them without question (Dan. 13). Ultimately, powerless individuals are saved by their wisdom, faithfulness, and the support of like-minded individuals. The Greek book of Daniel thus reminds its readers, ancient and modern, that working through established social parameters can be as effective for reforming corruption as full-scale resistance.

Women in Greek Daniel It is important to note, however, that the texts of Daniel are primarily the stories of men. It is Jewish men who are able to save themselves by their wisdom and Jewish men who prosper in foreign societies. With the exception of the Susanna narrative, women are largely absent from Daniel. When women appear, they are foreign, nameless, and function as plot devices or as extensions of their male counterparts, rather than as agents.

The unnamed queen mother who appears in 5:10–12, for instance, is a plot device. The only woman who speaks in the non-Susanna material, she appears suddenly in verse 10 to introduce Daniel to her son and then immediately disappears. No explanation is given of where she came from or what happened to her. She is merely a chronological bridge between Nebuchadnezzar’s reign and that of his son Belshazzar. She thus reflects the narrator’s voice, not her own. The rest of the women in the non-Susanna material are extensions of their male counterparts. They are “wives” and “concubines” of King Belshazzar (5:2, 3, 23), “wives” of the presidents and satraps who accuse Daniel (6:24), and “wives” of the priests of Bel (14:10, 15, 21). Similarly, the historical women referenced in the apocalypses are unnamed and identified only by their male associates. For instance, 11:6 refers to the daughter of “the king of the south” (=Ptolemy II), that is, Berenice, who was given in marriage to “the king of the north” (=Antiochus II of Syria) in 252 BCE. Later, the text refers to Cleopatra, daughter of Antiochus III, simply as “a woman” that is given in marriage (11:17). While historical figures are rarely named in ancient apocalypses, it is noteworthy here that, like the women in the narratives, Berenice and Cleopatra are identified by their male relatives and not by their own royal status. The fates of women and their children in Daniel are determined by their men. When their men prosper, the women drink wine from vessels of gold and silver (5:1–4) and eat the food dedicated to Bel (14:15). When their men scheme against Daniel or God, the women are thrown into the lion’s den (6:24) or are arrested and killed (14:21–22). Even Berenice, who is described as having power of her own, is “given up” (i.e., killed) when her husband dies (11:6) Unlike Daniel and his companions, these women are wealthy members of the dominant culture. However, despite belonging to the dominant culture, these women are relatively voiceless, and their fortunes remain tied to the men with which they are associated. Women in the non-Susanna narratives, then, challenge women who wish to read the Greek text of Daniel as a model for making their own voices heard in contemporary society. Although attempting to resist the injustice of the majority culture, the book of Daniel remains blind to the injustice perpetuated against society’s most vulnerable members, its women and children.

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Susanna References to the Old Greek of Susanna follow the numbering conventions and translation of the New English Translation of the Septuagint (NETS); references to Theodotion follow the translation of the NRSV. The story of Susanna similarly challenges modern feminist readers. Many have interpreted her character as a strong female voice, who righteously challenges the depraved ethics of the majority culture, and have heralded her story as a champion of feminine causes. Yet Susanna’s character is ambiguous. Like the women in the other Daniel narratives, her identity is largely dependent on her male associations, and her fate is determined by the men around her. She remains a woman trapped in a man’s world. The extent of Susanna’s entrapment depends on whether one reads the Old Greek version (OG) or the longer Theodotion version (TH). In both accounts, Susanna is the only named female. Other women are mentioned only by their social relationships: Susanna’s mother is one of her “parents” (vv. 3, 30), her “mother” (v. 30), or the “wife of Hilkiah” (v. 63); her servants are unnamed “maids” (vv. 15–19, 21, 30, 36), and other women are “daughters of Israel” (v. 57). In OG, Susanna herself is named only twice, once when the elders first see her (v. 7) and once when she is summoned to the assembly (v. 29). Elsewhere, she is identified by her gender or her male relations. Five times she is simply referred to as a “woman” (vv. 7, 30, 31, 37, 39), and another five times she is identified by her kin relations. She is the “wife of their brother, one of the sons of Israel” (v. 7), a “Judean lady” (v. 22), a “daughter of Israel” (v. 48), a “daughter of Judah” (v. 57), and the people’s “sister” (v. 61). Like the wives of the king or the priests of Bel, Susanna’s identity relies on the men with whom she is associated, the family of her father or husband. Even her two named references are immediately followed by familial identifications. In both cases, she is “Susanna, daughter of Chelkias, wife of Ioakim” (vv. 7, 29), that is, a man’s daughter, a man’s wife. Apart from the men in her life, she is simply an unnamed woman. TH does not negate this male identification; she is still wife (vv. 2, 29) and daughter (vv. 2, 48, 57, 63). Yet TH names Susanna nine times (vv. 2, 7, 22, 24, 27, 28, 29, 31, 42), four times as

often as the OG. This gives Susanna a greater presence in the narrative. In TH, Susanna is no longer an unnamed woman to whom events occur. She is a well-known elite woman, whose name is known to her community. The character of Susanna also differs between the two versions. In OG, Susanna is a flat character. She is described as “elegant in appearance” (v. 7), “refined” (v. 30), and a mother of four children (v. 30), but the narrative does not give any indication of her personality. She is relatively passive. Besides walking in her garden (vv. 7, 13) and coming to court (v. 30), the action in the narrative occurs to her, not by her. It is the elders who “see” her (v. 7), “lust” after her (v. 8), and make the conscious choice to act upon that lust (vv. 9–19). It is the elders who force Susanna to unveil herself (v. 32) and accuse her of wrongdoing (vv. 28, 35–41), and it is the people who summon her (v. 29) and decide her fate (v. 41). Finally, it is Daniel who saves Susanna by his astute reasoning (vv. 48–59). Susanna is spoken about in the narrative (e.g., vv. 19, 36–41); but no one actually speaks to Susanna, save herself. She is an object of desire and contestation, not an agent with her own volition. Such passivity is further demonstrated in Susanna’s limited speech. Compared to the elders and Daniel, whose repeated speeches compel the narrative forward (vv. 13, 19, 36–41, 48–51, 51b, 52–55, 54, 56–58, 58b, 59), Susanna speaks only twice in the OG. The first time (vv. 22–23), Susanna’s speech is matter of fact. Like the queen mother in 5:10–12, the narrator uses Susanna’s voice to remind the audience of key information, the Mosaic law that adultery results in death (cf. Lev. 20:10; Deut. 22:22). Although Susanna states that “it would be better for me to fall into your hands by not doing it than to sin before Lord” (v. 23), Susanna has not truly made a choice here. She merely states the obvious. The second speech by Susanna is more proactive. In verse 35, the distressed Susanna speaks to God, asking for divine mercy. Here too, however, Susanna’s speech is directed to a male audience and relies upon a male to remedy her situation. In the OG, Susanna does not have the power to choose her own destiny or solve her own problems. TH’s Susanna takes a more active role in her narrative. Still beautiful, Susanna is also Godfearing and wise (v. 2). She has been taught the law of Moses by her parents (v. 3) and how to

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apply it. She does not simply walk about her garden and accept the fate given to her. She commands her maids to bring her soap for her bath (v. 17) and takes an active role in the events that follow. Unlike the OG, Susanna’s encounter with the elders involves an active dialogue. The elders attempt to persuade Susanna (vv. 19–21); they speak to her. Susanna does not simply speak back; she “groans” (v. 22), suggesting a heightened awareness of the gravity of the situation. Like the OG, Susanna provides the Mosaic law as the rationale for her refusal; however, within the context of the TH, this rationale is presented as a choice. The elders present Susanna with the option of capitulating, but she makes the conscious choice to refuse. Like the OG, TH then notes that Susanna cries out to God (v. 35); however, it does not initially record the contents of that cry. Instead, after being accused, Susanna cries out a second time, this time a voice loud enough for both God and the people to hear (vv. 42–43). In addition to protesting her innocence, Susanna charges God to act on her behalf. She declares, “I will die, though I have done nothing that they have maliciously alleged against me!” (v. 43). The implication is that if God does not act, he is as guilty as the people who condemn her. Despite her heightened characterization in TH, neither text truly empowers Susanna. Although more active, TH still places the fate of Susanna in male hands, in those of Daniel or the assembly of the people, which would have been composed of male property owners. Susanna does not decide her own fate; men do. Moreover, in both accounts, Susanna disappears immediately after her trial. Although referred to in passing, Susanna herself is largely absent. In OG and TH, it is the assembly that cries out at the end of the trial (v. 60). In TH, it is her family who rejoices at the end of the narrative (v. 63). Susanna does not say a word. Finally, the morals given for each version, although different from one another, are not about Susanna. OG uses the tale of Susanna to conclude that the audience should “watch out for young able sons” (v. 62), presumably for marriage or governance, while TH concludes with a reflection on Daniel’s great wisdom (v. 64). Susanna is merely the example that illustrates these androcentric morals. It is Daniel or men more generally who are praised. Given the context of Susanna’s composition, this male orientation is to be expected. Yet it suggests caution when

searching the story of Susanna for an exemplar of feminine empowerment. Like the rest of Daniel, the story of Susanna raises as many challenges as it does possibilities. Susanna is distinguished in this story by being named, trusting God, and attempting to cry out. Yet her voice remains absent, ignored, or curtailed by a few male elites. Daniel righteously resists the injustice of the uncritical majority, yet he stands alone among a people who are easily swayed by the voice of the few. The people eventually punish the correct individuals, yet their actions raise serious questions. The text states that the elders were known for “condemning the innocent” (v. 53) and forcing young women to lie with them “through fear” (v. 57). Why did the community so easily accept their word? Why did Susanna’s family not speak in her defense, despite the fact that the accusation was not in keeping with her character (cf. TH v. 27)? Although Israelite law did not entitle Susanna to speak in her own defense, why did her husband or father not speak? Why did only Daniel believe Susanna? Daniel’s character also challenges the reader. He does not believe Susanna based on her own merit and stands silently among the people as they condemn Susanna and lead her off to execution. It is not until he is filled with the spirit of God that he is willing to speak on Susanna’s behalf (vv. 44–45), and when he does so, he operates within the accepted legal system. He does not challenge the legal system that would sentence a woman to death for adultery, but simply works to ensure its proper enactment. He maintains the status quo. In the end, only God acts on Susanna’s behalf; her peers know her merit, but are silent and follow the whims of the mindless majority. The story of Susanna, then, is not the exemplar of the triumphant minority that many would like. It demonstrates the possibility of empowerment, yet falls short of the ideals it represents. The readers are left to consider how best to make their own voices heard in the face of adversity without marginalizing others who lack the power to speak out on their own behalf. Bibliography

Glancy, Jennifer. “The Accused: Susanna and Her Readers.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 58 (1993): 103–16.

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Levine, Amy-Jill. “‘Hemmed in on Every Side’: Jews and Women in the Book of Susanna.” In Reading from This Place, vol. 1, Social Location and Biblical Interpretation in the United States, edited by Fernando Segovia and Mary Ann Tolbert, 175–90. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995. Nickelsburg, George. Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

Pietersma, Albert and Benjamin G. Wright. A New English Translation of the Septuagint: and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under that Title. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Wills, Lawrence. “The Daniel/Susanna Tradition: From Legend to Novel.” In The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World, 49–67. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

Susanna and Her Interpreters Nicole Tilford

In the Septuagint version of the book of Daniel (ca. second c. BCE), the story of Susanna is one of false accusation and righteous vindication. A noble Jewish matron, Susanna is falsely accused of adultery by two elders of her community when she refuses their sexual advances. The young prophet Daniel comes to her rescue, revealing the truth about the elders and clearing her name. A mere forty-five verses, Susanna’s story has captured the minds and imaginations of interpreters throughout history. Her character, largely passive in the Septuagint, is featured in countless commentaries, at least one hundred and thirty-seven dramas, and more than fifty paintings, musical compositions, and poems, making her one of the most discussed female figures in the history of biblical interpretation. By the time of Theodotion (second c. CE), the passive Susanna had developed into a dynamic character: she is beautiful, God-­ fearing, instructed in the law, and an active participant in her own story. Despite later objections to Theodotion as a heretic and judaizer, Theodotion’s Susanna became the basis for most later interpretations of the story, including Jerome’s Vulgate translation. For instance, by the end of the second century, Theodotion’s Susanna had already become a fixture in Christian art and interpretation as an “unwavering martyr of chastity,” a paradigm of sexual purity (Clement of Alexandria, Stromata, late second to early third c.). Praising Susanna for escaping death and defending chastity, Novatian (On the Discipline and Advantages of Chastity, third c.), Augustine (On the Good Marriage; On Holy Virginity, fourth c.), and Ambrose (On the Offices of the Clergy, fourth c.) each use her to illustrate the value of marital continence in the eyes of God. In an era when virginity epitomized piety for the Christian soul, Susanna’s chastity extended God’s protection and salvation to all pious Christians, including married individuals. The ambiguity of her genealogy eventually enabled Susanna’s chastity to become a model

for widows and virgin ascetics as well. In the Septuagint, Susanna is the wife of Joakim and the daughter of Hilkiah; she is a married noble woman. However, in the eyes of early Christian and Jewish interpreters, Hilkiah was not simply a “righteous” man; he was the priest of Josiah, who found the book of the law (2 Kgs. 22:10). Similarly, her husband Joakim was none other than the exiled king of Israel, Jehoiakim (2 Chr. 36:6–7; e.g., Hippolytus, Commentary on Daniel, second to third c.; Leviticus Rabbah, fourth to fifth c.; Jerahmeel ben Solomon, Chronicles, twelfth c.). These priestly and regal connotations enabled early interpreters to transform Susanna into the ideal virgin ascetic or pious widow. The three extant Samaritan versions (early traditions preserved in fourteenth to fifteenth c. codices) describe Susanna as a virgin Nazirite, who, tutored in the law by her father the high priest Amram, studies the Torah all day in isolation. Similarly, the most extended narration of Susanna in Islamic culture (“The Story of the Skull and the King,” recorded in a ninthc. MS) presents her as a miraculously conceived princess, a virgin who dedicates her ascetic life to prayer. In the Ethiopian Jewish version of the story (“The Acts of Susanna,” ca. fifteenth c.), Susanna is no longer a married noble woman or ascetic virgin but a young widowed queen, who shuns another marriage in order to serve God. Whether wife, virgin, or widow, Susanna thus becomes an exemplar of chastity and religious devotion for all women. However, by far the most persistent identification of Susanna has been with marginalized individuals or groups. “Persecuted” by “elders” (the majority community) who (mis)interpret the law for their own gain, these minority individuals and communities have likened themselves to a righteous Susanna, drawing upon her story as a symbol of hope that God would vindicate their position in this life or the next. Early Christians, for instance, viewed Susanna as a type for the early Christian church, which must stand against the “false prophets”

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who threaten to destroy it. In the writings of Tertullian (De Corona, late second and early third c.) and Cyprian (Ep. 39 [=Oxford, Ep. 43], third c.), Susanna’s accusers represent internal Christian “heretics,” who adulterate the chastity of the church with “false” teachings. For Hippolytus (second to third c.), on the other hand, Susanna’s story reflects the political tension between Christians and non-Christians in Rome. Susanna (the church) and Joakim (Christ) are beset by two elders (the Jews and the Gentiles), “seducers” who stand ready to drag the Christians to the Roman court. Like Susanna, the contemporary Christians must choose: do what the courts command them and die to God, or live by God’s laws and die by the hands of the judges (Commentary on Daniel, xxi). In the catacomb of Praetextatus (fourth c.), this allegorization becomes clear: Susanna’s story is symbolized by two wolves (labeled SENIORIS) surrounding a lone lamb (labeled SVSANNA). Here Susanna, representing the paschal lamb Jesus and the Christian church, must stand against the wolves who threaten to devour her (see Tkacz for similar typologies). Faced with internal and external pressures on their communities, many early Christians began to view Susanna’s chastity, even unto death, as a symbol for the resurrection of the Christian soul. At least six catacombs and four sarcophagi from Rome depict the martyrlike Susanna saved from impending death by a savior figure (e.g., catacombs of Callistus, third c.; catacombs of Pricilla, fourth c.). A similar theme is found in the Commendatio animae (third to fourth c.), a liturgical prayer for the severely sick, which invokes Susanna as one of many saintly figures who have received salvation through God’s mercy. Many interpreters also liken Susanna to the virgin Mary; a new Eve, Susanna resists temptation in the garden, reverses the fall, and thereby ushers in the salvation of humankind (e.g., Methodius of Tyre, Banquet of the Ten Virgins, late third to early fourth c.; John Chrysostom, Sermon on Susanna, fourth c.). By representing the triumph of God’s justice over death, Susanna’s figure, in both art and liturgy, became a prayer for the resurrection of the soul and the vindication of the persecuted Christian. In medieval Christianity, Susanna’s story continues to reflect the persecuted minority. Read on the Saturday before the third week of Lent, Susanna’s story prefaced Jesus’ encounter

with the adulterous woman (John 8:1–11), thereby emphasizing the continuity of the traditions and God’s ultimate mercy toward the accused. At least six sermons and twenty-five manuscripts from the eighth to fifteenth centuries depict Susanna as a type for the persecuted Jesus and, by extension, his later followers (e.g., Abelard, “On Saint Susanna,” tenth to eleventh c.; Biblia pauperum, Clm. 4523, ca. 1320). Alan of Melsa (“Tractatus metricus de Susanna,” ca. 1300) uses his recitation of Susanna to teach about true justice and the validity of his struggling Cistercian order. During the papal schisms and ecclesiastical turmoil of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Susanna became a symbol of John Wycliffe and his followers, a group of disillusioned, Bible-centered intellectuals who opposed papal authority and were declared heretical for their beliefs (e.g., “Apology of Wycliffe” and “The Testimony of William Thorpe”). Thus, the popular Pistel of Swete Susan (fourteenth c.), likely written by a Wycliffe supporter, portrays Susanna as a woman learned in Scripture, persecuted by those who abuse judicial (i.e., papal) power and threaten the property rights of the intellectual elite. In the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Susanna’s story exemplified patriarchal anxiety over adultery and illegitimate offspring. Although a few artists continued to defend Susanna’s chastity (e.g., Ludovico Carracci, Susanna and the Elders, 1598; Artemisia Gentileschi, Susanna and the Elders, 1610), in this period, the men of the story—Susanna’s husband and even the elders—become the persecuted parties. At best, Susanna is the locus through which danger enters the household; at worst, she herself causes the violation of the marriage bed. For instance, among such artists as Domenico Di Michelion (Susanna and the Elders, 1450) and Tintoretto (e.g., Susanna and the Elders, ca. 1555), Susanna herself threatens the sanctity of the matrimonial union. Daniel is rarely present in such paintings; instead, the focus is repeatedly on the perception and attempted seizing of Susanna’s naked form. The nude or seminude Susanna is no longer the chaste wife; rather, she flaunts her sexuality as she bathes, enticing the hapless elders into their crimes. As art historians have noted, by inviting the (male) viewer to identify with the perspective of the elders, such paintings exonerate them; the fault now lies with Susanna, whose

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self-absorption and vanity seem an open invitation to the attentions of the elders. On the other hand, in Thomas Gartner’s Comedy of the Most Virtuous and Godly Susanna (1578), Susanna is merely an unwilling participant in the shaming of her husband. Here, Ill Report, the offspring of Satan, seeks to

slander Susanna’s name in order to bring shame to her household. As if to ward off such danger, Susanna’s story became a popular icon on fifteenth-century Florentine marriage chests, serving as a permanent domestic reminder of the need for bridal chastity and marital sanctity. In each of these cases, the focus is on the danger

Susanna, an engraving by Johann Christoph Weigel (1654–1725), is part of his Biblia ectypa (Regensburg, 1697), which depicts hundreds of Bible stories with more than 800 illustrations. Above the picture is its chapter source and a Latin caption; below it is a German Bible quotation.

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that Susanna represents for the reputation of her husband and her household. Such patrimonial concerns, however, do not negate the political overtones of the story. For instance, with its veiled references to the elders as representatives of Catholicism, Gartner’s play may also defend the patrimony and purity of Queen Elizabeth and, by extension, her English reform movement. Post-Reformation German literature reflects similar themes. Featured in more than twenty-eight German dramas (e.g., Sixt Birck, Susanna, ca. 1532), Susanna becomes a symbol of the Lutheran church, attacked by the “older” judicial tyrannies of the Catholic clergy. Similarly, Guillaume Guéroult and Didier Lupi (“Susanne un jour,” a poem set to music, 1548) establish Susanna as a symbol of French Calvinism, protesting the persecutions of the Catholic Church. Counter-­Reformationists responded with their own Susanna depictions. For instance, casting Susanna as a Marian figure in the heart of the town’s judicial center, Albrecht Altdorfer (Susanna and the Elders, 1526) uses the story to emphasize the righteousness of William IV, duke of Bavaria, and his ardent C ­ ounter-Reformationism. Similarly, by including Susanna-as-Christ imagery on liturgical vestments and lecterns, sixteenth-century Catholic clergy emphasized that the persecuted Catholic Church would continue to serve as a symbol of God on earth. Luther’s exclusion of Daniel 13 from the Protestant canon in the sixteenth century slowly diminished the popularity of Susanna’s iconography in Western culture. However, her figure survived as inspiration for artists, poets, and composers. In twentieth-century America, for instance, Susanna reappears as the subject of Wallace Stevens’s 1921 poem “Peter Quince at the Clavier,” where the “music” of her voice expresses the anguish of violation: Susanna’s music touched the bawdy strings Of those white elders; but, escaping, Left only Death’s ironic scraping. Now, in its immortality, it plays On the clear viol of her memory, And makes a constant sacrament of praise.

Carlisle Floyd’s opera Susanna (1955) contemporizes the story, placing Susanna at the mercy

of rural Tennessee townsfolk, who too easily accuse her of sinful bathing and being a temptress of the devil. According to Sharon Baris, the strength of Susanna’s character and the power of her voice may even have inspired the strong female characters in such works as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1850), Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady (1876), and Tennessee Williams’s Glass Menagerie (1944). Whatever her status in post-sixteenth-­ century art and literature, for the first eighteen centuries of her reception, Susanna clearly intrigued biblical interpreters. Her unwavering chastity exemplified marital chastity and devotion to God for matrons, widows, and virgins alike, while her persistence in the face of false accusation established her as a type for Christ and the persecuted Christian throughout history. Her innocence inspired hope for the persecuted, her beauty warned of danger for the household, and her strength of character served as a model for men and women alike. Bibliography

Bohn, Babette. “Rape and the Gendered Gaze: Susanna and the Elders in Early Modern Bologna.” Biblical Interpretation 9 (2001): 259–86. Clanton, Dan. “The Good, the Bold, and the Beautiful: The Story of Susanna and Its Renaissance Interpretations.” PhD diss., University of Denver, 2002. Pennacchietti, Fabrizio. Three Mirrors for Two Biblical Ladies: Susanna and the Queen of Sheba in the Eyes of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Piscataway, NJ: Gorgias Press, 2006. Smith, Katheryn. “Inventing Marital Chastity: Iconography of Susanna.” Oxford Art Journal (1993): 3–24. Spolsky, Ellen. The Judgment of Susanna: Authority and Witness. Society of Biblical Literature: Early Judaism and Its Literature 11. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1996. Staley, Lynn. “Susanna and English Communities.” Traditio 62 (2007): 25–58. Tkacz, Catherine. “Susanna as a Type of Christ.” Studies in Iconography 20 (1999): 101–53.

The Prayer of Manasseh Patricia K. Tull

Introduction According to 2 Kings 21, King Manasseh of Judah “filled Jerusalem from one end to the other” with innocent blood (2 Kgs. 21:16). His evil inspired God to “wipe Jerusalem as one wipes a dish” (2 Kgs. 21:13). Yet his long reign and peaceful death upset conventional expectations of divine justice. The rewriting of Manasseh’s story in 2 Chronicles 33:10–20 redresses this theological problem with an episode in which Manasseh is captured by the Babylonians, repents of evil, and is restored by God, becoming the model par excellence of sincere repentance.

The apocryphal Prayer of Manasseh, in turn, fills a gap perceived in Chronicles—the pivotal prayer of repentance mentioned three times but not recorded. Probably written in Hebrew or Greek between 200 BCE and 100 CE, it was quite popular among early Christians, and was quoted at length in the third-century-CE Didascalia, along with a severe caution concerning deathbed confessions. Though finally omitted from Catholic and Protestant canons, it was retained as Scripture in the Eastern Orthodox churches.

Comment Only fifteen verses long, vivid with biblical imagery, the prayer is considered exemplary both aesthetically and theologically. Beginning with a description of God’s power in creation reminiscent of Manasseh’s predicament (“who shackled the sea by your word of command,” v. 3) and taking note of God’s wrath against sinners, he immediately sets over against this God’s “immeasurable and unsearchable” mercy (v. 6). He invokes the oftrepeated description of God as “merciful and gracious, slow to anger” (see Exod. 34:6; Jonah 4:2) and describes God as having promised “repentance and forgiveness” for sinners (v. 7). He admits that his sins are “more in number than the sand of the sea” and he is “weighted down with many an iron fetter” (vv. 9–10). “I bend the knee of my heart,” he continues,

employing repetition (“I have sinned, O Lord, I have sinned!” “Forgive me, O Lord, forgive me,” vv. 12, 13). He concludes with doxological praise and expectancy. The prayer offers a graceful example of the immediacy of divine love and forgiveness. This little portrait of the most abominable of Davidic kings not only undergoing radical transformation, but also emerging as a model of humble repentance, offers a corrective to simplistic character development in the books of Kings, in which every ruler is either all good or (more often) all evil. Women who have experienced themselves as evaluated through male ideology as either saints or sinners, either the Virgin Mary or Jezebel, rather than humans struggling with the ambiguities of morality, can see here an opening for a richer view of humanity, and

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possibilities for change always available as long as there is breath. At the same time, for a full reading of its theology of repentance, and to avoid intimations of “cheap grace,” the prayer should be interpreted in its narrative context, in which Manasseh’s governmental and religious policies subsequently undergo profound change. This prayer was composed either during the time of foreign (Greek or Roman) rule or during the century of Hasmonean domination. The excessive violence of any of these rulers could have inspired a wish to reach back to the king traditionally seen as the very worst of the Davidic forebears, and to remember even him as capable of change and repentance. Whether intended for this purpose or not, the affirmation that God always stands ready to judge evil and to extend mercy toward the

repentant exposes violent rule as theologically heedless. Bibliography

Charlesworth, James. “The Prayer of Manasseh.” In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James Charlesworth, 2:625–37. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1985. Connolly, R. H. Didascalia Apostolorum: The Syriac Version Translated and Accompanied by the Verona Latin Fragments. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929. Harrington, Daniel. “Prayer of Manasseh.” In Harper’s Bible Commentary, edited by J. L. Mays, 872–74. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1988.

1 Maccabees Kelley Coblentz Bautch

Introduction First Maccabees tells the story of the sons of Mattathias, who assist their people in mobilizing and forging a rebellion against Antiochus IV, a Seleucid king ruling over Judea in the second quarter of the second century. The work describes also how the family opposed those adopting Greek customs or assimilating to the dominant Greco-Roman culture, even while the dynasty would come to make alliances with Rome and Sparta. Particular leaders within the family—Judas, Jonathan, and Simon—are highlighted, along with their achievements and failures. Though the sons of Mattathias die in pursuit of their cause, they are successful in laying the foundations for a dynasty in Judea that rules for roughly a hundred years. The book concludes with a notice about the Hasmonean leader John Hyrcanus, whose descendants may well have commissioned the work. Readers might understand 1 Maccabees to offer a portrait of resistance and a celebration of liberation from colonial powers abusing a native population. Descriptions of defiance of imperial policy and the cost of such courage — for example, the grisly report of mothers murdered with their infants for remaining faithful to tradition (1:60–61)—precede and set up stories of victory over occupying forces, as is the case with the reclaiming and rededication of the temple recalled in the celebration of Hanukkah (4:36–59). Still, 1 Maccabees largely champions the family of Mattathias and the rout of Seleucid forces, and the collateral damage brought about during the season of fighting suggests the heavy price of war and independence. Astute readers

will wonder about all those unnamed persons eclipsed in this very selective view of events. First Maccabees does not address (or hardly addresses) the women who were involved in or affected by the political intrigues, dislocation, and violence; the rather homogeneous protagonists (for the most part male military leaders and politicians) in 1 Maccabees encourage feminist readers to look to the margins of the text’s constructed world and to inquire about the persons the story neglects.

Place in the Canons As one of the Historical Writings of the LXX, 1 Maccabees appears in the Orthodox canon. The Roman Catholic canon also includes this work, designating it a deuterocanonical writing, that is, one of the books whose canonical status was reaffirmed in the sixteenth century. First Maccabees is not included in the Hebrew Bible, although related traditions survive in rabbinic writings. Some Protestant Bibles may include 1 Maccabees in a supplemental section called the Apocrypha.

Title and Language of the Composition “Maccabee” derives from the nickname of Judas (“Maccabaeus”; perhaps Heb. “hammerlike”), one of the prominent sons of Mattathias; Judas plays a critical role in liberating the Jerusalem temple from Seleucid control in 1 Maccabees. Unlike 2, 3, and 4 Maccabees, this book is concerned especially with the story of the family that emerges and comes to lead during the

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second century. Rather than linger on temple or martyrdom, the book accounts for and legitimizes the Hasmonean dynasty (the descendants of Mattathias’s son Simon), which ruled in Judea until 63 BCE. First Maccabees likely was written in Hebrew (no longer extant) and then translated into Greek. The Greek of 1 Maccabees resembles that of the Septuagint, and the translation is considered to be pre-Christian.

Composition and Structure Not an objective recounting of events, 1 Maccabees is often associated with Jewish historiography of the Hellenistic period and recalls the style and vocabulary employed in earlier biblical books like 1 and 2 Samuel. First Maccabees also utilizes laments, poems, speeches, prayers, and letters as it relays dynastic history often modeled on biblical texts. It is very possible that the anonymous author used a number of sources, including official documents and oral traditions, in preparing this work. There has been some debate as to whether 1 Maccabees ended originally at 14:15 with Simon’s eulogy, such that the material following is a redactor’s addendum to the composition. There are different ways of analyzing the structure of 1 Maccabees. An initial reading of the book might suggest four principal sections: an introduction that addresses the challenges of Hellenism in Judea and Mattathias’s rebellion (1 Macc. 1–2), which was carried on by his sons Judas (3:1–9:22), Jonathan (9:23–12:53), and Simon (1 Macc. 13–16). Some have argued also for reading the book as three sections that highlight the restoration of the temple (1:1–6:17); the capture of the citadel, which was a symbol of foreign occupation in Jerusalem (6:18– 14:15); and the high priesthood of Simon and his descendants (14:16–16:24).

Historical Context and Date Although the book chronicles the rebellion of Mattathias and his sons against Seleucid rule in the mid-second century BCE, 1 Maccabees was written several generations after most of the events it describes. The terminus a quo coincides with the death of John Hyrcanus (104 BCE), as described by 1 Maccabees 16:23–24. The terminus ad quem would be about 63 BCE, Pompey’s conquest of Judea, since after that time one would not expect a favorable depiction

of Rome such as one finds in 1 Maccabees 8. Scholars tend to date the book to around the end of the first century BCE, though some suggest that an earlier form of the work (composed during Simon’s leadership [142–134 BCE] and later revised) is possible.

Overview of Hermeneutical Issues of Significance to Women and Feminist Readers Readers looking to fill in the history of women in the Second Temple period, feminist readers wondering how communities should make use of such a text, and all who seek social justice and advocate peace will encounter different sorts of challenges in 1 Maccabees. For example, the few women mentioned in 1 Maccabees are diminished in comparison to the Maccabean heroes and warriors, who offer interesting subjects for the study of gender and masculinity in 1 Maccabees. Though 1 Maccabees celebrates patriarchs, no matriarchs from Israel’s early history or from the Hasmonean dynasty appear. Postcolonial feminist readers will note the empire-directed violence in the text, the destruction of communities, and the displacement of people, including women and children. The relative absence of women in 1 Maccabees is curious in light of the growing prominence of women in other facets of Second Temple Judaism. Stories with heroines and protagonists such as Esther, Judith, and Susanna flourished in the Hellenistic period, not unlike the portrayals of powerful women in the Greek novel. Jubilees, in rewriting biblical narratives some sixty to seventy years before 1 Maccabees, gave prominent roles to matriarchs and added named women to genealogies. References to women in such writings do not necessarily indicate that these texts offer sympathetic views of or capture in some way the experiences of real women. Still, women are especially visible in the literature of the time and apparently proved useful to certain authors. One might ask then why 1 Maccabees neglects to mention noteworthy women among the rebellion’s heroes as we find in 2 Maccabees (see, e.g., the mother of seven sons in 2 Macc. 7:1–42 or the similar report of Simon’s wife being kidnapped and tortured in front of her son [Josephus, Ant. 13.228–35; War 1.54–60]). While the later accounts could be legendary or dramatized, they express interest in the women of the

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period; yet 1 Maccabees largely ignores women, even of the family it celebrates. The dearth of women in 1 Maccabees cannot be explained by want of women in leadership roles in the second century or by suggesting that women were not involved in the political affairs of the Hasmoneans. Not mere figureheads, Macedonian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid queens, like Cleopatra III (Ant. 13.284–87; cf. also 1 Macc. 10:54, 57–58; 11:9–12) had control of territories, wealth, and resources (cf. 2 Macc. 4:30). Moreover, according to Josephus, John Hyrcanus, with whose reign 1 Maccabees ends, intended his wife to govern in Judea following his death (Ant. 13.302). Yet when Hyrcanus died, his eldest son Aristobulus I seized control of the land and proclaimed himself king; he also imprisoned and starved to death his primary rival—his mother, who had opposed his rule (cf. also War 1.71). A quarter of a century later, Shelamzion (or Salome Alexandra) would succeed her husband Alexander Jannaeus (or Yannai), though she too was challenged by her son Aristobulus II, who sought to

be king of Judea (War 1.117; Ant. 13:405–28); unlike the wife of Hyrcanus, who likely would have ruled around the time when 1 Maccabees was composed, and whose name is lost to us now, Shelamzion did become queen. In spite of the silence of 1 Maccabees, women of the Hasmonean family were involved in matters of succession or politics, as Josephus’s reports suggest (see Ant. 13.230–35, 292, 320; 14.97; 15.42–47, 50-56, 62–64, 71–73, 166–68, 232– 34, 247–51; War 1.364). With the contentious nature of succession and the fact that women did hold positions of power, it is possible that those commissioning 1 Maccabees feared women rivals and therefore did not wish to call attention to any female exemplars from the Maccabean revolt. Or perhaps a Hasmonean queen sought to tamp down controversy of a woman governing—for example, Josephus suggests that misfortune occurred because a woman, Shelamzion, reigned (Ant. 13.417)—by commissioning a story that promotes a very patriarchal and conservative view of her family and their origins.

Comment The Violation of Earth and Zion (1 Macc. 1:1–2:14) The author foregrounds the story of the Maccabees’ rebellion against the Seleucids with the exploits of Alexander the Great (ca. 333 BCE; 1:1–4). The taut narrative links Antiochus IV to Alexander and his immediate successors, who are condemned as instigating evil (1:9–10). First Maccabees shows Alexander, a prototype of Antiochus, controlling land, cities, and peoples, seizing fortresses, slaughtering kings, and capturing spoil. Alexander is presented as “advanc[ing] to the ends of the earth” as the earth then becomes quiet before him (1:3). The language hints at domination and submission and anticipates Antiochus IV’s violation of Jerusalem in 1 Maccabees. In fact, the laments describe the sanctuary city Jerusalem—following the convention of identifying cities, lands, and earth as female—as defiled and shamed. Anthropological studies of the Mediterranean honor and shame system are helpful in understanding the language of shame in chapters 1–2. Honor was defined by a man’s ability

to control aspects of his life over against those seeking to subvert his control, and honor could be socially determined by symbols of power, including wives and property. Gender played a role in the system, as men acquired honor or disgrace through women; for example, sexual misconduct on the part of women brought about disgrace. Antiochus also breaches the temple, sacred space closed to Gentiles, when he plunders its fixtures and precious vessels. Revealing also of the author’s views of masculinity, the narrator emphasizes the extent of the degradation of the shrine or temple by comparing it to a man disgraced (2:8). With regard to the city, stripped of adornments (1:22–28, 31–32, 37–40; 2:6–11), Jerusalem, once free, is now a slave (2:11, 13), and as slave is subject to domination and even sexual abuse. The refrains that bespeak defilement and humiliation (1:28, 39–40; 2:8, 13) mirror the loss of autonomy and especially control of bodies, as Antiochus IV bans circumcision, forces on the people foods that violate kosher laws, and attempts to control ritual observances (1:41–64). The citadel much despised by the Maccabees and built near to the



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temple is a visible reminder of the domination of others (1:33). Postcolonial feminist readers will find that these chapters give voice to those dominated and often voiceless and set up the story of 1 Maccabees initially as one of empires violating colonized peoples. While the colonized can be victimized through violations to body, family, home, livelihood, sustenance, and goods, it is also true that imposition of culture, religion, and language—even subtle pressure to assimilate—can harm communities, and 1 Maccabees 1:1–2:14 calls attention to such violations. Alexander’s domination of the earth, which then falls silent, also speaks to eco-sensitive readers who are aware that stripping the earth of precious resources, often at the hands of colonial powers, is not without an effect on the environment or on those sustained by nature. Though especially focused on the agency of men in the narrative, 1 Maccabees often uses women, along with certain other groups, for rhetorical emphasis. In 1:25–28, the young women and brides, along with young men and bridegrooms, lament the looting of the temple. The lamentation suggests that the next generation and the nation’s fecundity are being threatened or impacted adversely by the plundering of Antiochus IV. First Maccabees also communicates that the actions of the powerful and the policies of Antiochus IV affect women as well as families. When the Mysian commander (likely Apollonius, cf. 2 Macc. 5:24) seizes Jerusalem, burns the city, and demolishes houses and walls, women and children are taken captive (1:32). Since prisoners of war typically become slaves of the victorious, the fate of the women and their offspring anticipates the diminished status of Jerusalem (2:11). As Jewish traditions were outlawed by Antiochus IV, the narrator reports that many in Israel chose death over profaning the covenant (1:63). Those resisting include women whose sons were circumcised; as punishment, the women were put to death with babies hung around their necks (1:60–61). Though families and those who circumcised infants were also killed, the author emphasizes first the martyrdom of the mothers and babies. While highlighting these mothers might have been done so as to call attention to the inhumanity or utter brutality of Antiochus’s forces, the heroism of such women recalls also the courage of the midwives and Moses’ mother

and sister in the account of Israel’s enslavement in Egypt (Exod. 1:15–2:10). With the predicament clarified, the book attends specifically to the men of Mattathias’s family, how they reclaim the honor of Jacob’s house and in the process found a dynasty.

Patriarchs, a Few Good Men, and Return to Zion (1 Macc. 2:15–4:61) The author fashions the Maccabean men after biblical figures who exhibit fervor and willingness to fight. Mattathias rallies people “zealous for the law” to follow him (2:27), and he and his sons flee soldiers of the king (2:28). Other Judeans, specifically families—men, women, children—who sought “to live according to righteousness and religious custom,” choose to resist by running from imperial powers as well (2:29, my trans.). One thousand persons in this group die rather than fight on (and so profane) the Sabbath (2:38); women are included in this community (2:30, 38) that actively resists the policies of Antiochus IV, though their actions lead to martyrdom. Mattathias and his followers decide to fight against Gentiles even on Sabbaths (2:39–41) and pursue coreligionists sympathetic in some manner to Greek culture or Seleucid rule (2:44– 48). Not only do they mean to kill sinners and lawless persons (2:44), but reminiscent of Hezekiah and Josiah (2 Kgs. 18; 23), they tear down illegitimate altars (2:45) and, in the battle for authority over the body, circumcise boys who were not circumcised (2:46). The testament of Mattathias, much like that of Jacob addressing his sons (Gen. 49; cf. also Deut. 33), highlights great men of the tradition as role models. Matriarchs like Sarah, Rachel, Deborah, and Abigail, women who could serve as models for perseverance, motherly love, strength, and prudence, are not included in these portraits of courage. The charge of Mattathias to avenge wrongs and to pay back Gentiles what they deserve (2:67–68) is consistent with honor-shame models, where honor is accrued by taking it away from other men. Though Jerusalem is lamented and her shame is mourned, Judas’s strength, honor, and glory are soon celebrated in the narrative. Enslaved, defiled Jerusalem is replaced by virile Judas, the warrior of the family (2:66), whose masculinity is celebrated. Judas is presented as a warrior with a breastplate like a giant and as lionlike (3:4), protecting the camp with

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his sword (3:3), seeking out the lawless who fear him (3:6), and redeeming and rehabilitating the house of Jacob (3:6–7). In his renown, Judas has the reach of Alexander: he is known to the ends of the earth (3:9); further, by gathering and protecting his people who were once targets, Judas reverses the actions of Alexander. In his fight with Apollonius and acquisition of his dagger (3:12), Judas becomes like David taking possession of the weapon of defeated Goliath (1 Sam. 17:51). After unmanning Apollonius, Judas battles against Seron, who wishes to make a name for himself (3:14; the expression has a negative valence; cf. Gen. 11:4). Impious men (those of Judea who are not like-minded) join Seron. Judas, accompanied by only a few good men, prevails, however. When those with Judas are fearful, he reminds them that power comes from heaven and that Seron’s army is lawless and means to kill them along with their wives and children (3:20). With stakes high, Judas and his men decide to protect the people from annihilation and also to restore the temple (3:42–43). The rededication of the sanctuary (4:36–38) leads to the celebration of the people (4:52–58); the joy of the community is attributed to the end of the disgrace (i.e., the ravished sanctuary city) that had been brought about by the Gentiles (4:58).

The New Patriarchs (1 Macc. 5:1–9:22) The rededication of the temple, which leads to the Maccabees’ regaining honor from the Seleucids, is followed immediately by counterchallenges from the Gentiles (5:1–2). Judas and his armies must thwart blockades, ambushes, and menacing regional powers (5:3–8), and the new patriarchs—Judas, Jonathan, and Simon—protect their people who are under siege. The communities including women and children are shepherded safely to Judea (5:23, 45). Women whose husbands or male relatives were defeated or killed in battle often became (along with their children) captives or slaves subject to displacement, forced labor, and rape. First Maccabees provides examples of how women, whether Jew (5:13) or Greek (8:10), were often victims of wars and international disputes they did not initiate or choose—a plight sadly to which women, men, and children today can relate still.

From Pandemonium to Power (1 Macc. 9:23–12:53) Jonathan’s tenure brings him prestige and power as high priest; he first inherits, however, a difficult and unstable situation that has him fighting in various skirmishes (9:32–36, 43–49). The chaotic situation leads to attacks and counterattacks that leave the protagonists appearing reactionary. In one instance, Jonathan and Simon attack a wedding party that includes bridegroom, friends, and musicians, to avenge the death of their brother John that occurred in a raid by the sons of Jambri (9:35–42). Commentators have suggested that John was killed in the raid along with women, children, and the elderly who accompanied him to Nabatean allies (9:35–36). Still, it may be difficult for a contemporary audience to sympathize with Jonathan and Simon’s decision to render a wedding day a day of mourning and lamentation (9:41); the ambush may have injured or killed the bride from Nadabath and her family, who were probably not involved with the raid (9:37). From leader of guerilla fighters on the run, Jonathan develops into a savvy negotiator capable of improving his own situation. Alexander Balas, with whom Jonathan ultimately works, establishes diplomatic ties with the Ptolemies and proposes to Ptolemy VI Philometor that he marry the latter’s daughter (10:51–56). Cleopatra Thea is perhaps around fifteen when she is married to Alexander at Ptolemais (10:57–58). The experience of Cleopatra reminds readers of how women have been considered often economically and politically useful for families who seek marriages to improve a family’s or community’s situation (in terms of biblical women, one thinks also of Esther). Here Cleopatra’s unions are arranged so as to strengthen international alliances, a common practice. Cleopatra’s marriage to Alexander Balas is dissolved when Philometor wishes to marry her to another potential ally and to take control of Alexander’s kingdom (11:1–13). Thus Cleopatra is given in marriage to Demetrius II Nicator, a rival of Alexander (11:9–12). Even while 1 Maccabees does not pursue her story beyond the marriage to Demetrius II, Cleopatra’s example can shed light on the experience of Hellenistic queens. Male relatives and politicians would appear to determine initially the contours of Cleopatra’s life; yet Cleopatra



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emerges soon as an independent figure who navigates the political and monarchical structures of her world. After Demetrius II is captured in Parthia (ca. 139–138 BCE), she marries his brother Antiochus VII Sidetes (Justin, Epitome 36.1; Josephus, Ant. 13.10). When this husband dies, Cleopatra rules by herself and then as a regent for her son, Antiochus VIII Grypus (125–121 BCE); when Cleopatra attempts to have her son poisoned, she is found out and is put to death (Justin, Epitome 39.1–2; Appian, Syr. 69). Jonathan continues to gain both prestige and power as the region’s instability grows amid power struggles and rapid turnovers in leadership. Associations and alliances with Rome and Sparta (12:1–23) ultimately do not save Jonathan, just as they do not seem to preserve the Ptolemaic or Seleucid leaders. Jonathan is neutralized through the machinations of Trypho, who deceives and captures him and some of his men (12:39–52).

Founding of a Dynasty (1 Macc. 13:1–16:24) Simon offers to fight on behalf of his people, out of vengeance for his nation and the sanctuary, and on behalf of the wives and children of Judah (13:6). Simon’s exhortation that speaks of defense of families and of the vulnerable may be self-serving—he recalls how much his family and he have done for the people (13:3–5)— but it also acts as a call to battle. The people choose Simon as their leader (13:8). Women and children were victims of battles and wars initiated by others, as one observes, for example in Simon’s attack on Gazara (13:43–48). There the people of the city, including women and children, climb up on the city walls and ask for mercy as they surrender (13:45–46); though they are not killed, Simon drives them all out of the city. After Jonathan is killed by Tryphon (13:23), Simon erects a memorial in Modein, where his family is buried (13:25–30). In addition to or in proximity to the sepulchre, the tribute for Simon’s father, mother, and his brothers consists of seven pyramids (fashionable in Egypt to honor families of importance) and pillars decorated with arms and ships to be seen from afar (13:30). With the exception of the reference

to Simon’s mother (13:28), the women of Mat­ ta­thias’s family are not mentioned in 1 Maccabees. The reader does not learn about the wife, sister, mother, and daughters of Mattathias, nor about the brothers’ wives, daughters, or other female relatives. Perhaps the narrator celebrates the mater familia, Simon’s mother, as a heroic actor in the rebellion who, along with her spouse and children, has given her life or much energy to resisting the forces with which the family disagreed. Or maybe the mother merits mention (with memorial tribute and in the narrative) only as Simon establishes his dynasty. First Maccabees begins with a wide-angle view of the situation in Judea in the mid-second century, but concludes with a focus on a leader, Simon, and his deeds. The people and their plight serve as a convenient back story to set up the rise of one family (others who resist, fight, or die are not named); when the people have served this purpose, their role in the narrative and their needs fade. Since the perspectives in this work are rather limited, the postcolonial feminist reader might wonder about how postscripts (from the neglected voices or from opposition to the Maccabees) to this work might read. Bibliography

Goldstein, Jonathan A. 1 Maccabees: A New Translation, with Introduction and Commentary. New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2007. Ilan, Tal. Integrating Women into Second Temple History. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999. Pomeroy, Sarah B. Women in Hellenistic Egypt: From Alexander to Cleopatra. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. Rappaport, Uriel. “The First Book of Maccabees.” In The Oxford Bible Commentary, edited by John Barton and John Muddiman, 711–33. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Sievers, Joseph. “The Role of Women in the Hasmonean Dynasty.” In Josephus, Bible, and History, edited by Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, 132–46. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1989.

2 Maccabees Colleen M. Conway

Introduction Second Maccabees tells the story of the Maccabean revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV, with a particular focus on Judas Maccabeus. The book is canonical in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions, is included in the Apocrypha of Protestant Bibles, and is noncanonical in the Jewish tradition. In its present state the book indicates at least two authors—one Jason of Cyrene, the author of a five-volume history of rebellion against Antiochus led by Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, and an unnamed compiler of this history, traditionally designated the Epitomist, but hereafter referred to as “the author.” The book presents a fascinating example of the complex mix of cultural forces that was shaping the Jewish community during this time of localized power struggles, competing Hellenistic kingdoms, and increasing economic pressures from an expanding Roman presence. The narrative suggests that the calamities that befell the people of Jerusalem in this period were the result of a “high point of Hellenism” brought on by the wicked “not-high-priest Jason” (4:13; translations are mine, unless noted otherwise) and other Jewish villains. Indeed, it seems that the terms “Judaism” and “Hellenism” were first coined in this text and presented in seeming opposition to one other. Yet a closer look reveals that these terms are not as opposed by the author as it might first appear. In narrating and interpreting the history, the author is clearly influenced by specifically Jewish tradition, shaping his account, for example, with the categories of Deuteronomistic theology from the Hebrew Bible. Yet 2 Maccabees is broadly shaped by Hellenistic traditions as well, written

in Greek by an author well versed in Greek literature, who draws heavily on conventions of Greek historiography, as well as Greek cultural values. Clearly something more than a simple opposition between Judaism and Hellenism is at work in the text. Instead, the text presents an adoption and adaptation of Jewish and Greek literary traditions and culture, at the same time that it attempts to distinguish Jewish identity from Greek. In other words, the evidence of the text of 2 Maccabees suggests that “Hellenism” is presented as a problem only insofar as it distracts or prevents one from maintaining the traditions of the ancestors. Appropriated rightly, Hellenism appears in the book as a potential asset, insofar as it allows one to communicate and promote the values and traditions of the Jewish people. In this sense, one might say that 2 Maccabees provides an example of the proper way to live as a Hellenistic Jew, appropriating the Greek language and cultural values in ways that highlight the noble and honorable ways of the Jewish people. It is no coincidence, for example, that the author’s preface to the history speaks of the Maccabees plundering the “barbarian hordes” (2:21, NRSV). Here is a way of turning Greek categories against the Greek opposition, who, from the author’s perspective, were acting like barbarians! The gender construction in the text provides another good illustration of this blend of Judaism and Hellenism at work. The Jewish heroes of the story are presented as noble, honorable, courageous, and pious men, reflecting the Greek ideal of masculinity, even as they defend

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the Jewish nation, temple, and law. Similarly, Jewish women appear in roles that conform to Greek cultural values, as they too live and die on behalf of the Jewish way of life.

Structure and Composition The book opens with two letters addressed to the Jews in Egypt, urging them to celebrate the festival of Hanukkah (1:1–9; 1:10–2:18), and a preface by the compiler explaining his project (2:19–32). Whether this author is responsible for the addition of the letters to the compiled history is not clear. He makes no reference to them in his own preface or epilogue to the history (2:19–32; 15:37–39). In any case, the first letter includes the date 124 BCE (1:9), and most scholars see this as the earliest possible date for the work in its final form. At the other end, the

lack of anti-Roman sentiment and the concluding claim that the city is ruled by the Hebrews (15:37) suggests a date no later than 63 BCE, when the Romans took over the Hasmonean kingdom. Chapters 3–15, the main body of the work, can be organized around a series of three crises involving the temple and their resolution. The story of Heliodorus in chapter 3 represents the initial threat to the temple and serves as a prologue to the account of the revolt. The second, more severe crisis involves Antiochus IV (2 Macc. 4–7), and its resolution is found in his death and the purification of the temple (8:1– 10:9). The third crisis begins with the reign of Antiochus Eupator, son of Antiochus IV, and continues through a series of conflicts with local Greek governors (10:10–14:36), concluding with the defeat of Nicanor (14:37–15:39).

Comment Preface to the History (2 Macc. 1–2) Following the opening letters asking the Egyptian Jews to commemorate the purification of the temple, the author opens his preface with a lengthy sentence displaying his facility with the Greek language. In describing his efforts to adorn his source, including details of the sweat and sleepless nights that it cost him, he indicates that his historiographic style will be much like that of his Hellenistic contemporaries. Sometimes referred to as “tragic” or “pathetic” history (from the Gk. pathos), such history writing drew on elements of tragic plots and included exaggerated descriptions designed to evoke pity in the audience. Notably, in parts of the Hellenistic world, exactly this style of history writing was associated with femininity. The best-known Hellenistic historian, Polybius, critiques this style as “ignoble and womanish” (while also using it himself at times!). He points especially to Phylarchus (whose works are lost), who “in his eagerness to arouse the pity and attention of his readers . . . treats us to a picture of clinging women with their hair disheveled and their breasts bare, or again of crowds of both sexes together with their children and aged parents weeping and lamenting as they are led away to slavery” (Histories 2.56.7). Polybius would likely be

equally critical of the author of 2 Maccabees, who, as we will see, draws on images of women for the same effect.

The First Threat to the Temple (2 Macc. 3:1–4:6) The conflict between Simon, a civilian temple administrator, and the high priest Onias III, and the threat to the temple that ensues foreshadow the events of the longer history. Structurally, the episode begins and ends with peace in Jerusalem. So too the history proper will begin with peaceful cooperation between local Jewish authorities and regional kings (3:1–3) and end with a peaceful city “in the possession of the Hebrews” (15:37 NRSV). In between, both in the Heliodorus episode and in the history of the revolt, the temple and people of Jerusalem face serious threats to their way of life. Although these threats come from external forces, they are always the result of God’s response to misbehavior on the part of some Jewish malcontents. As in Deuteronomy–2 Kings, the Deuteronomistic History, God punishes disobedience by removing his protection against foreign power. In this case, the dispute between two Jewish officials leads to the potential violation of the temple and loss of the temple treasury by Heliodorus.

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The response of the people to this threat also fits the Deuteronomistic pattern. Disobedience must be followed by repentance. Here the blend of the tragic genre with history writing is quite explicit, as the author provides a “pitiable” picture of the whole populace lying prostrate in supplication to God (3:21). In detailing the people’s plight, the author gives special attention to the exposure of female bodies, both the exposed breasts of women taking to the streets clad in sackcloth and the reference to the “shutin young women,” who run outside to the gates and walls of the city (though some only peek through windows) (3:19). This latter reference is to unmarried young women not normally seen in public. That these young women are exposed to the public and that the whole population is “mingled together” in prostration (3:21) recalls Polybius’s disdain for accounts that present “crowds of both sexes together.” It is difficult to know whether this reference to unmarried young women being kept indoors represents a cultural ideal in Hellenism/Judaism, or is reflective of real women’s lives. Evidence from other Jewish writers, such as Philo, suggests that virgins lived in the innermost part of the house (Special Laws 3.169), but also that women were to be found in the marketplace and the theatre (Flaccus 95). In any case, the people’s supplication is effective, as God responds with a frightening apparition of a charging horse and two glorious young men who beat Heliodorus into unconsciousness. Then, once he is restored through the atoning sacrifice of the high priest, Heliodorus testifies to the power of God that protects the temple. Thus this first episode closes with the temple treasury intact and respect for the temple by foreign kings restored through God’s saving intervention.

The Second Crisis Begins (2 Macc. 4:7–6:17) The main story of the book begins with the introduction of Jason, who buys the position of high priesthood from Antiochus IV and asks permission to establish a gymnasium and to “enroll the people of Jerusalem as citizens of Antioch” (4:9 NRSV). Although Jason is presented as the villain, others are depicted as sharing in his vision, even the Jerusalem high priests who left their ritual duties to join in the athletic events (4:14–15). The priests’ behavior exemplifies the type of “Hellenism” that was promoted by Jason and opposed by the author.

It is one that exchanges Judaism for Hellenism, rather than enhancing Judaism with Hellenism. Here again we see that the author’s problem is not with Greek ways per se, but rather with valuing Greek glory over “the honorable ways of the ancestors” (4:15). In relating the calamitous events that follow, the author presents the villains of the story as raging, arrogant, and out-of-control men. The corrupt Menelaus, who outwits and outbids Jason for the high priesthood, is defined by his beastly temper and tyrannical cruelty (4:25). Jason is depicted as a rebel against the laws and an executioner of the country and citizens (5:8). Both characters represent a stark contrast to the Greek masculine ideal of a reasoned, temperate citizen of the polis. As the two vie for power over Jerusalem, they draw the attention of a third villain, Antiochus IV, who disengages from his second Egyptian campaign to storm into Jerusalem, assuming that the city is in revolt against him. Antiochus too is defined by his beastlike rage and arrogance, as he attacks Jerusalem and plunders the temple (4:11–16). Similarly, his son Antiochus Eupator will exhibit his own “barbarous arrogance” in his opposition to the Jews (13:9 NRSV), as will the Greek general Nicanor (15:1–6). All of these villains serve in 2 Maccabees as foils to the Jewish heroes who soon enter the scene. At this point in the book, the author simply foreshadows their role with a brief reference to Judas and nine others who leave Jerusalem and retreat to the desert, thereby remaining undefiled (5:27). Meanwhile, the author continues to draw a picture of women that highlights the severity of the crisis and arouses the emotions of the audience. Women are listed among the categories of people considered vulnerable and weak, slaughtered in the rampage of Antiochus’s soldiers (5:13). Those who are not slaughtered, as always in ancient warfare, make prime targets for slavery (5:14, 24). The examples of outrages against the Jews also feature a story of two women who are put to death for having circumcised their children. The women are paraded in public with babies at their breasts before being thrown to their deaths from the city wall. Note that the focus on breasts here in 2 Maccabees contrasts with the version of the same story in 1 Maccabees, where the babies are on the “neck” of the women (1 Macc. 1:60–61), a contrast that again reveals the special focus in 2 Maccabees on exposed women. Also, in 2 Maccabees the



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women alone are punished—there is no mention of fathers, or others who performed the circumcision (cf. 1 Macc. 1:61). While this may not be enough to argue that the women were viewed in 2 Maccabees as performing the ritual themselves, it is clear that they are seen as complicit enough as to be held accountable. (For further discussion, see Haber.) Thus the audience of 2 Maccabees has their first glimpse of women who die for the sake of the law. In contrast, women are also used to accentuate the corruption of the temple. Not only does Antiochus violate the space and abscond with the vessels, but “Gentiles” (here used pejoratively) engage in sexual relations with prostitutes and allow women into the temple precincts (6:4). While early scholarship has often focused on what type of cult was introduced in the temple and whether it was characterized by “sacred prostitution,” most recent scholarship has largely debunked the existence of such a practice. Instead, the reference to women and sex in the temple is another place where 2 Maccabees draws on a specifically Greek trope to characterize cultic misdeeds, in this case one from Herodotus and other Greek historians. The point of the description is to epitomize the level of defilement that had come upon the temple. As events turn from bad to worse, the author provides two theological interludes. The first (5:17–20) explains the violation of the temple by Antiochus on the basis of God’s anger against the Jews living in the city. As in Isaiah 54:7–8, the author claims that the Lord was “angered for a little while” (5:17 NRSV) and only for this reason did not have Antiochus flogged as he did Heliodorus. The second interlude (6:12–17) follows the account of increasing persecution of the Jews in Jerusalem, including the forced participation in Greek festivals and the prohibition of Jewish law and customs. In this case, the author argues that these are punishments designed to discipline the people, a privilege that God grants his own people but not the nations. This reminder, as the author calls it, is crucial for understanding the scenes that follow and their importance to the narrative as a whole.

Turning Point and Resolution of the Second Crisis (2 Macc. 6:18–10:9) Chapters 6 and 7 relate the stories of Eleazar and the mother and her seven sons. Here, the author draws on the Greek noble-death

tradition to provide examples of courageous, sacrificial deaths that will atone for the sins of the people and turn God’s wrath to mercy. Eleazar, described as a distinguished, handsome man of advanced age, chooses torture and death over the prospect of eating meat that is prohibited by the law. His final speech emphasizes integrity, respect for the laws, and the benefits of willingly dying a good death, echoing Socrates, the quintessential Greek example of noble death. Similarly, the brothers, at their mother’s urging, all choose to die nobly for the nation, rather than violate the law. Eleazar, the mother, and her sons are remembered as martyrs in the Jewish and Christian traditions and for good reason. The stories serve as a pivotal point in the crisis, as God’s wrath against the people turns to mercy. This is made explicit with the family’s opening quote from the Song of Moses that promises God’s compassion (7:6, cf. Deut. 32:36) and the youngest son’s final speech, in which he expresses the hope that his death and that of his brothers will bring an end to God’s wrath (7:37– 38). His speech, as well as his brothers’ before him, picks up on another theme of Deuteronomy 32, namely, that God will also take vengeance against the nations whom he allowed to punish the people, lest they think they are more powerful than God (Deut. 32:26–27). In this way, 2 Maccabees, like Deuteronomy, maintains the idea of God’s sovereignty in the face of seeming insurmountable disaster. The mother, described as “exceedingly wonderful” and “worthy of good memory,” is the most prominent woman in 2 Maccabees. Nevertheless, her conduct is admirable because she behaved like a man or, as the narrator reports, “stirred up her womanly reasoning with a manly courage” (7:21). In the context of the ancient Mediterranean world, womanly reasoning would have had negative connotations. Indeed, the statement suggests as much—her feminine aspect needs to be supplemented with the masculine. Once this occurs, she can now encourage her sons with a reasoned theological explanation that emphasizes the power of the Creator who gave the sons life in her womb and thus can give them life again (7:23, cf. Deut. 32:39). In this way, the woman downplays her own maternal role, articulating the ancient understanding of women as vessels that merely carry the life that was created through masculine generative power. The emphasis on God as creator and the

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hope for resurrection that runs through the text reinforces this idea (7:9–11, 14, 22–23, 28–29). Notably, although the details of the brothers’ torture and death are reported in gruesome detail, the death of the mother that concludes the story is only briefly mentioned. The effectiveness of these deaths is immediately confirmed with the reappearance of Judas Maccabee, whose band of nine grows to six thousand of his kindred who had “remained in Judaism” (8:1). Together they appeal to God, with specific reference to the deaths of innocent infants, a plea that recalls the stories featuring women and their sons, if we can think figuratively of the mother’s seven sons as “infants.” When Judas and his men go to battle, they have instant success because the “wrath of the Lord had turned to mercy” (8:5 NRSV). The battle stories that follow in the rest of the narrative count deaths by the thousands exacted by Judas and his warriors. They also point repeatedly to the combination of courage, nobility, and humility with which they go about their warfare. Whereas their enemies are led to battle by rage, the Jewish men rely on their manly virtue (aretē) and the Lord (10:28). When Jewish men are driven by anger, it is manly (in Greek terms), because is it a righteous anger provoked by blasphemies (10:35). Their masculine nobility and bravery are consistently praised in the book (e.g., 8:16, 21; 13:14; 14:18; 15:17), while their Greek opponents are portrayed as fleeing the battle in shameful retreat or dying dishonorably (8:34–35; 9:1; 10:37; 11:12; 12:22). It is clear that the author has fully embraced the Greek value of nobility, displaying it decisively in the Jewish heroes of his history. At the same time, the heroes of the story honor the traditions of their Jewish ancestors, stopping pursuit of the enemy to keep the Sabbath and distributing the spoils of the battle among the people (see Num. 31:25–47). This second crisis ends with the ignoble death of Antiochus, brought down by his rage and arrogance, not to mention the worms with which God afflicts him (9:1–12). Before he dies, like Heliodorus before him, he humbles himself and testifies to the power of God (9:12).

The Final Crisis and Resolution (2 Macc. 10:10–15:39) Although the temple is reclaimed, the story does not end until Judas and his armies contend

with the final crisis brought on by the regional governors who oppose the Jews and Antiochus Eupator, son of Antiochus IV. The pattern continues much as before, with Judas encouraging the men toward nobility and courage in battle and God enabling them to slaughter their enemies by the tens of thousands. The brutal and disturbing accounts of divinely aided slaughter recall the book of Joshua, as the narrative itself makes clear (12:15–16). Not surprisingly, these battle narratives devote little attention to women. Where they are mentioned, it is in ways that reflect how women were victimized in times of war, as well as the general status of women in the ancient patriarchal world. So, for example, wives are drowned along with their families by the people of Joppa (12:3). Given the threat to the temple (14:33), concern for the well-being of wives and other family members is less pressing (15:18). Tellingly, when Jason marches against the Greek governor, Timothy, the latter orders the evacuation of “women and children and other baggage” (12:21), a phrase that could not make more clear the ancient patriarchal assumption that women are to be counted among one’s material possessions. The final series of battles also features one last instance of a noble death, this time by an elder of Jerusalem named Razis. It occurs in most dramatic fashion as the man attempts three times to take his own life to protect his noble birth rather than allow himself to die at the hands of sinners (14:41–42). His death paves the way for the final confrontation between Judas’s army and Nicanor. The author again draws a contrast between the Greek army, who goes to battle with trumpets and battle songs, and the Jewish one, who “engaged the enemies with invocations and prayers, thus fighting with hands, but praying to God in their hearts” (15:26–27). For a contemporary audience, the contrast between the armies may not be entirely convincing, especially as the concluding scene involves the beheading and mutilation of Nicanor’s body. The display of Nicanor’s head on the citadel signals the final resolution of the crisis, and the author quickly brings his story to completion. The history of 2 Maccabees closes with the author inserting himself once again, with an epilogue that (along with the preface) frames the entire account. He suggests that he has done the best he could and reminds the reader that



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his purpose has been to “delight the ears of those who read the work” (15:38–39). Bibliography

Haber, Lynn. “Living and Dying for the Law: The Mother-Martyrs of 2 Maccabees.” Women in Judaism (2006): 4. Himmelfarb, Martha. “Judaism and Hellenism in 2 Maccabees.” Poetics Today 19

(1998): 19–40. http://wjudaism.library .utoronto.ca/index.php/wjudaism/article/ view/247/319. Schwartz, Daniel R. 2 Maccabees. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2008. van Henten, Jan Willem. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees. Leiden, New York, and Cologne: Brill, 1997.

3 Maccabees Sara R. Johnson

Introduction Unlike 1 and 2 Maccabees and 4 Maccabees, the rather confusingly named 3 Maccabees does not give an account of the Maccabean revolt, but focuses attention on a (likely fictitious) persecution of the Jews of Alexandria almost a century before the Maccabean revolt, at the hands of Ptolemy IV Philopator of Egypt (221–204 BCE). It seems likely, however, that the author was aware of the Maccabean revolt, and that the account echoes the themes of that persecution. Perhaps for that reason, the text came to be grouped with accounts of the Maccabean revolt in the Septuagint. The role of women is muted in the book (with a few notable exceptions). The main focus is, rather, upon the Jewish community as a whole, particularly their vulnerability to the whims of the king, their passive resistance to persecution, and their dependence upon God, who intervenes in response to prayer. The book may be read either as a bleak portrait of a community that survives despite being surrounded by hostile enemies, or as an optimistic fairy tale about the ability of the community to prevail over trials and thrive within the Diaspora. Although strongly colored with seemingly realistic historical details, the book is essentially a historical fiction with an uplifting moral. Its closest literary analogues within the Septuagint are Esther (which is also an account of a festival founded to commemorate surviving a persecution), the early chapters of 2 Maccabees, and the court tales of Daniel 1–6.

Author, Date, and Canonicity It is universally agreed that the book was written by a Greek-speaking Jew of Egypt, most likely living in Alexandria. Most scholars date the book to the late Hellenistic period (first c. BCE), although some prefer the early Roman period (after 30 BCE). Since the book is written in rather ornate Alexandrian Greek and shows extensive familiarity with Ptolemaic court protocol, the author may have served at court (or aspired to). The book is preserved in only one of the three major manuscripts of the Septuagint (Codex Alexandrinus). As a result, it was not included in the Latin Vulgate and did not become part of the Catholic or Protestant canon, but it is regarded as canonical by the Orthodox Church. There are only occasional mentions of it in the early church fathers. No trace remains of the book (or the story) in later Jewish tradition.

Historicity Like Esther, 3 Maccabees appears to have originated as a narrative to explain the existence of a festival, in this case a festival to celebrate the miraculous deliverance of the Jews of Alexandria from a persecution. Josephus (Against Apion 2.53–55) preserves an alternate account, but places the persecution under Ptolemy VIII Physcon in the context of a civil war (ca. 145 BCE). In both accounts, however, the Jews of Alexandria are gathered together into the hippodrome to be trampled to death by drunken

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elephants, only to be spared at the last minute, due to divine intervention.

Role of Women in the Book While 3 Maccabees, like Esther, seeks to explain the origin of a festival, the focus is not upon a heroine who saves the people but upon the community as a whole, dependent on the intervention of God. Individuals are rarely identified by name, but of those that are, both are male leaders who call upon God in prayer: the high priest Simon (2:1–24) and a priest named Eleazar (6:1–15). Third Maccabees has often been compared with the sentimental Greek novel, but it lacks a conventional romantic hero and heroine. Hadas suggests that the role of the hero is taken by the Jewish community as a whole, but in fact, the plight of the Jews of Alexandria more closely resembles that of the suffering heroine. In the Greek novel, the heroine’s chastity is often placed in danger, only for her to be delivered at the eleventh hour; there is frequently a spectacular trial in a public place; the heroine’s sufferings are piteously elaborated upon, and so forth. While the analogy with the Greek novel is not perfect, the speculation raises interesting implications for the gendering of the Jewish community in relation to God, who rescues the community from peril. Among the unnamed members of the Jewish community, women figure prominently, but not exclusively, in the pitiful account of the distress of the people, both in Jerusalem (1:18– 20) and in Alexandria (4:6–7). In Jerusalem, sheltered young women rush into the streets to mourn; mothers abandon their newborn children to gather at the temple. In Alexandria,

young brides are dragged through the streets, unveiled, along with their young husbands, who are likewise brutally mistreated. All of these are standard features of pathetic or “tragic” Hellenistic historiography, designed to invoke fear and pity (cf. the women who are martyred with their babies for the crime of having circumcised them [2 Macc. 6:10], or the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons [2 Macc. 7:1–42; 4 Macc.]). The only named female figure who stands out in the narrative is, intriguingly, Philopator’s sister-wife Arsinoe. (Brother-sister marriage was commonly practiced among the Ptolemies, in imitation of earlier pharaonic practice.) She appears only briefly in the introductory section (1:1–7), which gives a detailed account of events leading up to the battle of Raphia. Apart from the pathetic effect of her appeal to the troops, it is not clear why Arsinoe has been given a starring (or, at least, named) role, unless to enhance the general impression of historical verisimilitude in the opening lines of the narrative.

Structure of the Narrative Structurally, the clearest division in the book is that between events in Palestine (1:1–2:24) and events in Egypt (2:25–7:23), where Philopator’s attempt to invade the temple prefigures the persecution of the Jews in Egypt. The persecution in Egypt is likewise carefully structured, such that the decree of the king reversing the order of persecution (7:1–9) mirrors and inverts the original decree (3:11–30). Moreover, the miraculous thwarting of the registration in 4:14–21 is located at the center, balanced between the intervention of God in response to the two prayers of Simon (2:1–24) and Eleazar (6:1–29).

Comment Battle of Raphia (3 Macc. 1:1–7) The narrative opens with Philopator preparing for a final confrontation with Antiochus III at the battle of Raphia (217 BCE). The assassination of Philopator at the hands of a former courtier is narrowly averted, thanks to another courtier, an apostate Jew named Dositheus. Philopator wins the battle, thanks in part to the

timely intervention of his sister Arsinoe, and he decides to make a tour of the neighboring cities. The role of the apostate Dositheus appears to be an invention of the author, though the character may be loosely based on a historical Jewish man named Dositheus, who served as priest of Alexander under Philopator. The heroic role played by Dositheus is paradoxical, for here an apostate Jew saves the life of a tyrant persecutor

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(cf. the pious Mordecai, who saves the life of Ahasuerus in the book of Esther). Dositheus prefigures the importance of apostates later in the narrative.

Visit to the Temple (3 Macc. 1:8–29) Philopator’s attempt to enter the innermost sanctuary of the temple and his being miraculously struck down by God (2:1–24) bear a striking resemblance to the experience of Heliodorus, the minister of Seleucus IV, whose attempt to enter the temple was similarly rebuffed, according to 2 Maccabees 3:4–40. This similarity may represent literary influence in one direction or the other. The narrative stresses both the loyalty of the Jews to Philopator (1:8) and the king’s initial respect for and admiration of the temple (1:9– 10), which paradoxically touches off the crisis. Loyalty to a sovereign, however, does not override the obligation to uphold divine law (1:11), a theme that will recur in the second half of the narrative. Nevertheless, the priests and the people alike take refuge in prayer rather than armed resistance (which is explicitly restrained by wiser heads at 1:23).

Prayer of Simon, the High Priest (3 Macc. 2:1–20) Both the prayer of Simon and the later prayer of Eleazar follow well-established conventions of Hellenistic Jewish petitionary prayer (cf. Pss. 105 and 106). Simon praises God for his power and glory and calls upon him to deal with “an impious and profane man, puffed up in his audacity and power” (2:2). The request is justified in terms of a recital of God’s previous interventions on behalf of his people, such as the destruction of Sodom (2:5) and the plagues sent upon Pharaoh (2:6–8). Even if their present sufferings are the result of their own “many and great sins” (2:13), Simon calls upon God not to allow “transgressors” (2:17) to boast of having defiled the holy place, but asks God to deliver them from the oppressor (2:19–20).

Philopator Is Struck Down and Withdraws (3 Macc. 2:21–24) Philopator suffers a seizure and is carried away, unable to move or speak. This is

explicitly represented as an act of God (2:21), though no heavenly apparition is seen, as in the case of Heliodorus (2 Macc. 3:25–28). In contrast to Heliodorus, who is properly repentant and respectful of the power of God thereafter (3:31–40), Philopator “by no means repented, but went away uttering bitter threats” (3 Macc. 2:24).

Persecution of the Jews of Alexandria and All Egypt (3 Macc. 2:25–3:10) Upon returning to Egypt, Philopator turns his wrath upon the Jews of Egypt (2:27). The logic of this is not at all clear, but the narrative implies that trouble in Palestine can lead to trouble for the Jews of the Diaspora. The wording of the initial proclamation at 2:28–30 is puzzling. Exactly which Jews are to be registered, and for what purpose? Particularly striking is the mention of branding of the symbol of Dionysus, which would normally be a mark of devotion by a worshiper, not a punishment to be inflicted on one who rejects the god (but cf. 2 Macc. 6:7). The proclamation seems to be designed to impose requirements and punishments that would be offensive to most Jews (sacrifice to foreign gods, a bar on entry to “sanctuaries,” registration in a degrading census, branding with the symbol of a pagan god). In response to the proclamation, some “readily gave themselves up, since they expected to enhance their reputation by their future association with the king” (2:31). Those who choose to become apostates are shunned by their fellow Jews (2:33). The feelings of the Gentiles are divided on the subject of the Jews. “A hostile rumor was circulated against the Jewish nation by some who conspired to do them ill” (3:2), indicating that the Jews do have some enemies, in part because their pious determination to maintain “separateness with respect to foods” made them “appear . . . hateful to some” (3:4). While the identity of the Jews’ enemies is not made clear, “the Greeks in the city” are explicitly said to have been sympathetic, but unable to do anything to help, “for they lived under tyranny” (3:8). The accusations here laid against the Jews are typical of the rhetoric used by those who were hostile toward Judaism in the late Hellenistic and early Roman periods.



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Philopator’s First Letter Condemning the Jews (3 Macc. 3:11–30) Both this letter and the second letter at 7:1–9 mimic the style of Ptolemaic bureaucratic correspondence. The letter opens with a formula of greeting (3:12–13), reviews the events that have so far taken place (3:14–24), and orders that Jews throughout the country be brought to the capital for execution (3:25–26); the same fate is promised to anyone who shelters the Jews (3:27–29). The king stresses the inherent wickedness of the Jews (3:16, 18, 22) and makes much of his own “benevolence” (3:15, 18, 20). The king’s depiction of his own actions is clearly disingenuous and self-serving. In the second letter, the rhetoric is systematically turned on its head, after he is converted by God into a defender of the Jews.

Assembly and Registration of the Jews (3 Macc. 4:1–21) The Jews are gathered together at Schedia, a few miles from the hippodrome near the east gate of Alexandria, to be registered for execution. For a modern audience the systematic and bureaucratic implementation of the command to execute all the Jews of Egypt carries disturbing echoes of the Holocaust (4:14). The horror of the persecution is somewhat undermined, however, by the humor of the fact that the registration cannot be completed because the number of the Jews is so vast that the kingdom has run out of paper and ink (4:17–20). This is designated “an act of the invincible providence” from God (4:21). Humorous though it may be, the miracle occupies a central position in the text, between the miracle that drives Philopator from the temple in chapter 2 and the miracle that spares the Jews in chapter 6.

Command to Execute the Jews Miraculously Averted Twice (3 Macc. 5:1–51) The miracles that repeatedly postpone the climax of the Jews’ ordeal again have a humorous cast to them. The king’s plan is to have the Jews executed by being trampled by drunken elephants, which, although bizarre, is attested elsewhere as a method of execution in the Hellenistic world. On the first day, however, the

king oversleeps, and on the second he is stricken with divine forgetfulness—both explicitly identified as acts of God (5:11–12, 28). Hermon, the keeper of the elephants, has a miserable time of it, since on first day the king unfairly berates him for not carrying out the execution (5:18), and on the second day he threatens him with death for attempting to injure his most loyal subjects, the Jews (5:31)—only to call him back a few hours later, demanding to know why the execution has not yet been carried out (5:37)! In addition to demonstrating the power that God has to control the king’s mind, these comical reversals undermine the otherwise terrifying power of the absolute monarch. On the third day, the stage is set for the execution to be carried out, and the assembled Jews can only pray for deliverance (5:48–51).

Prayer of Eleazar (3 Macc. 6:1–15) The prayer of Eleazar follows a pattern similar to the prayer of the high priest Simon (2:2–20). It opens with praises of God’s glory (6:2) and invokes the history of God’s care and protection of Israel (6:3). In addition to the example of Pharaoh (6:4), Eleazar recalls the destruction of Sennacherib’s army (6:5, cf. 2 Kgs. 18:13; 19:35–37), the rescue of the three young men from the fiery furnace in Babylon (6:6, cf. Dan. 3:22, 27), the deliverance of Daniel from the lion’s den (6:7, cf. Dan. 6:22), and the rescue of Jonah from the belly of the whale (6:8, cf. Jonah 2:10), calling upon God to demonstrate his power before the eyes of the Gentiles (6:13–15).

God’s Intervention: The King Repents (3 Macc. 6:16–41) Eleazar’s prayer, like Simon’s, is promptly answered by a divine miracle, as “two glorious angels of fearful aspect descended, visible to all but the Jews” (6:18). The angelic appearance terrifies the elephants, who turn back upon the forces of the king and trample them underfoot instead of the Jews. By the providence of God the king now is permanently converted into a benefactor of the Jews (6:22–28). Although the king’s startling reversal might again be viewed as comical, it confirms the author’s insistence upon the loyalty of the Jews to the crown, even when the man in power may not deserve that loyalty.

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Philopator provides the revenue for the Jews to celebrate a seven-day festival in honor of their deliverance (6:30–36; cf. Josephus, Against Apion 2.55). Although nothing else is known of the festival, it was evidently celebrated on a regular basis by the Jews of Alexandria and, like Purim, may have given rise to legends about its origin.

Philopator’s Second Letter (3 Macc. 7:1–9) Philopator’s second letter echoes the rhetoric of the first, but systematically reverses the antiJewish polemic and replaces it with praise for the Jews and their God. The accusation of the Jews’ disloyalty and treachery, earlier made by the king himself, is now placed in the mouths of his misguided advisers (7:4). Thus the second letter’s representation of events, like the first, is inclined to be self-serving and disingenuous, but at least the Jews are no longer the target of the king’s wrath. The author stops short of making the king actually convert to Judaism, but Philopator repeatedly utters praises of God’s power and providence.

The Jews Punish the Apostates and Return Home (3 Macc. 7:10–23) In Esther, the Jews petition the king for the right to defend themselves and kill the Gentiles who attacked them (Esth. 8:8–11); in 3 Maccabees, the Jews request permission to punish the apostates among them. They claim that it is the apostates whose loyalty to the kingdom cannot be trusted (7:11). On their return

home, the Jews are said to have executed a total of more than three hundred apostates (7:15). It is striking that the antipathy shown toward the apostates seems to be greater than that felt for those who were actually responsible for the persecution. The ordeal thus concludes happily for the Jews, who recover the property they had lost in the course of the registration, and who now are restored to a position of even higher prestige than before (7:21–22). As in Esther, all around them are filled with the fear of God (7:22; cf. Esth. 9:2–3). The words with which the book closes (“So the supreme God perfectly performed great deeds for their deliverance. Blessed be the Deliverer of Israel through all times! Amen,” 7:22–23) may indicate that, like Esther, 3 Maccabees was read aloud each year at the celebration of the festival it commemorates. Bibliography

Anderson, H. “3 Maccabees.” In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J. H. Charlesworth, 2:509–29. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1983, 1985. Croy, N. C. 3 Maccabees. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Hadas, M. The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees. Jewish Apocryphal Literature Series. New York: Harper & Bros., 1953. Johnson, S. R. Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004. Wills, L. M. Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995.

4 Maccabees Judith H. Newman

Introduction Fourth Maccabees is different from the first three books of Maccabees, which contain narrative accounts of political events. In elaborating on the martyr stories of 2 Macc 6–7, 4 Maccabees seeks to demonstrate that Judaism offers its own legitimate “philosophy” or way of life in which the role of religious reason is paramount. Piety (eusebeia), a term that is repeated with great frequency in the book, is understood as foundational to this outlook in Jewish practice. A woman and mother serves a featured role in the argument, as will be elaborated below. The work was known by Eusebius, who referred to it by the title “On the Supremacy of Reason” (Hist. eccl. 3.10.6). It is preserved in several manuscripts of the Septuagint, though it is not considered canonical by any church, nor is it authoritative in Judaism. Neither the date nor the provenance of the book is certain. The mention of Cilicia along with Syria and Phoenicia as a single province in 4:2 (cf. 2 Macc. 4:4) has suggested to some scholars that the book dates from 20–54 CE, when the three were joined in a single province. Yet an earlier scholarly consensus for a first-century date has broken down, with suggestions running as late as the second century CE. A reference in 4:20 to the citadel in Jerusalem “of our native land,” which in fact includes an erroneous placement, would suggest the provenance of the book lies outside Palestine. The major Jewish Diaspora cities of Alexandria and Antioch have been proposed as places of origin. Antioch seems more likely. Antiochus IV Epiphanes, the ruler remembered for the siege of Jerusalem and the desecration of the

temple (175–164 BCE), is the featured villain in the account, and he obviously had a close connection with his capital city. Both the frequent intermingling of Jews and Christians in that city and the long-lived cult of the Maccabean martyrs there add weight to this supposition. The identity of the author is unknown. Since the book likely dates from before the final “parting of the ways” between Jews and Christians, it might have been written by a Torah-observant follower of Jesus, such as were opposed by Paul (Gal. 5:1–6:10). Its most influential theological feature is the idea that the blood and death of the martyrs serve as purification and atonement for corporate sin (6:29; 17:21–22). The genre of the book has been described broadly as a logos protreptikos, that is, a speech promoting a particular philosophy. The book can be divided into three main sections: an introduction (1:1–3:19); a narrative account of the martyrdoms of Eleazar the priest and the seven brothers and their mother, which reflects expanded accounts of 2 Maccabees (3:20–17:1); and a final section that serves as a eulogy of the martyrs and an explanation of their efficacy (17:2–18:23). The middle section can be further subdivided into four accounts: the historical circumstances of the martyrdoms during the reign of Antiochus (3:19–4:26); an account of the martyrdom of the priest Eleazar (5:1–7:23); the martyrdom and praise of the seven brothers (8:1–14:10); and the mother’s suicidal martyrdom (14:11–17:1). The main parts are knit together by similarities of vocabulary, in particular the reiteration by the author of the thesis that reason should prevail over the emotions 455

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(6:31–35; 7:16–23; 13:1–5; 16:1–4; 18:2). The work exhibits an eclectic mix of philosophical influences, particularly from Stoicism and Platonism. The author wrote in a much more sophisticated level of Greek than most of the authors of the Septuagint, New Testament, and apostolic fathers. He shows familiarity with a range of Greek rhetorical forms and devices,

including most notably the encomium. A reference to “this occasion” (1:10, 3:19) and an address to “you children of Israel” (18:1) suggest that the book may have been composed for a commemoration of the martyrdoms, perhaps at the site of their tombs in Antioch (1:10; 3:19; 17:9–10), but this can be no more than an educated guess.

Comment Introduction (4 Macc. 1:1–3:18) The introduction to the book begins (1:1–4) and ends (3:17–18) by stating its philosophical aim to demonstrate that reason governs the emotions. Emotions cannot be eradicated (3:2–5), but through control and self-discipline they can be brought under control. The four cardinal Hellenistic virtues (rational judgment, self-control, justice, and courage) are presented as fully compatible with the ancestral wisdom of the Jews found in their law. Reason prefers the life of wisdom, which is defined as “knowledge of divine and human matters” (1:16). Such wisdom is available in the law of Moses; thus education in the Jewish law (tou nomou paideia) is reasonable. The author interweaves philosophical reflection with examples from Jewish tradition. Only male figures are mentioned. The first example pertains to the use of reason in enabling the observance of dietary laws. Joseph is able to exercise self-control over sexual desire for Potiphar’s wife through his use of reason in observing the commandment against adultery (2:5). Implicit in this characterization of Joseph is his wise restraint against the wiles of the caricatured wicked and lascivious woman (Prov. 6–7). Moses is able to control his anger with Dathan and Abiram though reason (2:17). Jacob condemns his sons’ anger in their revenge on the Shechemites for the rape of their sister Dinah (2:19). David is able to stave off his “irrational desire” for water through the use of reason. The author makes the point that the “enthroned mind” can rule over a temperate, good, and just “kingdom” of the body. While this is compatible with the Stoic ideal of the sage as king, it is also a not-too-subtle jab against the excesses of human kings with which the book as a whole is concerned.

The Narrative Demonstration (4 Macc. 3:19–17:1) Having drawn examples from the ancestral teaching, “the present occasion” prompts the author to present a narrative demonstration of his thesis by detailing the dramatic events during a period of Hellenistic Seleucid domination (3:19–4:26). The use of reason is evident in the virtues displayed by the priest Eleazar, the seven brothers, and their mother through their courageous deaths in resisting cultural imperialism. Drawing on events mentioned in 2 Maccabees 3:1–40, the narrative begins (3:20–4:14) by describing the historical backdrop to the martyrdoms during the period of Seleucid rule in Palestine (cf. 2 Macc. 3–5). After a period of relative peace under the beneficent rule of Seleucus Nicanor, political dissent and disagreement develop among the Judeans. Simon, a political rival of the high priest Onias, commits treason. He convinces the regional Syrian governor Appollonius that Onias has kept funds in the Jerusalem temple that rightly belong in the king’s treasury. The subsequent attempt of Apollonius to retrieve the taxes from Jerusalem is foiled, but it anticipates further conflict. After the death of his father Seleucus, Antiochus Epiphanes takes the throne. He replaces Onias with his hellenized brother Jason, who establishes Greek cultural institutions like the gymnasium. Antiochus ultimately bans the observance of Jewish law, thereby causing a crisis. The Old Priest Is Martyred (4 Macc. 5:1–7:23) The king’s demand that all Hebrews eat pork and food sacrificed to idols or suffer death sets the stage for the martyrdoms recounted in the rest of the book. The accounts of the deaths of Eleazar and the sons (cf. 2 Macc.



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6–7) follow the same pattern: the Greek king commands them to commit apostasy; they engage in a philosophical dialogue; the victim is tortured in gruesome ways and finally killed. This is followed by an encomium to honor his death. In the case of the old priest Eleazar, Antiochus argues that since he is being forced to eat the meat, surely his God would not hold him responsible for breaking the law. Eleazar counters that transgression of the law whether in minor or major things is the same, because obeying the whole law itself is the principle to be observed. He defends the law as an excellent philosophy, because it teaches the virtues of self-control, courage, justice, and piety, which in turn permit due reverence for the “living God.” Eleazar’s tortures are described in excruciating detail. In his resistance to them he is likened to a “noble athlete,” a common metaphorical trope in popular philosophy (17:11–16; cf. 1 Cor. 9:24–25). Even when given the opportunity by his admiring captors to feign eating the forbidden pork by substituting another kind of meat, he resists the appearance of such disobedience. This would be deemed “unmanly” (6:21). This association of the “higher virtues” with true maleness will become evident especially with the death of the only woman martyr. His dying words are a prayer for mercy for his people: “Make my blood their purification.” He asks that his death serve as an expiation of theirs (6:28–29). The encomium that follows recapitulates in a series of metaphors. Eleazar, the old priestly sage, successfully steered the “ship of piety” (eusebeia) over the “sea of emotion” (pathos); like a besieged city, his mind hard like a jutting cliff, he does not let the waves of emotion erode him. “Hardness” of mind as well as body is associated with the ideal male in Greek culture, in contrast to the soft flesh of women. The encomium draws again on interpretive scriptural tradition to demonstrate how the priest followed in the footsteps of his noble ancestors in piety: Aaron in atoning for the people with his censer (Num. 16:46–50, Wisd. Sol. 18:20–25) and Isaac in his willing acceptance of his sacrificial role. The portrayal of a rational Isaac is not evident in Genesis 22:1–14, but accords with early interpretations of Isaac as a willing sacrificial victim found in fragmentary texts at Qumran, in Josephus, and in the early Jewish work Pseudo-Philo.

The Witness of the Seven Sons (4 Macc. 8:1–14:10) Antiochus is frustrated by his failure to compel the old man to eat defiling food and thus transgress his religious practice, so he seeks to identify other potential inductees to Hellenistic mores. He takes a two-pronged carrot-andstick approach in coercing the seven brothers. He promises them positions of authority in the government if they adopt Hellenistic ways and renounce their Jewish practice. To drive the point home, he introduces the instruments of torture with which their passions will be tested, but the sons together taunt the tyrant: “Why do you delay, O tyrant?” and again pledge their fidelity to the law. In the manner of other early Jewish literature, like Judith and Esther, the foreign tyrant is depicted in slightly hyperbolic terms. He is infuriated and crazed, out of control at their lack of gratitude. In his own passions, he serves as a foil to the Jewish martyrs. The brothers are killed in turn from the oldest to youngest. The oldest exhorts his younger siblings to let him serve as a worthy exemplar for the rest of them. Even on the rack, with his bones disjointed, he exhorts them: “Imitate me, brothers. Do not leave your post in my struggle or renounce our courageous family ties” (9:23). He affirms his conviction that divine justice will ultimately avenge his death. The second (9:23–32), third (10:1–11), and fourth (10:12–21) brothers staunchly face torture and likewise affirm the principle of divine retribution. The fifth brother boldly volunteers for his tortures because he understands that the tyrant will receive an even greater divine punishment as a result. The youth of the sixth is emphasized, though he is described as being the equal of his brothers in mind and education. Their training in the law and discipline numbs their bodies to the pain of torture: “Your fire is cold to us, and the catapults painless, and your violence powerless” (11:26). The account of the trial of the seventh son is made more poignant in that the boy’s mother is called to witness it. She exhorts him in Hebrew, which emboldens him to follow the example set by his brothers, and he puts an end to his own life by throwing himself in the brazier. An encomium concludes the account of the son’s martyrdom (13:1–14:10). The end of the section of the seven sons’ martyrdoms describes two dimensions of their resistance. The first (13:19–14:1) is fraternal love. Brotherly love (philadelphia) was a Greek

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ideal known from Plutarch and Aristotle. Such shared affection stems not only from biological foundations, the recognition of common parentage, but also from nurture. The brothers shared the same training in the law, which made them of like mind. This equipped them to endure the tortures, and for the younger ones to witness and even encourage the older ones to suffer for the sake of their common religious philosophy. The second aspect is again reason (14:2–10), which is understood to “master the emotions of their brotherly love.” Philosophers regularly mentioned slavery to the passions as worse than physical slavery, which was involuntary and did not involve one’s character. Such liberation is here understood to permit a “harmonious concord” among the seven brothers (14:3–8), a state that is said ultimately to guarantee their passage into immortality with their ancestors (18:23). The Mother of Manly Mind (4 Macc. 14:11–17:1) From the narrator’s perspective, the mother’s martyrdom is the most laudable of all. This section consists largely of an encomium beginning with a series of four apostrophes (15:1–10, 12–15, 16–28, 29–32). The mother is extolled for choosing religion over the emotions. In Greco-Roman cultures, the “mind of woman” (gynaikos nous) was considered inferior and not rational. In her love for her offspring, a mother is compared to “unreasoning animals,” whose love for their offspring is a natural part of their being. Maternal love is viewed as a very powerful force, connected to the bowels (14:13), in contrast to the elevated mind. Her “natural” love for her children was intensified by witnessing their display of virtue and obedience to the point of death (15:9). The choice lies between enduring the emotional torment of watching her children suffer and relinquishing them to death, which paradoxically “preserves them for eternal life” (15:9–10). Her performance thus represents a contradiction: she is able to overcome such natural female pathos and frailty and demonstrate that she shares “the same soul as Abraham.” The author heightens the contrast between the life given to passions and the one guided by reason by inserting a fictive lament that she might have offered, had she been overcome by her passions (16:6–10). The woman is thus the exemplar par excellence because she

had performed a “superhuman” feat through her piety. She had overcome her status as “the weaker sex” to become “a “soldier of God in the cause of religion . . . more powerful than a man.” In keeping her “mind like adamant” she endures labor and birth again, delivering the sons to immortality (16:13). The description of the mother’s death itself is brief (17:1) and comes as the culmination of the narrative demonstration. The section of the book devoted to the female martyr is likely the most disquieting from a feminist perspective. Both women and men are depicted as having biologically determined natures with no room for differentiation. For those who understand gender as a phenomenon that is in part shaped by social forces quite distinct from biology, this underlying assumption is problematic. “Jewish woman” measures up to, or even surpasses in this case, “Jewish man” only if she “overcomes” something considered natural. Moreover, another biological fact is said here to feature centrally in motherly love. The suffering of labor and childbirth is understood to bestow a uniquely deep emotional bond between mother and child. This is a claim that many contemporary fathers, not to mention adoptive parents of all genders, might well contest. Martyrdom, Expiation, and Closure (4 Macc. 17:2–18:23) The end of the book contains a final encomium (17:7–18:5) to the mother, who is likened to a roof set firmly on the pillars of her sons and to the moon with seven starlike sons shining in the heaven with God. The deaths of the martyrs are “an atoning sacrifice” that serves to purify the land from the sins of their nation, the apostasy of those who abandoned the ancestral law. Antiochus is said to receive just punishment both in his lifetime and after his death. By contrast, the eternal heavenly inheritance of the martyrs is assured (18:3). In what seems to be an addition to an earlier form of the book (18:6–19), the mother shares some more principles with her sons. The final speech stands in tension with her exceptional exemplarity and her role as a teacher of virtue to the audience of 4 Maccabees at large. She assures her sons that she was kept virginally pure within the domestic confines of the patriarchal house; like Eve, she remained a subordinate to a male. Rather, it was their father



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who served as pedagogue to the sons, teaching them lessons about exemplary men described in the law and prophets (18:6–19). No mention is made of Sarah or Hannah or Deborah. At the end of the book then, she remains defined wholly by domesticity. She is denied a fully public role in a life and death circumscribed by her relationship to males. A perpetual “mother” and now “martyr,” she is a stereotypical figure characterized positively only to the degree that she becomes “like a man.” A deeper challenge to the overarching argument of 4 Maccabees comes from a contemporary trend in scientific research. Recent work in cognitive neuroscience suggests that body and mind, thought and feeling, are deeply integrated and indeed are essential to producing such social and civic virtues as altruism. Powerful emotions such as joy, sorrow, jealousy, and awe interact with the brain stem and are thus not easily separable from other cognitive acts that can be understood to comprise “reason.” This confirms a traditional feminist critique of elevating “reason” over “feelings.” Many women find more congenial an approach that values experience as much as logic and rationality. In 4 Maccabees, to demonstrate “reason,” the mother must transcend her own most compassionate emotions for her children. The sons must transcend their fraternal feelings. The emotional ties that inhere in interpersonal family bonds must be ignored in favor of abstract principle. What are the implications of such rationality? In contemporary life, an extreme version of such rational devotion to principle can sometimes have extremely negative effects. It can provide legitimation for various kinds of

violence, from honor killings of daughters who have transgressed religious norms to murders of doctors who perform abortions. The largescale tragedy on 9/11, which was intended as retribution and itself has engendered an ongoing cycle of violence and new “martyrs,” might also be seen as a commitment to reasoned conviction. Thus martyrdom without a complete commitment to passive nonviolence can thus be at best a two-edged sword. Bibliography

Aune, David. “Mastery of the Passions: Philo, 4 Maccabees, and Earliest Christianity.” In Hellenization Revisited, edited by W. Helleman, 125–38. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. deSilva, David A. 4 Maccabees: Introduction and Commentary on the Greek Text in Codex Sinaiticus. Septuagint Commentary Series. Leiden: Brill, 2006. Hadas, Moses. The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees. New York: Harper & Bros., 1953. van Henten, Jan Willem. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees. Leiden: Brill, 1997. Young, Robin Darling. “The ‘Woman with the Soul of Abraham’: Traditions about the Mother of the Maccabean Martyrs.” In ‘Women Like This’: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 67–81. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1991.

Psalm 151 Carol A. Newsom

Introduction Psalm 151 is not a part of the Hebrew Scriptures but has long been known in Greek manuscripts of the Septuagint and in the versions of the Bible translated from the Greek (Syriac, Latin, Ethiopic). Although it is considered canonical in the Orthodox tradition, Psalm 151 is not part of the canon of either the Roman Catholic or Protestant churches. Its ambiguous status is reflected in the heading given to the psalm in the Septuagint, which acknowledges the tradition of Davidic authorship but excludes it from

the collection of psalms: “This psalm is ascribed to David as his own composition (though it is outside the number [of the one hundred fifty canonical psalms]), after he had fought in single combat with Goliath.” In 1956 a Hebrew version of the psalm was found at Qumran among the Dead Sea Scrolls (11QPsa). The Hebrew manuscript showed that the version of the psalm in the Septuagint is actually composed of two original Hebrew psalms that have been combined and condensed.

Comment What is striking about the psalm is that it is narrated in the first person. Drawing on 1 Samuel 16–17, both for the narrative and for particular phrases, the psalm depicts David recalling his youth as a shepherd of his father’s sheep and as a musician (vv. 1–3). As in the biblical narrative, God chooses David to be anointed as leader in preference to his brothers, even though they “were handsome and tall” (vv. 4–5). The Hebrew version of the psalm is similar, although somewhat more elaborate. The latter part of the Greek psalm (vv. 6–7) abruptly shifts to the story of David’s battle with Goliath. In the Hebrew manuscript from Qumran, it is clear that the material about Goliath is part of a second, originally separate psalm, which has its own heading: “At the beginning of David’s power after the prophet of God had anointed him.” Even though the Hebrew psalm is badly broken and only partially preserved,

it is evident that it was a longer composition and that verses 6–7 in the Greek Psalter are an abbreviation of it. Of what interest is such a psalm to a feminist biblical commentary? Actually, an important consequence of feminist analysis of gender has been an awareness that masculinity, as well as femininity, is culturally constructed to a significant extent. David, as one of the most important male figures of the Bible, is a significant template for biblical masculinity. One of the striking things about the representation of David in the Hebrew Bible is that one follows him from adolescence, through maturity, to old age and senescence. His physical appearance, his familial and social relations, his role as musician and exorcist, his military successes and setbacks, his sexual activity and marital conflicts, his conflicts with his own sons, his failure to act when his daughter is raped, the role of various strong

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women in his life, and the failure of his sexual potency as a mark of his general waning power are all narrated in extraordinary detail in the books of 1 and 2 Samuel and in 1 Kings 1–2. David continued to be a figure of significance whose life was continually reinterpreted in the Hellenistic period, when Psalm 151 was probably written. Many of the features of David that would particularly engage feminist analysis about his representation in 1–2 Samuel, however, do not figure prominently in the later traditions about David. Strikingly, however, most of these later reflections on David focus on his activities as an adolescent, drawing on 1 Samuel 16–17. They variously recall and enhance his role as an unlikely youth chosen by God, who composed exorcistic psalms, defeated a lion and a bear that threatened his flock, and, above all, who defeated Goliath. In this focus, they pick up on a recurrent theme in biblical tradition. Elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible the successful male is often the younger, not the elder brother (e.g., Jacob, Joseph, Solomon), a striking inversion of the well-established patriarchal tradition (even in ancient Israel) of awarding the eldest male special rights and privileges. Psalm 151 selects only a few details to highlight about David the adolescent. Two verses contrast him with his older brothers, describing him as “small” and “the youngest.” Moreover, his brothers are described as “handsome and tall.” In ancient Israel, as in many cultures, physical stature and male beauty were often correlated with social dominance. Saul, the first king of Israel, was noted for being “head and shoulders” above his fellows, and yet he was a reluctant leader (1 Sam. 10:20–24). David’s ambitious but troubled son Absalom was known for his handsomeness, in particular his thick and beautiful hair (2 Sam. 14:25–26). Yet each of these figures is represented as deeply flawed and ultimately a failure. Thus there seems to be an ambivalence in Israelite narrative toward the traditional correlation of the handsome, charismatic male with the natural leader. To be sure, David is also described as “ruddy,” with “beautiful eyes,” and “handsome” (1 Sam. 16:12), but he is not so impressive as to draw the attention of the prophet Samuel, who overlooks him when he is seeking the next king of Israel. Thus the original tradition and Psalm 151’s adaptation of it represent David as not really fitting the traditional image of the dominant male.

The second detail that Psalm 151 draws from the tradition is that of David the musician. Modern readers may think of this trait as representing David’s “feminine side,” since music in modern societies is often thought of as the antithesis of rough masculine physicality. But in antiquity music was practiced by both men and women and was often seen as a form of charisma, indeed as closely related to the prophetic gift (2 Kgs. 3). Miriam’s association with music is probably why she is called a prophet (Exod. 15:20). Thus David’s skill with a harp and lyre would evoke his ability to turn aside the evil spirit that tormented Saul (1 Sam. 16:14–23). Moreover, the tradition that developed that credited David as the composer of the psalms and other poetic literature understood his musical and poetic gift as a kind of inspired prophecy, as attested in the 11QPsalms scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls. The modern equivalent of the association of musicianship and male charisma would be the male rock star. There too a form of dominant masculinity is articulated through musical performance. The third detail from David’s adolescent biography that is mentioned by Psalm 151 is David’s beheading of Goliath. Here one meets masculinity in its most stereotypical form: physical violence in the setting of war. But again, what is striking is the subversiveness of the Israelite masculine ideal. It does not picture David as the hypermasculine giant, slaying all comers. Instead, its masculine ideal is the unlikely youth, the one who manifestly does not have strength and physical superiority. It is difficult to say why Israel developed this countercultural image of masculinity, even as it continued to pay homage to the “tall, handsome, and powerful” template. Perhaps it was the fact that the nation itself was a small and not all that attractive player in a world where there were always larger national giants. If so, this is perhaps why the national imagination was also able to make room for such countercultural female heroines as Deborah, Jael, and Judith, women who commanded armies and conducted strategic assassinations with their own hands. Whatever one’s own views on the ethics of war and national violence, the Hebrew Bible gives one much to think about in terms of how it challenges any glib association of political and military prowess simply with stereotypical images of “huge and hairy” masculinity.

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Bibliography

Charlesworth, J. H., and J. A. Sanders. “Psalm 151.” In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J. H. Charlesworth, 2:612–15. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985. Fernández-Marcos, Natalio. “David the Adolescent: On Psalm 151.” In The Old Greek Psalter, edited by R. J. V. Hiebert, C. E. Cox, and P. J. Gentry, 205–17.

JSOTSup 332. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Harrington, Daniel J. “Psalm 151.” In Harper’s Bible Commentary, edited by James L. Mays et al., 935–36. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985. Talmon, S. “Extra-Canonical Hebrew Psalms from Qumran—Psalm 151.” In The World of Qumran from Within: Collected Studies, edited by S. Talmon, 258–64. Jerusalem: Magnes Press; Leiden: Brill, 1989.

New Testament

Gospel of Matthew Amy-Jill Levine

Introduction Early Christians viewed the First Gospel as an eyewitness account composed by the apostle Matthew, as well as a source for the other three canonical Gospels. Today, scholars recognize that neither the date of Matthew’s Gospel, nor its original audience, nor its author’s identity can be securely determined. The best we can do is posit the audience and author on the basis of the text, and then interpret the text in light of that determination. Despite the inevitable risk of a circular argument, we can with some confidence extrapolate general parameters. Although arguments for Matthean priority still receive support, most scholars believe that Matthew utilized other sources: Mark’s Gospel; a collection primarily comprising Jesus’ sayings (called Q, from the German word for “source,” Quelle), also used by Luke; and additional material unique to this Gospel (called M). The Gospel’s dependence on sources, deemphasis on Jesus’ imminent return, establishment of church polity, and self-definition as neither “Gentile” nor “Jewish/Judean” but as a third group, the “church” (Gk.: ekklēsia; Matthew’s is the only Gospel to use this term: 16:18; 18:17, 21) suggest a date toward the end of the first century CE. Given Petrine connections, a large Jewish community, and probable knowledge of this Gospel by Ignatius the local bishop, Antioch in Syria provides a plausible setting, although recent studies propose a Galilean origin. Many factors—emphasis on Jesus’ fulfillment of the Scriptures of Israel (i.e., the church’s “Old Testament”); numerous explicit

and implicit references to Abraham, Moses, and David; promotion of Torah (biblical Law); use of “kingdom of heaven” as a circumlocution for the Markan “kingdom of God” to preserve the sanctity of the divine name; and restriction of Jesus’ mission to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” (10:6; 15:24)—locate the Gospel within a broadly Jewish purview. However, invectives against Jewish groups (Pharisees, Sadducees, synagogue congregations, temple leadership, cities such as Chorazin and Capernaum) suggest a strained if not fully fractured relationship of author and audience to the Jewish community. Conversely, numerous righteous Gentiles (Rahab, Ruth, the magi, centurions, the Canaanite mother, Pilate’s wife) and the “Great Commission” (28:16–20) indicate an increasingly Gentile focus. In Matthew’s church, membership is based not on descent or geography but on baptism (28:19), faith, and especially, as Jesus states, doing the “will of my Father in heaven” (7:21; 12:50). Constructed as a family, the church comprises “brother and sister and mother” (12:50) as well as those who have “made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” (19:12), rather than fathers, wives, and husbands. Loyalty to Jesus will disrupt households (10:34–37), and followers typically appear outside of marital unions. Although Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law (8:14–15), Peter’s wife goes unmentioned. Zebedee’s wife joins her sons in Jesus’ movement; Zebedee does not. Matthew eliminates Mark’s reference (5:40) to the mother in describing the raising

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of the ruler’s daughter. Frequently Matthew depicts individuals apart from marital unions having positive, active roles (8:14–17; 9:20–22; 12:42; 13:33; 15:21–28; 21:31–32; 25:1–13; 26:6–13; 27:55–61; 28:1–10). Thereby, the Gospel challenges Roman culture, which saw the family as the microcosm of the state; it also challenges Jewish culture, which on the whole highly regarded marriage and children. Such fictive kinship configurations are comparable to voluntary societies (e.g., Pythagoreans, the people represented by the Dead Sea Scrolls, Philo’s Therapeutae/Therapeutrides), in which community solidarity takes preeminence over natal families. Matthew also issues political challenges. Rulers like Herod and Pilate appear as corrupt and cowardly. The “kings of the earth” (17:25; in the Gospels, the phrase is unique to Matthew) “take toll and tribute” rather than administer justice, while “the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them” (20:25, cf. Mark 10:42). Whether these challenges are prompted by the experiences of a small, marginalized community remains a matter of debate. Much current scholarship suggests that the Gospel was written for all churches rather than a sectarian group, and that it reflects robust confidence. From the magi’s upscale gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh (2:11, cf. Luke’s manger) to the missionary instructions not to take gold or silver (10:9) to the notice that Joseph of Arimathea was a “rich man” (27:57), textual details suggest less impoverished readers than well-off congregants who need reminders of their responsibilities to the poor, the stranger, and the imprisoned (see 25:31–46). The Gospel’s challenge to the status quo extends to the complacent, whether in the church or outside. Matthew condemns Pharisees and Sadducees (3:7; Luke’s parallel [3:7] mentions only “crowds”) who believe descent from Abraham guarantees salvation. For Jesus, saying “Lord, Lord” (7:21–22; 25:11) is insufficient; disciples must act on their convictions. This faith manifested in action defines Matthew’s mandate of righteousness (see 3:15; 5:6, 10, 20; 6:33; 21:32) greater than that practiced by Pharisees and scribes (5:20). As rabbinic

commentary speaks of making “a fence around the Torah” (Pirke Avot 1.1) to ensure that commandments would be fulfilled, so Jesus extends the commandments from action to attitude: Torah forbids adultery (Exod. 20:14; Lev. 20:10; Deut. 5:18), and Jesus forbids lust and remarriage after divorce (Matt. 5:28; 19:9); Torah forbids murder (Exod. 20:13; Deut. 5:17), and Jesus forbids anger (Matt. 5:22). Among the Gospel’s demands, Matthew emphasizes service (see esp. 23:8–12) and frequently depicts women as representing the service required of disciples (20:26–27). Women appear as models of higher righteousness (Tamar [1:3], Rahab and Ruth [1:5]) and participants in salvation history (the wife of Uriah [1:6], Mary the mother of Jesus [1:16–2:23]), retainers of communal memory (Rachel [2:18]), exemplars of hospitality (Peter’s mother-in-law [8:15]; the woman who anoints Jesus [26:6–13]) and fidelity (the woman who seeks physical healing [9:22]; the Canaanite mother [15:21– 28]), symbols of resurrection (the ruler’s daughter [9:24–25]), witnesses and judges (the “queen of the south” [12:42]), examples in parables and teaching (the woman who hides leaven [13:33]; the levirate widow [22:23–33]; wise and foolish virgins [25:1–13]), participants in miracles (14:21; 15:38), mothers to be honored and supported (15:4–5), followers to be instructed (the mother of the sons of Zebedee [20:20–23]), accusers who call disciples to account (the high priest’s servant [26:69]), seekers of justice (Pilate’s wife [27:19]), followers and patrons (women at the cross [27:55–56]), and witnesses to the resurrection (28:1–10). Women are the first to worship the resurrected Jesus (28:9), and both an angel and Jesus himself commission women to proclaim the resurrection. However, Matthew has not designed an egalitarian community. Jesus appoints no women among the Twelve and locates no woman as “judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (19:28; see Luke 22:30); no women are present at the transfiguration, the Last Supper, or Gethsemane. Along with epitomizing service, women also subvert justice (Herodias and her daughter [14:1–12]). Women are both among Jesus’ followers, and among those who resist his teachings.

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Comment Genealogy and Nativity (Matt. 1:1–25) Beginning with a genealogy (biblos geneseōs, see LXX Gen. 2:4; 5:1), Matthew emphasizes Jesus’ Hebrew (“son of Abraham”) and royal (“son of David”) lineage. Within the list of ancestors are the names of five women: Tamar, taken by her father-in-law Judah to be a prostitute (Gen. 38:15); Rahab the Canaanite prostitute (Josh. 2:1) who protects the Israelite spies; Ruth the Moabite widow (see Gen. 19:30–38), whom Boaz marries after their potentially compromising meeting on the threshing floor (Ruth 3); the “wife of Uriah,” Bathsheba, who commits adultery with David (2 Sam. 11); and Mary, pregnant before her marriage to her betrothed, Joseph (Matt. 1:18). These women are not sinners (see Matt. 1:21) as some early church fathers suggested; were “sin” the genealogy’s concern, then many of the men listed would be better candidates. Moreover, other sources from this period, both Jewish and Christian, do not regard these women as sinners. It is also unlikely that their mention serves to combat charges of Jesus’ illegitimate birth, both since such charges postdate the Gospel and since the presence of these women lacks exculpatory function: to the contrary, the reference to the “wife of Uriah” (when Solomon is conceived, Bathsheba is legally David’s wife) could reinforce a charge of illegitimacy. More likely, the references to the women indicate, first, that the divine plan moves in ways that contravene traditional family values. Second, Rahab and Ruth were Gentiles who affiliated with Israel. Some early Jewish sources also regard Tamar as a Gentile, and Uriah the Hittite, whom Matthew explicitly mentions, was Gentile. Therefore the references may also foreshadow Matthew’s Gentile mission. However, Jewish tradition considers Rahab and Ruth proselytes, and it generally views Tamar and Bathsheba as Hebrews. Nor can Gentile association explain Mary’s presence. Third, the women model Matthew’s concern for “higher righteousness.” Judah acknowledges that Tamar “is more in the right” (Gen. 38:26 LXX; the Greek term is from the same root as Matthew’s term for “righteousness”) than he is. Rahab not only “hid the messengers whom Joshua sent to spy out Jericho” (Josh. 6:25);

she also recognizes the power of Israel’s God (2:9–11) and pleads with the spies on behalf of her family (Josh. 2:12–14). Both early Jewish and early Christian (see Heb. 11:31; Jas. 2:25) texts praise her hospitality and obedience. Ruth shows loyalty to her mother-in-law Naomi, and she also prods Boaz to act on her behalf. So too Uriah—unlike David—displays fidelity to his commission and his fellow soldiers. Some commentators regard the stories of Rahab and Ruth as encouraging women to be loyal to Israel’s God rather their own, and so as complicit in colonialist propaganda. In some present-day settings, Ruth’s fidelity to Naomi becomes the cultural warrant for mothers-inlaw to control their sons’ wives. All texts are open to multiple interpretations, and many interpretations reveal potential dangers. Yet we might treat our sources with generosity, rather than presume a pernicious agenda. For example, all these women and Uriah choose an Israelite affiliation, a choice that Matthew’s Gospel, with its interest in making disciples of all Gentiles/nations (28:19), commends. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba/Uriah share two other commonalities consistent with Matthean themes. First, each—from a relatively powerless position—seeks justice not through violence but through cleverness. Judah the patriarch, the king of Jericho (Josh. 2:2–3), Boaz, and David all had the power to act, and all either shirked responsibility or exploited others. Second, the genealogy highlights women removed from traditional domestic arrangements: a levirate widow returned to her father’s home; an apparently unmarried prostitute with responsibilities for parents and siblings; two widows. These women represent the socially vulnerable, and at the same time Matthew, following the Scriptures of Israel, empowers them. The story of Mary and Joseph continues several of these themes. Unlike Luke, who emphasizes the actions of Elizabeth and Mary, Matthew depicts Mary as passive: she “had been engaged” and “was found to be with child” (1:18); Joseph “took her as his wife” (1:24). Mary’s passivity may serve to undercut the privileged position she will acquire by being Jesus’ mother; it also focuses attention on Joseph, who epitomizes Matthean family values.

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Joseph first resolves to divorce Mary quietly, apparently to prevent her being charged with adultery or assumed to be a rape victim. People would presume the child was his (see 13:55). His accepting Mary and naming the child (see 1:21) makes him Jesus’ legal father. He not only cares for this new family, but also turns his life upside down for them: he moves to Egypt, then relocates from Bethlehem of Judea to Nazareth in Galilee, on their behalf. Matthew’s genealogy records “Jacob the father of Joseph” (1:16; Luke 3:23 offers “Joseph son of Heli”; none of the names following Zerubbabel [Matt. 1:13] can be located in Jewish records), and the Matthean Joseph both dreams (1:20; 2:13, 19) and travels to Egypt (2:14); the references evoke the Joseph of Genesis, who is accused by his master’s wife of seduction (Gen. 39) but displays higher righteousness and rescues his family by relocating them to Egypt. Although Joseph predominates in Matthew’s nativity story, feminine images encircle Jesus’ conception and birth. Mary conceives by the “Holy Spirit,” a grammatically neuter phrase in Greek but feminine in Semitic languages. The Spirit will acknowledge Jesus’ heavenly approbation (3:16–17), serve as the source of his powers (12:28), and be the litmus for salvation (12:32). The combination of the feminine Spirit and Jesus’ lack of a human father (the passive “was born” [1:16]) continues the theme of restructuring the family to decrease paternal importance. Matthew explains the virginal conception (the “virgin birth,” in which Mary remains a virgin pre-partum, in partu, and post-partum, begins with the second-century Protevangelium of James) as the fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14. Jewish writings offer no parallels to the Messiah being conceived in this manner. The Hebrew of Isaiah states simply that a “young woman” (almah) is pregnant. The Septuagint, which Matthew follows, translates almah as parthenos, which can mean “virgin” (cf. the Parthenon, the temple of the virgin goddess Athena) or “young, unmarried woman.” In Genesis 34:3 (LXX), Shechem, who has just had intercourse with Dinah, refers to her as a parthenos. Matthew likely intended the translation “virgin,” which is what subsequent Christian interpreters understood. That the child “is from the Holy Spirit” (1:20) suggests a miracle, not rape or seduction.

According to Matthew 1:25, Mary maintained her virginity “until she had borne a son.” Matthew 12:46–47 mentions Jesus’ “brothers”; 13:56 mentions “sisters”; the Gospel provides no detail for determining if they are younger siblings, Joseph’s children by a previous marriage, or cousins.

The Infancy Narrative (Matt. 2:1–23) The genealogy’s list of kings includes David the adulterer and murderer, Solomon the apostate, Rehoboam the despot, and Manasseh the sinner, hardly representatives of righteous rule. The concern with political evil becomes explicit in chapter 2, which contrasts “King Herod . . . and all Jerusalem” (2:3) with the oppressed, the displaced, and the faithful: Joseph, Mary and the child, the magi, the families of Bethlehem. The story is not about “evil Jews” (Herod and Jerusalem) vs. “good Gentiles” (the magi), but about earthly power vs. divine power. The magi’s reference to Jesus as “king of the Jews” (2:2) shows the illegitimacy of “King Herod” (2:1, 3; the title “king” repeats three times in three verses for emphasis) and anticipates the servant leadership (20:26; 23:11) Jesus promotes. When the title “King of the Jews” next appears, it refers, ironically, to the suffering Jesus (27:11, 29, 37). Continuing to contrast elite and oppressed, Matthew 2 also recapitulates the story of Moses (Exod. 1:8–2:10). As in the book of Exodus, an evil king orders babies killed, and a special child, a savior adopted by a stepparent from a royal family, survives. Like Moses, Jesus descends to Egypt, enters water (3:13–17), faces temptation in the wilderness (4:1–11), ascends a mountain and delivers instruction (Matt. 5–7, the “Sermon on the Mount”). Whereas Exodus 1 depicts women who subvert Pharaoh’s decrees (Shiphrah and Puah, Pharaoh’s daughter, Moses’ mother and sister), Matthew 2 emphasizes Mary’s maternal role (2:11, 13, 20, 21) and records the voice of Rachel, weeping for her children (2:18, a citation from Jer. 31:15; the original passage goes on to predict Israel’s return from exile). Matthew may also be contrasting Joseph’s care for his family to Herod’s infamous executions of his Hasmonean wife Mariamme, their two children, and numerous others. Archelaus, the brother of Herod Antipas, who reigned “in place of his father” Herod (2:22), was one of the few sons to survive.

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Baptism, Temptation, Commission (Matt. 3:1–4:25) To Pharisees (popular teachers who represent not only Jesus’ opponents but also Jewish leaders who retained their own teachings rather than joined the church) and Sadducees (an elite party with Jerusalem and temple connections) seeking his baptism of repentance, John the Baptist asserts that Abrahamic descent will not save them. Again Matthew redefines the family: “God is able from these stones [Heb. ebanim] to raise up children [Heb. banim] to Abraham” (3:9). Proper action rather than lineage determines soteriological status. Jesus is the “beloved Son” (3:17) who can claim Abraham as his ancestor (1:1) because he submits to baptism though John would have prevented him (3:11). By subordinating himself to John, Jesus models servant leadership. Together, both men fulfill “all righteousness” (3:15). Such obedience to the will of heaven is not easily accomplished, as the temptation narrative indicates. When the devil wants Jesus to prove he is the “Son of God” by performing miracles, Jesus indicates that true sonship consists in following God’s will, as manifest in Torah. To each temptation, Jesus responds by quoting Deuteronomy and thus reinforces the Law’s importance. By portraying Satan as offering Jesus “all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor” (4:8–9)—“kingdoms” and “splendor” signal corruption and exploitation; the world is in Satan’s hands—Matthew reveals the contrast to Jesus’ kingdom of heaven. By dying “as a ransom for many” (20:28), Jesus redeems the world from satanic grasp. Jesus’ willingness to forego comfort (4:3–4), safety (4:5–7), and power (4:8–10) becomes the paradigm for his followers (4:18–22). The two sets of brothers called as the first disciples leave everything (cf. 19:27): boats, nets, and— for the sons of Zebedee—earthly father. Those who follow Jesus will serve others, as the angels came to serve Jesus (4:11); the NRSV’s “waited on him” masks the Greek diakoneō, meaning “to serve,” whence the term “deacon.” The same word describes the service of Peter’s motherin-law (8:15), Jesus’ service (20:28), the service demanded for salvation (25:44), and the service of the women who follow Jesus to the cross (27:55). Ironically, although instructed to “serve,” the Twelve are never described as doing so.

The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5:1–7:29) Beatitudes and Antitheses. Matthew’s Gospel offers five teaching discourses: the Sermon on the Mount (5:1–7:29); missionary instructions (10:1–42); parables concerning the kingdom (Gk. basileia) of heaven (13:1–53); church guidelines (18:1–35); and predictions of the end time (24:1–25:46). The discourses do not necessarily create a new Pentateuch, but they do suggest that the Gospel functioned as a catechetical guide for the early church. The first discourse combines material from Mark, Q, and M, along with editorial glosses to provide a summary of Matthean ethics. The Beatitudes beginning the Sermon (5:3– 12) provide comfort and encourage action. The poor in spirit, who are not necessarily destitute (cf. Luke 6:20), recognize dependence on each other and on God. To be meek is to restrain one’s privilege for the sake of others. To seek righteousness, practice mercy, and make peace are the responsibilities of the faithful, and for Matthew’s Gospel, these actions rather than christological confession are paramount. The rewards are not spiritualized abstractions but concrete desiderata. The promise that the meek will inherit “the earth” (5:5) draws upon Psalm 37:9, 11, 22, 29, 34 (cf. Tob. 4:12); Jesus’ original audience would have heard a reference not to the earth in general, but specifically to the land of Israel; the beatitude evokes the promises of the land to the patriarchs, even as it recognizes that the land, in the hands of Rome and its client kings, also cries for justice. Whether Matthew’s Gospel, which does not revoke the promises to Israel but rather extends the mission to the Gentiles, anticipates this specific promise to Israel, along with that of the ingathering of Jews in the Diaspora (cf. 8:11) as coming to fruition, whether the text spiritualizes the promises, or whether it reassigns them to the church, remains debated. The disciples’ ability to conform their actions to these priorities, even if persecuted “for righteousness’ sake” (5:10), makes them divine witnesses. These disciples—not just Jesus—are the “light of the world” (5:14, cf. John 8:12; 9:5). The so-called “antitheses” that follow (5:21– 48) are not opposing biblical Law (Torah). To the contrary, Jesus insists that Torah be kept (5:17–18), and a few of the antitheses are not found in Torah: for example, there is no

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command to “hate one’s enemy” (5:43). In most cases, Jesus does not oppose the earlier teaching but rather extends it (see discussion of higher righteousness above). Following his understanding of Torah creates “children of your Father in heaven” (5:45). In broader Greek-speaking society, “adultery” (Gk. moicheia) connoted illicit intercourse with “respectable women” and thus indicated a violation of their honor; it did not apply to relations with slaves, prostitutes (pornai), or courtesans (hetairai). Matthew, following the view in Second Temple Judaism that any extramarital sexual relationship was sinful, extends the definition of moicheia from the physical act to the lust that leads to it (5:27–32; cf. 19:2–12) and to remarriage after divorce. The extension of the law against adultery to include lust suggests that no one should be regarded as a sex object. The burden is placed on the man: women are not held to be responsible for enticing men into sexual misadventures, but nor are they seen as active initiators of divorce (contrast Mark 10:12). Whereas Mark 10:10–12; Luke 16:18; and 1 Corinthians 7:10–11 forbid divorce, Matthew permits it in cases of porneia (5:32; 19:9). Behind this exception clause is Deuteronomy 24:1, which permits divorce in the case of an “indecency.” However, defining what “unchastity” or “indecency” means remains difficult; the Latin rendering fornication, appearing only in Christian texts, is similarly vague. In Second Temple Jewish texts, porneia ranges from incest (Matthew may be including marriages between forbidden relations, as in Lev. 18:6–18, perhaps those contracted by Gentiles who subsequently joined the church) to adultery to relations with slaves, courtesans, and prostitutes. The prohibition of divorce is not meant to protect Jewish women from being tossed out by their husbands (a common misconception based on select citations from rabbinic sources): Jewish wives were protected from financial loss in the case of divorce by marriage contracts (Heb. ketubah); divorce was socially decried (see Mal. 2:16), and some Jewish authorities restricted the reason for divorce to adultery (discussion in mishnah Gittin). Nor is eliminating the possibility of divorce beneficial to women trapped in broken marriages. Rather, Jesus forbids divorce because it contradicts Genesis 2:24, God’s initial plan. The antitheses concerning the famous “eye for an eye” (5:38), followed by injunctions to

“turn the other” cheek, “give your cloak,” and go “the second mile” (5:39–41), are designed to preclude both vengeance and abjection. Jewish Law understood the talion (Exod. 21:24; Lev. 24:20; Deut. 19:21) as preventing the escalation of violence; rabbinic teaching insists that the law cannot be taken literally, because no two limbs are alike. Rather, it mandates financial compensation for physical damage, pain, loss of work, medical and other expenses, and embarrassment (mishnah Baba Kamma 8:1).

The Lord’s Prayer (Matt. 6:9–13). The address “father in heaven” (6:9; see also 5:16, 45, 48; 6:1, 15, 18, 26, 32, and so on) can prove difficult for readers who suffered abuse at the hands of their fathers or who chafe at patriarchal language. Perhaps, however, the address “father” can function to show the beneficent role fathers in antiquity did play. Although the false stereotype of Jewish fathers as distant and dismissive of women and children is still occasionally heard, Matthew presents fathers as showing love for their children by protecting them (Joseph), beseeching Jesus’ help (9:18; 17:15), and providing them what they need (7:9–10). The phrase “father in heaven” may have political resonances. The emperor Augustus claimed the title “father” (along with “god,” “son of god,” and “savior”); although Tiberius, emperor at the time of Jesus, rejected the title, it had already gained political prominence. By speaking of a “father in heaven” or “heavenly father,” Matthew may be making a political statement: the ultimate authority is not the human emperor. The expression “kingdom of heaven” is also off-putting to some readers, who would prefer a less patriarchal or androcentric term. Options include basileia, Greek for “kingdom,” which is feminine, the “realm” of heaven, and even the neologism “kin-dom.” However, “kingdom,” like “Father,” might prove helpful by setting up an alternative to the present systems. Healings (Matt. 8:1–9:38) Chapters 8 and 9 consist of ten miracle stories and several controversy accounts. In the original version of this commentary, I suggested that Matthew focused on “those who are outcasts of or marginal participants in the Jewish cultic establishment— lepers (8:1–4), Gentiles

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(8:5–13), women (8:14–15), demoniacs (8:16, 28–34; 9:32), tax collectors (9:9–13), sinners (9:11–13), the cultically impure (9:20–22), and even the dead (9:23–26).” Recent study requires reformulation of this description. The language of “marginal” or “outcast” does not fit the Gospel or the social context it represents. Gentiles are not marginal figures in Matthew’s narrative: the magi, the centurion, Pilate and his wife, and the people to be evangelized (28:19) are hardly outcast or marginal. Indeed, Jews welcomed Gentiles in synagogues and in the Jerusalem temple. Both external literary and archaeological evidence and the Gospels themselves demonstrate that women were neither marginal nor outcast: although early Judaism as well as the broader Mediterranean world was both patriarchal and androcentric, women nevertheless owned their own homes, had access to their own funds, had freedom of travel, attended synagogue gatherings, and worshiped in the Jerusalem temple. Demoniacs are not cast out; rather, they, like tax collectors and sinners, have removed themselves from the common social welfare. The ritually impure, such as the man with leprosy, the hemorrhaging woman, and the dead daughter, are also not “cast out”; their problem is not sin but illness or death. By touching them, or allowing them to touch him, Jesus violates no purity law or cultural taboo; to the contrary, he heals bodies. Moreover, his command to the man cured of leprosy indicates the preservation of Mosaic Law: the healed man’s reincorporation into society requires that the priest proclaim him cured, and Jesus insists as well that he offer the appropriate sacrifice (see Lev. 14:2–32). To speak of “outcasts” requires asking, cast out from what, and cast out by whom? To speak of the “marginal” requires asking, marginal to what? Both terms typically serve to portray Judaism as an elitist, uncompassionate system over against the church. Such classifications are neither historically warranted nor theologically valid. The better understanding of Matthew 8–9 is in terms of inclusivity: Jesus encounters a range of individuals, poor and rich, male and female, healthy and ill, sinners and saints, those with strong support networks and those depicted as on their own. The full complement of supplicants provides Matthew another fulfillment citation (8:17, quoting Isa. 53:4); for Matthew, Jesus’ healings and not his death make him Isaiah’s “suffering servant.”

The account of Peter’s mother-in-law (8:14–15; cf. Mark 1:29–31; Luke 4:38–39) is the Gospel’s only healing wherein Jesus takes the initiative, and the woman literally rises to this occasion: getting up from her bed, she “serves” (diakonei, 8:15) Jesus. Were her action to have ecclesiastical connotations, Matthew has depicted the church’s first deacon. While her action can be read as reinforcing domestic gender roles, it can also be seen as following the angels (4:11), setting the standard for ecclesial behavior (25:44), and specifically valuing women’s labor. That Peter had a mother-inlaw also indicates that he had a wife (see 1 Cor. 9:5). Peter’s willingness to give up his family for Jesus’ sake is recalled in 10:37–39; 19:27–30. An abbreviation of Mark 5:21–43 (cf. Luke 8:40–56), Matthew 9:18–26 conjoins the accounts of a hemorrhaging woman and a dead child. Recalling the Gentile centurion of 8:5–13 and anticipating the Canaanite mother of 15:21–28, the Jewish father wants his child to live. And the hemorrhaging woman, like Peter’s mother-in-law, manifests faith in action. She approaches Jesus, and he in turn heals her. Again, there is no violation of any purity laws or taboos. Since hands do not convey impurity (see Lev. 15:25–33), the woman has not made Jesus ritually unclean. Further, Matthew highlights his adherence to Torah by noting that the woman touched the “fringe” of his cloak (9:20– 21; cf. 14:36; see Num. 15:38). To be celebrated in these accounts are the father’s love manifest in his humility before Jesus, the woman’s courage and initiative in approaching Jesus, and Jesus’ restoring of two women to life and health and, yes, purity.

Disruption of Families (Matt. 10:21, 34–39; see also Matt. 12:46–50; 19:29–30) Having presented Jesus’ mission to serve, heal, and teach, the evangelist adds missionary instruction (10:1–42) to those who would continue this ministry. The discourse is addressed to the twelve apostles, but the instructions are programmatic for missionaries connected to Matthew’s church. Whether Matthew expected such missionaries to be accompanied by spouses, or to include women (cf. Priscilla and Aquila, Junia and Andronicus in Rom. 16:3, 7) is unknown. Their ministry will bring healing, but it will also create domestic discord. Because all

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relationships are to be subordinated to loyalty to Jesus (10:38–39), the church’s proclamation will set “a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-inlaw” (10:35; see Mic. 7:6); “brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death” (10:21). Discussion of the true family continues in 12:46–50 (cf. 13:54–58; 15:4–7; 19:19). Decreasing the harshness of Mark 3:31–35 (cf. Luke 8:19–21), Matthew insists that biological relationships are to be replaced by new mothers, brothers, sisters (12:46–50): the men and women who do the Father’s will. The only “father” is the one in heaven. Matthew 8:21–22 depicts a would-be disciple who asks, “Lord, first let me go and bury my father.” Jesus responds, “Follow me, and let the dead bury their own dead.” For those in the inner circle, the biological family has been replaced. These instructions do not mean, however, that the earthly family is to be slighted. Matthew 15:4–7 and 19:19 assert, perhaps particularly to those who are not yet members of Jesus’ inner, itinerant group, that one must honor and indeed provide financially for both father and mother; the presence of his mother-in-law in his home shows Peter’s fulfilling of this Jewish practice.

Wisdom Sayings (Matt. 11:16–30) The comment that Wisdom (Gk. sophia) is “justified [or, “vindicated”] by her deeds” (11:19; cf. Luke 7:35) could, but need not, indicate leadership roles of women in Matthean churches. The verse rather stresses the connection between Jesus, the manifestation of the Divine on earth (see 1 Cor. 1:21, 24, 30), and personified Wisdom, the traditional image of the divine presence (see Job 28; Prov. 8–9; Sir. 24; Wisd. Sol. 7–8). In 11:25–30, Jesus assumes Wisdom’s roles: mediating knowledge, demonstrating intimacy with the Deity, providing comfort. Readers may choose to see Jesus as thereby embodying the feminine presence of the Divine, or co-opting it. Consistent with other Q material that often pairs male and female figures (e.g., Matt. 24:41), the next saying about a woman (12:42; cf. Luke 11:31) parallels a saying concerning men: the inhabitants of Nineveh. The “queen of the South,” who is to be identified as the queen of Sheba (1 Kgs. 10:1; 2 Chr. 9:1) is, like each

of the Ninevites, a Gentile who will receive a more favorable final judgment than the scribes and Pharisees who seek a sign of Jesus’ legitimacy. The queen exemplifies Matthew’s agenda: although she has royal authority, she acknowledges greater Wisdom, and she travels to its site, Solomon’s court.

The Parable of the Yeast (Matt. 13:33) By teaching in parables, Jesus assumes Wisdom’s role. The third of seven parables gathered in chapter 13 presents a woman as a main character. Paralleling 13:31–32, the immediately preceding parable of the Mustard Seed, the parable of the Leaven (13:33; one might retitle the parable of the Woman Baker) reflects the sexual division of labor: men work outside and women work inside; men sow and women bake. Here work traditionally associated with women is recognized as valuable. The focus on the woman is even stronger in the noncanonical Gospel of Thomas. Whereas Matthew compares the kingdom to “leaven that a woman took,” Gospel of Thomas 96 compares the “Father’s kingdom” to “a woman who took leaven.” The mention of three measures of flour (cf. Luke 13:21) recalls the amount Sarah kneaded for the heavenly messengers (Gen. 18:6; see also Judg. 6:19; 1 Sam. 1:24; Hos. 7:4), although the Greek terms are not the same. Three measures is approximately a bushel; the bread produced could feed a small village. Perhaps themes of exaggerated hospitality and even pregnancy, given both the connection to Genesis 18:6 and the Roman analogy of women’s bodies to ovens, appear. Present also is a theme of secrecy: the woman does not “mix” the leaven, but “hides” (Gk. kryptō) it; there is something surreptitious about the growth of the kingdom, and there is power in the woman’s facilitating it. Given the occasional negative images of leaven (Exod. 12:15–20; 23:18; 34:25; Lev. 2:11; Matt. 16:5–12; 1 Cor. 5:6–8; Gal. 5:9; but cf. Lev. 7:13–14; 23:17), the author of Matthew might get a rise out of the audience by comparing leaven to the kingdom, but the parable is not about ritual purity. Leaven is not impure (if it were, then Jews would be eating unleavened bread all year long and not just at Passover, there would be no shewbread displayed at the temple, and the woman in the parable would be wasting time and material). Nor does the presence of a woman indicate impurity; women are not

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presumed to be perpetually impure, any more than a story about men presumes the men— who are impure after ejaculating—are impure. What teaching the parable conveys remains an open question: that the meanest of domestic implements, like the mustard seed, can represent the kingdom; that the kingdom grows surreptitiously; that like pregnancy it is mysterious, miraculous, comes with both pain and urgency, and gives new life; that the kingdom pervades and transforms everything it encounters; that hospitality, generosity, and exaggeration are hallmarks of the kingdom; that the parable anticipates the Eucharist; that the kingdom is found not with pearly gates or golden streets, but at the communal oven of a Galilean village, where everyone has enough to eat. It offers a full meal of possibilities.

Rejection in Nazareth (Matt. 13:53–58) At the completion of the parables, Matthew again mentions Jesus’ natal family (cf. 12:46– 50). The comments of those in Nazareth (cf. Mark 6:1–6a) indicate the failure of some to grasp Jesus’ message; thus they fulfill Jesus’ citation of Isaiah 6:9–10 (Matt. 13:14–15). The people question the source of Jesus’ abilities by identifying him as the son of the “builder” (Mark 6:3 makes Jesus himself the builder) and Mary and by mentioning his brothers and sisters. They believe one can be judged by one’s biological family. For Matthew, one is judged by one’s deeds (7:21; 25:31–46).

The Death of the Baptist (Matt. 14:1–12) Interest in true and false families as well as in Jesus’ identity continues in 14:1–12 (cf. Mark 6:14–29; Luke 9:7–9). Herod Antipas regards Jesus not as the builder’s son but as John the Baptist resurrected. According to Matthew, John condemned Herod’s incestuous marriage (Lev. 18:16; 20:21) to Herodias (a granddaughter of Herod the Great and Mariamme; sister of Agrippa I [see Acts 12:1, 20–23]), and so Herod imprisoned him. Josephus suggests the imprisonment and execution were preemptive strikes serving to prevent John from leading the people into revolt (Ant. 18:5). Herodias’s daughter (the Gospels do not name her; Josephus identifies her as Salome) dances for Herod’s birthday, and he is so pleased with her performance that he promises her

“whatever she might ask” (14:7; see Esth. 5:3, 6; 7:2 for similarly rash royal promises). The ill-fated dance may be contrasted with the wisdom sayings in 11:17, where the children refuse to dance. While the daughter requests and receives the Baptist’s head on a plate, and so is served a perverse meal, the refusal of the children is directly linked to the rejection of the Baptist, who “came neither eating nor drinking” (11:18). As Wisdom is vindicated/justified (Gk. dikaiothē) by her deeds (11:19; Luke 7:35 reads “children”), so Herodias, who prompts her daughter’s request and who finally receives the head, is condemned by hers. The story indicates the political influence women could wield and thus foreshadows the unsuccessful attempt by Pilate’s wife to rescue the righteous (dikaios) Jesus (27:19). The entry of women, indeed of anyone, into secular politics cannot for Matthew provide either social or spiritual redemption.

Feeding and Eating (Matt. 14:13–15:20; 15:32–38) The perverse image of John’s head on a dish is replaced by the feeding of the five thousand (14:13–21); the meal of horror yields to the foreshadowing of the messianic banquet. Not included among the five thousand and the four thousand men, but mentioned “in addition” to them (14:21; 15:38b), the women and children indicate both Matthew’s androcentric perspective and the appeal of Jesus’ message. References to feeding, women, and children again combine in 15:1–20, the discussion of the oral tradition. Like Jesus, the Pharisees interpreted Torah in order to determine how best to live the life heaven desired. Responding to the Pharisees’ complaints against his disciples, Jesus suggests that the leaders are themselves unfaithful. While they are commanded to honor father and mother (Exod. 20:12; Deut. 5:16) and not to speak evil of them (Exod. 21:17; Lev. 20:9), they permit the dedication of property to the temple and so remove its potential to support fathers (15:5b). The reference to the mother in this verse is not included in many early manuscripts, perhaps to create better parallelism with the mention of the Deity.

Canaanite Mother (Matt. 15:21–28) During his ministry, Jesus limits his mission and message to the house of Israel (see

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10:5b–6). Nevertheless, he does perform healings for two Gentiles: the Canaanite woman of 15:21–28 and the centurion of 8:5–13. These healings—the only two explicitly concerning Gentiles and accomplished from a distance— indicate that Gentile supplicants are worthy of Jesus’ beneficence and foreshadow the Great Commission. Yet the woman is also comparable to other parents who seek healings for their children: not only the ruler in 9:18 and the father of the epileptic boy in 17:15, but also King Jereboam’s wife (1 Kgs. 14:1–14), the “Great Woman” of Shunem (2 Kgs. 4:18–37), and the widow of Zarephath (1 Kgs. 17:17–18). The story of a subordinate person (foreigner, widow, poor) who begs a favor from, but is initially rebuffed by, a person in authority, but who achieves what is needed by a clever saying or action was a well-known convention (Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.27; Dio, Roman History 69.6.3; b. Baba Batra 8a) Unlike Mark’s account (7:24–30), Matthew’s does not present Jesus entering Tyre and Sidon; rather, the woman and Jesus meet on the border: he “goes toward” the district and she “comes out.” Mark identifies the woman as a “Greek (Hellēnis), a Syro-Phoenician by birth” (7:26); in Matthew, she is a Canaanite, nameless in the Gospel, as are most figures needing healing. Church tradition calls her Justa. Her presence recalls the original struggle between the Hebrews and the indigenous population of the land, and it also recollects the Canaanite women of the genealogy: Rahab and (probably) Tamar. Just as these women succeeded despite the initial hesitance of the men with whom they are paired, readers know that the Canaanite will receive her request. Whereas Mark’s version records no titles, the Canaanite woman addresses Jesus as “Son of David” (15:22b; cf. 9:27; 20:30) as well as “Lord” (Gk. Kyrios; three times) and thereby recalls the monarchy in the genealogy, associates herself with the Jewish crowds who acclaim Jesus (21:9, 15), and distances herself from the leaders who will not (22:41–45). But Jesus first ignores her. Whether the disciples’ response, “Send her away” (15:23), means “loose her” (that is, “perform the exorcism”) or simply “throw her out” depends on whether one wants to view the disciples as intercessors. Still hesitating, Jesus proclaims his mission to Israel (15:24). The woman then kneels before him: her position may be seen as one of humility; it can

also be read as her holding her ground. “Lord, help me,” she asks; the phrase evokes the Psalms (Pss. 6:3; 9:14; 26:7, etc.). The claim that Jesus’ response, “It is not fair to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs,” was expressed with a smile on his lips is apologetic. Nor does the point that the term for “dogs” (Gk. kynaria) really means “puppies” or “household dogs” soften the response (“little bitch” is no nicer than “bitch”). The designation was not a Jewish term for Gentiles; it was a standard insult, found in Euripides, Aristotle, Quintillian, and others (see also 7:6; Phil. 3:2; Rev. 22:15). The woman responds to Jesus not with violence or abjection, but by accepting the insult and still insisting on her rights; she models the instructions in 5:39–41: cleverness, coupled with faith, gains her request. Some readers understand the woman as the (postcolonial) Christian who must subjugate herself and her culture to obtain the West’s benefits. For others, the story shows Jesus moving beyond the ideology of chosenness, to embrace (Christian) universalism. However, chosenness need not be an oppressive ideology: it is precisely that ideology that helps groups persevere despite persecution, and it is how the church saw itself (see, e.g., 1 Pet. 2:9). Also, Jesus does not insist that the woman become Jewish to receive the healing. This is an ironic difference from the so-called universalism of those claiming salvation only through Jesus. Rather than view the narrative as hopelessly colonial or employ it to advance a supersessionist agenda, we might see the woman as another Rahab or Ruth: she recognizes her salvation is with Israel’s representative, yet she retains her Canaanite identification; she proves more faithful than insiders (the spies in Jericho; the disciples); and she does what she must to save her family.

The Church as a New Family (Matt. 16:13–20; 18:1–35; 20:20-28) Punning on the nickname “Peter,” meaning “rock,” Matthew defines the community as an ekklēsia (“church”), an institution apart from the temple or synagogue (16:13–20). As the ecclesial discourse (18:1–35) indicates, life within this community is to be characterized by humility, forgiveness, and service. Matthew 18:1–5 presents little children (cf. 11:25; 19:13– 15; 21:16) as the community’s ideal members. The point is not that children were the lowest of

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the low; to the contrary, they were, as the healing narratives in the Gospel show, treasured family members. Rather, the child represents the dependent, the trusting, and the powerless. All is not harmonious in the ekklēsia, however, for there is a struggle for supremacy among the disciples. In Mark 10:35–45 (cf. Luke 22:24–27), James and John request positions of honor for themselves; in Matthew their mother requests, “Declare that these two sons of mine will sit, one at your right hand and one at your left, in your kingdom” (20:21). Jesus repudiates the woman by responding directly to the disciples, and he repudiates her agenda by emphasizing service, not supremacy (20:25– 28). Ironically, those on his right and left hands will be those crucified beside him (27:38). The mother reappears at the cross (27:56) but not at the tomb (28:1); her absence is not explained, although perhaps she accompanied her sons back to Galilee (28:16).

Triumphal Entry (Matt. 21:1–11) Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is accompanied by political images such as allusions to David, but it also presents subtle feminine images, from the female donkey that carries Jesus, to quotations from Zechariah 9:9 and Isaiah 62:11 concerning “daughter Zion” (21:5). Jesus enters as a king, but a humble one. The familial language counterbalances the royal acclamation: Jesus’ mission is to create a new family of heaven, not an earthly kingdom.

Tax Collectors and Prostitutes (Matt. 21:31) Jews regarded tax collectors, agents of Rome’s occupation government in Judea, as traitors. Prostitution was dishonorable at best, sinful at worst (see Lev. 19:29; Deut. 23:17–18; Prov. 2:16–22; 29:3). Yet these individuals heed Jesus’ message. Unlike the “chief priests and elders” (21:23) secure in their status, the tax collectors and prostitutes, who accepted the Baptist’s message (21:32), will be welcomed into the kingdom.

The Levirate Widow (Matt. 22:23–33) Within Jerusalem, conflicts with Pharisees fade while Sadducees and high priests become the antagonists. Amid such controversies as the concern for paying taxes (22:15–22), the question of the great commandment (22:34–40),

and the issue of the Christ’s identity (22:41–46), Matthew includes the Sadducees’ question about levirate marriage at the resurrection (cf. Mark 12:18–27; Luke 20:27–40). Based on Deuteronomy 25:5, levirate marriage (from levir, Latin for brother-in-law) maintains that childless widows should marry their husband’s brother in order to bear a child to carry the dead husband’s name and inherit his estate. The Sadducees’ inquiry is not an innocent quest for theological clarification. Since Sadducees do not believe in resurrection, the question is designed to trick Jesus into either condoning a woman’s having multiple husbands or denying the afterlife. Jesus overcomes the question by explaining its incorrect premise: resurrected individuals are like angels and therefore are not married (22:31–33). Marriage, with its sexual component, is appropriate to this world but not to resurrected life. Gender roles (“married and given in marriage” [22:30]) define earthly relationships only. While divorce is not permitted except under specific circumstances, the realm of heaven offers a life beyond marriage. The love one has for one’s spouse extends to all within the kingdom. Jesus’ comment to the Sadducees may be compared to his statement about eunuchs (19:12). Upon the disciples’ observation that, without the possibility of divorce, marriage is not expedient, Jesus speaks of those who make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven. Individuals of special charism can forswear sexual relationships to devote themselves to spiritual concerns (cf. 1 Cor. 7:5–7).

Lament for Jerusalem (Matt. 23:37–39) Similar to the use of the wisdom metaphor in 11:19, in Matthew 23:37 (cf. Luke 13:34) Jesus compares himself to a mother hen. In the context of the chapter’s exaggerated invectives against Pharisaic hypocrisy and elitism, the feminine metaphor of maternal gentleness is apt. Moreover, the extended metaphor casts Jesus in the role of public mourner, a role traditionally assigned to women (cf. 28:1), and connects him to Rachel (2:18). Both matriarch and Messiah mourn their doomed children.

End of the Age (Matt. 24:1–51) Maternal imagery continues into the fifth discourse. Signs of destruction are “birth pangs”

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(24:8); the metaphor graphically indicates the inevitability as well as the increasing intensity associated with the end time. Matthew 24:19 (cf. Mark 13:17–18; Luke 21:23) addresses the problems faced by pregnant women and nursing mothers: they too undergo the tribulation in fleeing and finding refuge, and they have added burdens unique to women. Perhaps Matthew’s indication of the difficulties facing these women serves to deemphasize a focus on childbearing; thus it reinforces the praise of eunuchs (19:12). That women are included in all eschatological facets is further noted in the Q saying, “Two men will be in the field; one is taken and one is left. Two women will be grinding at the mill; one is taken and one is left” (24:40–41 RSV; cf. Luke 17:34–35). The parallelism suggests both that those in Matthew’s community will continue normal pursuits as they wait for the eschaton and that these pursuits continue through a gendered division of labor.

The Ten Virgins (Matt. 25:1–13) Unique to Matthew, the parable of the Ten “Bridesmaids” (NRSV; literally, “virgins”; Gk. parthenoi) continues the Gospel’s concern for women at the final judgment (cf. 24:19, 41). The women may be wedding guests or, more likely, servants waiting for the groom to return to his home. This latter interpretation draws a connection to the immediately preceding parable of the Good Servant (24:45–51) and so retains the evangelist’s interest in paralleling stories about men and women. In either case, evident is the insistence that women bear responsibility for their own salvation. Other characteristics of the parable pose particular problems regarding women’s roles. First, the bride is absent in the better early manuscripts. Second, the women lack solidarity: those with oil refuse to help those without, in contradiction to the prohibition against turning away anyone who asks (5:42). However, were they to share their oil, all eventually would lack light. The third problem is that all fall asleep (25:5), an act condemned implicitly in 25:13 (cf. 26:40–41, 43, 45). Matthew’s “bridegroom” thus presents a very problematic wedding: he arrives late; he lacks a bride; he separates rather than unites individuals; again, familial bonds, and even familial rituals, are disrupted in light of the kingdom.

The parable is consistent with the major Matthean themes of doing one’s own good works, dedicating one’s life to Jesus, and preparing for the end time. Because the women are to light the way for the bridegroom, they fulfill both the demand for service and the command that their light should “shine before others, so that they may see your good works” (5:16). That they apparently have their own funds to purchase the oil suggests financial independence. The good works, described in 25:31–46, consist of service to the poor, imprisoned, and hungry. Jesus identifies himself with such people; to serve them means to serve him and so perform the will of heaven. Both men and women bear the responsibility for complying.

Passion Narrative (Matt. 26:1–27:66) Paralleling Mark 14:3–9 and John 12:1–8, Matthew 26:6–13 (cf. Luke 7:36–50) describes Jesus’ anointing. The action has a twofold meaning: Jesus equates it with the rituals accompanying burial (26:12) and so acknowledges women’s religious deed. But anointing the head also connotes royal commission, and thus the woman is cast in the role of priest and/or prophet. Like the other evangelists, Matthew emphasizes the ointment’s expense. The economic notice is consistent with the identification of Joseph of Arimathea as a “rich man” (27:57) and the beatitude about the “poor in spirit” (5:3) rather than simply the “poor” (cf. Luke 6:20b). The rich are welcome in the church, as long as their wealth is appropriately used in service to others. As in Mark, the Matthean Jesus proclaims that the woman’s prophetic action will be preached universally. As in Mark as well, her name is never recorded. The disciples’ complaint that she has wasted funds that might have been given to the poor contrasts the woman’s true understanding of Jesus’ fate with their focus on earthly—albeit important—matters. The disciples’ lack of true understanding continues throughout the passion narrative, where it is juxtaposed with the depictions of women as aware, sympathetic, and loyal. Her service at Simon’s house contrasts with the Last Supper (26:17–29). As the woman prepares Jesus for burial in a meal setting, Jesus prepares his disciples for his departure. Both scenes also recount the unexpected: the

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woman’s funds aid Jesus rather than the poor; Jesus is betrayed by a disciple. Although absent from the Last Supper and from Gethsemane, women function as foils for the disciples. While Jesus is tried by the high priest, Peter denies him in the courtyard. On two of three occasions, these denials are prompted by women, who recognize Peter as one of the disciples (26:69–75). The women of Jerusalem thus appear to have direct familiarity with Jesus and his followers. Women’s fidelity and awareness continue into the trial before Pilate. Only Matthew (27:19) presents the governor’s wife as interceding on Jesus’ behalf. Like Joseph and the magi, she has been warned in a dream that Jesus is “righteous” (Gk. dikaios; the NRSV’s “innocent” masks the Matthean motif). The “many women” (27:55) at the cross and burial (27:55–61; cf. Mark 15:40–47; Luke 23:49–56; John 19:25b–27) confirm the contrast with the fallible male apostles. Like Peter’s mother-in-law, they offer service (diakonia, 27:55) to Jesus; their roles are those of patrons. Sitting opposite the grave, they hold a vigil rather than, as in Mark, merely observe the place of burial. They may also be contrasted with the guards, who are bribed to say that they slept while the disciples stole the body. As women mediate both a man’s entry into this world by giving birth and, in many traditions, his exit by participating in funerary rites, women frame the life of Jesus: they are present in his genealogy and the story of his birth, and they are the primary witnesses to his death and resurrection.

Easter Witnesses (28.1–10) Seeing the earthquake and the angel, the guards are struck senseless. But the women, guided by the angel, continue to act faithfully. They witness the empty tomb, and they follow the

instructions to report quickly the news of the resurrection. Although they are not included in the reference to “his disciples” (28:7) or mentioned as present at the Great Commission (28:16–20), the angel’s words (28:7) and the meeting with Jesus (28:9–10) indicate their substantive role in the Easter mission. It is Jesus who first greets them, and they are the first to worship him. Matthew records of the Eleven that “some doubted” (28:17), but of the women Matthew reports only their legitimate fear and their joy. These independent, motivated women are both the first witnesses to the resurrection and the first missionaries of the church. Bibliography

Blickenstaff, Marianne. While the Bridegroom Is with Them: Marriage, Family, Gender, and Violence in the Gospel of Matthew. Journal for the Study of the New Testament, Supplement Series 292. London/ New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2005. Carter, Warren. Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2000. Levine, Amy-Jill, with Marianne Blickenstaff, eds. A Feminist Companion to Matthew. Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christin Writings 1. London: T. & T. Clark International, 2001; Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004. Reid, Barbara E. Taking Up the Cross: New Testament Interpretations through Latina and Feminist Eyes. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Wainwright, Elaine M. Shall We Look for Another? A Feminist Reading of the Matthean Jesus. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1998.

Gospel of Mark Elizabeth Struthers Malbon

Introduction Changing Understandings of Mark the Evangelist Mark’s Gospel is anonymous. No claim for authorship is made within the text itself, which dates to about 70 CE, while the name “According to Mark” dates to the second century. Fourth-century historian Eusebius cites second-century presbyter Papias, who asserts that in the first century “Mark became Peter’s interpreter.” Peter is named as one of Jesus’ disciples; a Mark or John Mark is associated with Paul and/or Peter in several New Testament books (Phlm. 24; Acts 12:12, 25; 15:37–39; Col. 4:10; 2 Tim. 4:11; 1 Pet. 5:13). Second-century Christians were not so much interested in the authorship of the Gospels as their authority. Linking a Gospel to the name of an apostle (Matthew, John) or an associate of an apostle (Mark, Luke) was a way to claim that text as foundational for the developing church. Apparently the evangelists (Gospel writers) themselves thought the story was more important than the storytellers. For most hearers and readers through the sixteenth century, the inspiration of the evangelists by the Holy Spirit was more important than the evangelists themselves—just as spiritual meanings were more important than literal ones. In the early fourth century, Augustine, noticing the overlap between Matthew and Mark, concluded that Mark had abbreviated Matthew (a view still held by a few) and thus that Matthew was more important than Mark. Matthew’s Gospel did gain first place in the New Testament canon, with Mark second. With the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century,

Mark gained new importance as the probable source of Matthew and Luke according to the “two-source hypothesis,” along with a hypothetical source of Jesus’ sayings called Q, from Quelle, German for “source.” Although most scholars still hold to the two-source hypothesis, some question the existence of Q, arguing that Matthew used Mark and then Luke relied on both Mark and Matthew. “Markan priority” gave the evangelist Mark new importance as the first one to combine oral traditions about Jesus in the form of a Gospel. Those questing for the “historical Jesus” in the nineteenth century concluded that, since Mark was first written, it must also be most historically accurate—a view seriously questioned today. Mark was thus valued as a “reporter” but not as a creative author—until “redaction (editorial) criticism” of the twentieth century. At that point Mark the evangelist was revalued as the creator of the Gospel genre, and his work was thought to reflect the time of his telling (community situation and theology) as well as the time of his tale (Jesus’ ministry). (See Anderson and Moore, introduction.) Later in the twentieth century, narrative criticism focused particularly on Mark as story—with settings, characters, plot, and rhetoric. Narrative criticism forms the basis of the feminist interpretation offered here.

Historical Background of the Gospel The Gospel according to Mark, Kata Markon, was written in Greek—not the classical Greek of fifth-century Athens but the Greek made

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common among peoples of the eastern Mediterranean by the conquests of Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. When allusions to Scripture appear in Mark, they are related to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, made after Alexander. Traditionally, the Markan Gospel was associated with Rome, largely because of its second-­century association with Peter, who was venerated quite early in Rome, but also because it uses some Latin loan words. However, Latin loan words were common throughout the Greek-speaking east, spreading with the rule of Rome. Roman rule arrived in force in Palestine in 63 BCE, when Judea was subdued by the Roman general Pompey and became a client kingdom. Consideration of events in the Roman Empire leads scholars closer to agreement on the date of Mark—around the time of the Jewish/ Roman war (66–70 CE), perhaps in reaction to the cataclysmic end of the war with the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 under Titus, son of Emperor Vespasian and later emperor himself. Reference to the destruction of the temple is made in Mark 13:2 (cf. 13:14), and some interpreters have seen in Mark’s Gospel as a whole a response to this crisis. The Gospel could have originated in some eastern Mediterranean location directly affected by the war. Arguments have been made for Galilee and Syria. Yet Mark’s location remains as unknown as its author. The Markan text seems to imply a mixed audience of Jews and Gentiles, possibly in the Diaspora (outside the Jewish homeland). On the one hand, familiarity with Scripture is presumed throughout—as would be possible with a Jewish audience or an audience of Gentile “God-fearers” who attended welcoming synagogues. On the other hand, expressions in Aramaic, the spoken language of first-century Jews in Palestine, are translated (5:41; 7:34; 15:34) and certain Jewish customs are explained (7:34)—as if they would be unfamiliar to at least some in the audience. It may be that the audience addressed was mixed in terms of social class as well, including some leaders of a subelite class (not Roman occupiers but persons with some wealth and influence) who were meant to hear certain warnings about leadership at the same time as members of the lower class were to hear promises of health and wellbeing in God’s “realm.” The Greek behind the term “realm” is basileia, often translated

“kingdom,” but it does not have the spatial connotations often given to “kingdom,” and it does not have the male denotation of “king” but refers to “rule” or “ruling” more generally. The term “audience” is used purposefully, because Mark’s Gospel would have been performed by a “reader” for a group of listeners. Firstcentury literacy rates have been estimated at no more than 10 percent. Mark would have been performed all at once, as a dramatic story, probably in less than two hours—not in small segments over a period of weeks.

Hearing Mark’s Story Unfold Mark’s Gospel was written on the basis of oral traditions and oral storytelling that preceded it and was written to be heard. We latterday readers would do well to become more aware of favorite techniques of oral storytelling, techniques that help listening audiences become engaged, stay focused, and make necessary connections. Mark’s narrative rhetoric makes creative use of the present tense to bring the story into the hearers’ presence; of dramatic shifts in characters and locations to underline important teachings; and of repetition—with variation, framing, intercalation (inserting one story into another), and chiasm (symmetrical arrangement of elements) to foreshadow and echo events in the developing plot. Many outlines of Mark’s Gospel have been offered. They are not all compatible because they focus on different elements of a complex story, but most do help us see something that earlier audiences may have heard. An outline is a map; hearing the story is a journey. Here is one possible map for a Markan journey: 1–3: Jesus, God’s realm, and community 4:1–34: Jesus’ powerful words: God’s realm in the present age 4:35–8:26: Jesus’ powerful deeds (for Jews and Gentiles) 8:22–10:52: Jesus and disciples (leaders of the new community) 11–12: Jesus and the established community 13: Jesus’ powerful words: God’s realm in the age to come/passion of the new community 14–16: Jesus’ passion (suffering from Jews and Gentiles) and resurrection

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The first part of the story is centered in and around Galilee (1:1–8:26), the shorter middle section “on the way” to Jerusalem (8:22–10:52), and the final section in Jerusalem (11:1–16:8; a “longer ending,” 16:9–20, was added to the Markan text later, after the writing of Matthew and Luke, as were other alternative endings). Both the first and final sections frame a substantial teaching session of Jesus (Mark 4 and 13). Obviously the middle section is a bridge between the two larger sections, not just geographically but also theologically or ideologically. The Markan Jesus tries to prepare his disciples for transitioning, from witnessing the power of God’s realm in bringing food, health, and wholeness to the powerless, to risking participation in such community in the face of the powerful. Simultaneously, the Markan narrator tries to prepare the audience for the same transition. The central character Jesus interacts with a number of characters and character groups—from demons and unclean spirits to sick and hungry peasants to religious leaders to Roman officials. Women characters are not dominant but do play significant roles and appear at key points in the plot.

Mark’s Good News: Re-visioning Power Mark both reflects the patriarchal culture of its original situation and challenges that culture in important ways. All the major characters are men, many of whom (but not all) are given

names, and they appear in both public and private settings. The women characters are minor in terms of their narrated presence in the plot, most of them (but not all) remain nameless, and they generally (but not always) appear in the private settings of homes. These generalities exhibit the patriarchal world of both author and audience. Earlier feminist interpreters helped make women characters visible and paid special attention to how they challenge their boundaries. But the ancient patriarchal world was hierarchical in multiple dimensions: gender, ethnicity, religious status, economic status, political status, and class, which could combine many of these aspects. Mark challenges many of these hierarchies in the status quo of its day, and more recent feminist interpreters have drawn attention to this larger systemic challenge. In this regard, Mark is seen as really good news to the powerless about a re-visioning of power—and a warning to all, even followers of Jesus, who might be attracted to hierarchical models of power. God’s realm is dramatically portrayed in Mark’s story as making health and wholeness available to all, but especially to those who have the least access to them under the Roman Empire ruling Jewish Palestine: women, children, the poor, the sick, Gentiles. And God’s realm (or kingdom), so Mark’s story adds, challenges and enables persons to join in that re-visioning of power in confronting the kingdoms of men.

Comment God’s Realm Breaking In (Mark 1–3) Jesus and the Realm of God (Mark 1:1–45) Although “According to Mark” was added later, Mark’s Gospel does have a functioning title in 1:1: “The beginning of the good news [gospel] of Jesus Christ, Son of God.” Each term is important. While “Jesus” is a personal, biblical name (a form of Joshua), both “Christ” and “Son of God” are titles. “Christ” is the Greek form of the Hebrew “Messiah,” meaning “anointed one,” one called out for a special task, like a king, priest, or prophet. From the Jewish Scriptures, “Son of God” would be understood as one obedient to God—such as the king, or Israel as a nation, or the righteous individual. In Hellenistic understanding, “Son of God” could

be used for someone with special, even Godlike, capacities, including the emperor himself! Thus for Mark to proclaim Jesus as Son of God is to challenge the Roman Empire, a challenge made even more clear at Jesus’ proclamation of the inbreaking of the realm (or empire) of God. “Gospel” was not the name of the genre Mark was later credited with creating. It meant “good news” and also had imperial connotations, being used in proclamations to refer to the “good news” of the emperor’s appearance, ordinances, or military victories. But Mark uses it, as did Paul before him, to refer to the “good news” of Jesus in two senses: the good news proclaimed by Jesus about God’s realm, and the good news about Jesus’ ministry as a manifestation of the inbreaking of God’s realm for

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the believing community. What is not meant by “gospel” is an objective, historical, or biographical report about Jesus. Mark’s Gospel, rather, paints a portrait of the meaning of Jesus for the community of faith. (In the commentary below, Jesus always means the Markan Jesus.) Perhaps the most curious term in this title is “the beginning.” Mark’s story of Jesus is just the beginning of the good news of God’s realm breaking into history because, according to Mark, that story has not come to an end—it is continued in the life of the believing community. Prepared for the story of Jesus, we hear first a voice from Scripture (identified as Isaiah) that is then actualized in the voice of John the baptizer, “crying out in the wilderness” (1:3). Scripture prepares a way for John, who prepares a way for Jesus. Jesus comes from Nazareth in Galilee to John at the Jordan in Judea to be baptized. As he comes up from the water, a voice from heaven says (to Jesus only?), “You are my Son.” God confirms the title’s proclamation of Jesus as Son of God. To what task will Jesus be obedient? Apparently it will be a hard task, for “immediately” the Holy Spirit, which had just descended into (translating literally) him, “drove him out into the wilderness” (1:12). Israel was in the wilderness being tested (in the sense of prepared) by God for forty years during the exodus; not everyone passed the test. Jesus was in the wilderness for forty days being tested/prepared by God. He seems to be ready because he is not eaten up by the wild beasts but rather “served”/“ministered to” by angels, the messengers of God. Jesus too will bear a message from God and serve as God’s agent. Jesus returns to Galilee “proclaiming the good news of God, and saying, ‘The time [kairos] is fulfilled, and the kingdom [or realm] of God has come near; repent, and believe in the good news” (1:14–15). God is no longer distant, though the oppression of the Roman Empire may make it seem that way. God has come near; turn to that good news and trust it. This good news must be shared, and others are needed to help. Jesus calls four Galilean fishermen to follow him and “fish for people” (1:17). So, with a small team forming, Jesus enters the synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath and takes his turn teaching, quite ordinary for a Jewish man. But the result is extraordinary: people are astounded because “he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes” (1:22), traditional authorities learned in Scripture.

Equally astounding, Jesus casts out an unclean spirit who cries out to him in the synagogue through the person it has overpowered. The power of unclean spirits was linked to the power of Satan for evil. Here Satan’s power is challenged by God’s power through God’s agent Jesus. The people’s response to this exorcism ties it to his astounding teaching: “What is this? A new teaching—with authority!” (1:27). Jesus’ authority or power (Gk. exousia can mean either) in both teaching and exorcising demonstrates that God really has come near. The audience hears further evidence in the healing of Simon’s mother-in-law, with this healing of a woman in private balancing the preceding healing of a man in public. God’s power for wholeness knows no gender boundaries. Then this unnamed woman “serves”/“ministers to” Jesus, just as the angels had done in the wilderness. Jesus moves throughout Galilee, preaching everywhere and healing many. When Jesus heals a leper, he directs him to follow the traditional rules for being declared “clean” by the priests and making an offering to God. Like biblical prophets before him, Jesus proclaims to his own the renewed nearness of God, but the message of prophets is never easy for all to hear. Jesus and the Traditional Community (Mark 2:1–3:6) Four of the five stories that follow begin, as stories before them did, as stories of healings (paralytic; man with a withered hand), or calling disciples (Levi the toll collector), or events that occur on the Sabbath (plucking grain; withered hand). These stories continue to demonstrate the presence of God’s realm, generously offering forgiveness of sin (not connected to Jesus’ death in Mark) and health and wholeness, even to the despised and outcast. The middle story begins with a question to Jesus about why his disciples are not fasting. But all five stories end in controversy between Jesus and the leaders of his community. The “scribes” and “Pharisees” depicted as characters are, or course, under the power of the Roman Empire, so their authority is limited. At the end of the five stories, the “Pharisees” go out and conspire with “the Herodians” on how to destroy Jesus (3:6). Scholars know little about “the Herodians,” but Herod exercised limited authority under Roman overlordship. It is good to remember that all these groups are characters in Mark’s story, not objectively described actual

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Jewish groups in the first century—much less ciphers for all Jews in all centuries! Since Jesus and his disciples are just as Jewish as the scribes and Pharisees, the controversies are an internal debate, a phenomenon to which Jewish tradition has long shown considerable openness. The term “Son of Man” (NRSV 2:10, 28) occurs in stories one and four and would be more accurately translated “Son of Humanity” because the term translated “man” is not the Greek word for a male (anēr) but for a human being (anthrōpos), from which we derive our word “anthropology.” Only Jesus employs this intriguing term. The five stories are chiastically, or symmetrically, arranged. Chiasm comes from the Greek letter chi, our X. In story one Jesus heals useless legs, in story five a useless hand. In between are three stories having to do with eating: eating with sinners, eating instead of fasting, plucking (a form of work) and eating grain on the Sabbath. Thus story three, the one that begins with a question, is at the midpoint of the X, the center of the chiasm. Jesus’ answer there offers three metaphors, all having to do with how the new relates to the old. The wedding guests cannot fast while the new bridegroom is still with them; new cloth is not used to patch an old garment; and new wine is not put into old wineskins. Clearly the bridegroom who will be “taken away” (2:20) in the days to come is Jesus. The bride is not mentioned, but Christian tradition has interpreted it as “the church” (see Eph. 5:21–33). Here the focus is on the sense of sadness and loss that the entire wedding party will experience, the sadness and loss that the conflict of old and new can bring. Jesus and the New Community (Mark 3:7–35) A new section of Mark’s narrative opens with a summary statement of Jesus’ healing and teaching beside the Sea of Galilee, where persons come to him from all the places he will later go. This compact summary closes with the unclean spirits recognizing Jesus as “Son of God” (remember 1:1) and Jesus ordering them “not to make him known” (3:12). Scholars call this recurrent aspect of Mark the “messianic secret,” and various explanations of it have been offered—from the historical and redactional to the rhetorical and existential. One can at least ask what anyone in the story who told all that she or he knew at this point might tell—and

whether that would that be enough to make Jesus’ mission clear. Moving from sea to mountain, Jesus appoints some of his larger group of followers to be “apostles,” those sent out to do what he has been doing, preaching and casting out demons. Twelve men are named, but two narrative signals warn us to take the story more symbolically than historically. The “mountain” brings to mind encounters of Moses and Hebrew prophets with God on mountains. The number twelve brings to mind the twelve tribes of Israel. Although Jesus has more than twelve followers, including women and men, these twelve men function as a symbolic core of a new community of faith. From the mountain Jesus goes “home” (3:19), and two stories are intercalated or intertwined. First, Jesus’ “family” (literally “those around him”) come to restrain him because people were saying, “He had gone out of his mind” (3:21). But before anything happens on that score, Jesus is engaged in a controversy with official Scripture interpreters (“scribes”) who have come from Jerusalem. They question the source of his ability to cast out demons. Jesus’ response is parabolic, suggesting it unlikely that Satan would be casting out Satan, but possible that one even stronger than the “strong man” Satan (that is, God) could indeed be plundering Satan’s house. Jesus also asserts that to confuse God and Satan, good and evil, is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, the one unforgivable sin. Then Jesus’ “mother” and “brothers” come and call to him from outside. It is this reference that leads to the translation “family” in 3:21. Mark does not present this story to give his hearers objective, historical information about Jesus’ relation to his family, but to allow Jesus a teachable moment. Jesus asks, “Who are my mother and my brothers?” Then, “looking at those who sat around him,” Jesus says, “Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother” (3:33–35). Although we frequently think of ourselves as “individuals,” in the world of Jesus and Mark, family would have been the primary social reality. We know that participation in the Jesus movement at the time of the writing of Paul’s letters and the Gospels often strained family relations to the breaking point. When Paul addresses his letters to “brothers and sisters” and Jesus calls family “whoever does the will of God,” the establishment of a new fictive kinship group is grounded. Feminist

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commentators have long noted that Jesus does not mention a father in his list of family members as those who do the will of God. In the first century, the father was the head of the hierarchically structured family, but the new family is not to replicate such hierarchy. The social status quo for women and men is being seriously challenged.

Jesus’ Parables of God’s Realm (Mark 4:1–34) Chapter 4 presents a more extended example of Jesus’ teaching—teaching in parables, colorful little stories that suggest a comparison to think about, to puzzle over. The dominant comparison is of the realm of God and the life of seeds. Although the images in parables are taken from daily life, they are frequently stretched—made into hyperboles—in order to encourage the audience to stretch its imagination toward a deeper understanding of something too important to be reduced to ordinary words. The sower who sows seeds all over the place could hardly expect much of a harvest, but he reaps an unbelievable harvest. The tiny mustard seed basically plants itself, and it grows bushy everywhere. Maybe God’s realm does not look promising at this point; maybe it is not a cedar-of-Lebanon kind of kingdom that the world admires—but look out! A lamp is not lit to be hidden but to give light. “Let anyone with ears to hear listen!” (4:23). Who has ears to hear is just the question Mark encourages its audience to puzzle over. The very group one would expect to understand Jesus’ parables, “those who were around him along with the twelve” (4:10), that is, the broader group of followers, women and men, seems not to understand (4:10, 13). But to them Jesus says, “To you has been given the mystery [Gk. mystērion; NRSV “secret”] of the realm [NRSV “kingdom”] of God, but for those outside, everything comes in parables” (4:11). These insiders seem to have an advantage over outsiders, who, like those who so frustrated the prophet Isaiah, will look but not perceive and listen but not understand. Yet, as the story unfolds, these insiders also struggle to understand, which makes them seem almost like outsiders! Apparently, being given the “mystery” of the realm of God is more like being given a question than being given the answer. Not only does Jesus teach in parables, but Mark teaches parabolically.

Community in Formation (Mark 4:35–8:26) And Jesus sets off again. Mark 4:35–8:26 pre­ sents more healing stories, all around the Sea of Galilee, but also stories of miraculous feedings and miraculous deeds on the sea. There are clear echoes between stories and clear echoes of Scripture. Although neither the first-century author nor audience would have had access to geographical maps, the story does seem to indicate when Jesus is among his own people (Jews) and when he crosses boundaries into Gentile (nonJewish) territory. Such boundary crossing challenges elements of the hierarchical status quo. First Journey (Mark 4:35–6:44) Jesus seems surprised that those who have received “the mystery of the realm of God”—and some of them fishermen at that—are so easily frightened by the storm on the sea. Mark’s Sea of Galilee is actually an inland lake, but calling it “the sea” reverberates with Scripture, in which power over the sea always rests with God. The disciples in the boat ask the right question, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey him?” (4:41). But it is the listening audience who must answer. Across the sea, in Gentile territory, Jesus’ dramatic healing of the Gerasene demoniac is narrated, with several “in” jokes. A Jewish audience might chuckle at the destruction of the herd of pigs, unclean animals. A peasant audience might cheer the destruction of a demon named “Legion”—hoping for the same for the Roman legions occupying their nation. Back across the sea in Jewish territory (the synagogue ruler is a spatial clue), two healing stories are intercalated: the raising from the dead of the twelve-year-old daughter of Jairus, and the healing of a woman suffering for twelve years from a vaginal hemorrhage. The woman’s story is impressive. She does not ask Jesus for healing but acts on her own initiative in a way that prompts it. At her touch from behind, Jesus senses that “power had gone forth from him” (5:30) and commends her faith or trust. By calling her “Daughter,” he also signals her reincorporation into the community, from which she had become isolated due to her illness. Both daughters are restored to fullness of life as women. The next several stories highlight the parallel careers of John the baptizer, Jesus, and the disciples. When Jesus returns to his hometown (patris), one might expect a celebration. But

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what occurs is rejection by those who knew Jesus before his fame spread. “Just who does he think he is?” seems to be their question. Jesus notes, “Prophets are not without honor, except in their hometown [patris]” (6:4). Then Jesus sends the Twelve off on their own missions of healing, two by two, instructing them to trust the hospitality of those who will receive them— apparently the women and men of the villages of Galilee—and the disciples do this successfully (6:13). The story of the beheading of John interrupts as a flashback. Jesus began his Galilean ministry “after John was arrested” (1:14), but only now is the story of John’s arrest and fateful death narrated. John went out and preached and was handed over to death. Jesus went out and preached and is already being rejected. Jesus has sent the disciples out to preach . . . and one has to wonder. Their return is reported only after the story of John’s death and his burial by his disciples is completed, as if to seal their parallel fates. Just as John’s death took place at the hands of one who ruled by Rome’s favor, Herod, but was facilitated by others caught in that imperial web (Herod’s wife Herodias and her daughter), so Jesus’ death will be at the hands of Rome’s Judean governor, Pilate, but facilitated by others also entwined in that Roman net (the temple authorities). Once the disciples return to Jesus, this “first journey” of Jesus in chapters 4–8 comes to a striking conclusion with the feeding of the five thousand. Scriptural echoes abound: Jesus manages to feed this Jewish multitude in the wilderness, just as Moses fed the people of the exodus with manna in the wilderness—both as God’s agent. Jesus had first asked his disciples to feed the crowd, but they were incredulous (6:37). Healings they could manage, but not this. Yet there were even twelve baskets full of broken pieces of bread and fish left over. In the subsistence economy of the ancient Mediterranean world, a story of such generosity and abundance would be good news indeed—and reason to believe that God’s realm has indeed broken in. Second Journey (Mark 6:45–8:26) The second journey in Mark 4–8 begins, like the first, with a powerful event on the sea: here Jesus walking on water. Jesus retires to “the mountain” to pray and sends the disciples on ahead in the boat, across the sea to Gentile Bethsaida (6:45). Earlier the Markan Jesus

preached and healed, then sent his disciples out to do the same, and they succeeded. Having previously accompanied them across the sea to Gentile territory (Mark 5), he now sends them on their own. But they do not succeed. When Jesus comes to them, walking on the water, appearing to them as a ghost, he says, “I am [NRSV “It is I”]; do not be afraid” (6:50). Coming just after the manna imagery in the previous story and the passing through the sea as if on dry land image here, this Exodus allusion to the voice of God to Moses from the burning bush (Exod. 3:14) is hard for Mark’s audience to miss. Still, the Markan disciples appear to miss it, because “their hearts were hardened” (6:52), another allusion to the exodus—this time to Pharaoh. So they all land safe and sound—and conventionally—at Jewish Gennesaret, where Jesus again heals crowds of people. The arrival of Pharisees and some scribes from Jerusalem confirms the Jewish setting and precipitates a heated discussion about observance of Jewish purity regulations, echoing parts of 2:1–3:6. Jesus has already challenged some of these regulations in active ways. Here the major point is that how one acts (what comes out of a person) is a more important indication of holiness than what or how one eats (what goes into a person). A narrative aside pushes this even further: “Thus he declared all foods clean” (7:19). Observing the traditional laws of clean and unclean foods reinforced the distinction between Jews and Gentiles. Challenging that distinction was important for Mark’s church. So Jesus sets out, with his disciples in tow, to Gentile territory by an overland route, north to the region of Tyre (7:24). There a Gentile comes to him, a Syrophoenician woman seeking to have a demon cast out of her daughter. Their conversation is stunning. Even though Jesus has already exorcized demons from a Gentile and raised someone’s daughter from the dead, he refuses her request harshly: “Let the children be fed first, for it is not fair to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs” (7:27). But the woman is dogged on behalf of her daughter: “Sir, even the dogs under the table eat the children’s crumbs” (7:28). Jesus commends her “word” (Gk. logos), her clever and pointed—and effective—saying, and the demon leaves her daughter. Mark seems to go out of the way to present Jesus learning from a Gentile woman in a Gentile place about the inclusivity of God’s

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realm. Maybe others—both inside and outside the narrative—can learn as well. Still in Gentile territory but now on the east side of the sea (7:31), Jesus heals a man who is deaf and has a speech impediment; communication with Gentiles is improving. Then, with no reference to moving outside of Gentile territory, Jesus feeds four thousand people in the wilderness. The disciples, alas, are surprised a second time; communication with disciples is slow. Yet, following Jesus’ instructions, the disciples help distribute the abundant food and collect seven baskets full of leftover pieces. In Mark’s world, seven symbolizes completeness: not only seven days of the week but seventy nations (ethnē) of the Gentiles. Then Jesus and the disciples all cross the sea back home to the Jewish side, to Dalmanutha. There the Pharisees pick up the controversy again by asking for a “sign from heaven” (8:11). In Mark (in contrast to John), “sign” has no positive use; those who ask for signs are always looking in the wrong direction (cf. 13:22). Perhaps they want majestic cedars and royal banquets, not mustard bushes and abundant crumbs. But the trip to the west side was apparently just for this conversation, because afterward Jesus and his followers return to the boat and start the crossing to the other side. On this third sea trip there is no extraordinary event, just a serious conversation. Was there enough bread for the five thousand [Jews]? Yes, more than enough. Was there enough bread for the four thousand [Gentiles]? Yes, more than enough. “Do you not yet understand” (8:21) the inclusivity of the realm of God? When they arrive at Bethsaida (8:22), the audience realizes that this entire section has been a long detour. The disciples, failing to reach Gentile Bethsaida when sent there by Jesus (6:45), have been led there by him, step by step! And at Bethsaida, Jesus heals a blind man in two stages. Jesus seems willing to make a second effort to heal the blindness of any who cannot quite envision the impact of God’s realm as it challenges the hierarchies of ethnicity, religious tradition, economic class, health status, and gender and transforms interaction among all the peoples of God.

Discipleship Challenges (Mark 8:22–10:52) Mark 8:22–10:52 was one of the sections where redaction critics first saw Mark as exercising creative control over the material. These

chapters are framed by the only two stories of the healing of blindness and punctuated by three passion prediction units. Each of these units has three parts. First is a prediction by Jesus of his passion (suffering and death) and resurrection, using the term “Son of Humanity” as a self-reference. Second is a manifestation by the disciples of a misunderstanding of, or perhaps resistance to, the implications of this passion prediction—both for Jesus and for themselves. Third is renewed discipleship instruction by Jesus. These three elements make each passion prediction unit a lesson in discipleship. In addition, this “way” section, so called because of numerous references to being “on the way,” contains four significant “interludes”: the “confession” of Peter, the transfiguration, one extended exorcism, and one extended teaching session. Although women characters are not obvious in this portion of the narrative, this section of discipleship teaching challenges the hierarchical status quo of its time. First Lesson (Mark 8:22–9:1) The two-stage healing of the blind man from Bethsaida serves both as the conclusion to the journeys back and forth across the sea in chapters 4–8 and as the introduction to the journey from Galilee to Jerusalem in chapters 8–10. Physical sight has long been employed as a metaphor for insight. As a conclusion, this two-stage healing suggests that the good news about God’s realm is available to both Jews and Gentiles. For a listening audience, knowing only what has come before, this two-stage healing would make a striking conclusion to the “detour” section of the journeys around the sea. As an introduction, the same story anticipates two related stages of Jesus’ ministry: powerful words and deeds for the powerless and willingness to risk persecution at the hands of the powerful who are inevitably challenged by such service. The immediately following story is traditionally known as the “confession” of Peter. In answer to Jesus’ question, “Who do you say that I am?” Peter replies, “You are the Christ [NRSV “Messiah”]” (8:29; remember 1:1). But rather than commending Peter, Jesus orders him “not to tell anyone about him” (8:30), a manifestation of the “messianic secret” par excellence. What is the quality of Peter’s insight here? Does he have a “trees walking” vision of messiahship? What is he not yet seeing? The first passion prediction follows this moment of tension, and the first manifestation

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of the disciples’ misunderstanding follows it immediately—and dramatically. Jesus’ teaching about his inevitable suffering at the hands of the powerful triggers Peter’s rebuke of Jesus for saying such a thing. Peter’s rebuke is then matched by Jesus’ rebuke of Peter, even calling him Satan, because he is thinking in a human way about power and not in God’s way. Jesus’ response to Peter is directed also to “the crowd with his disciples” (8:34), to women and men, to “whoever does the will of God” (3:35). Jesus says, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me” (8:34). Jesus’ passion prediction for himself becomes a passion prediction for his followers. Perhaps Peter’s rebuking shows that he understands this only too well and resists it. The link between denying oneself and taking up one’s cross makes it clear that denying oneself does not mean subordinating oneself to those with power over one in the existing hierarchy (as in the household codes in Col. 3:18–4:1 and Eph. 5:21–6:9) but, rather, subverting that hierarchy by serving those over whom one could possibly exert some power. The cross is a Roman implement of torture and death reserved for those who threaten the hierarchy of power and authority. Clearly Jesus’ ministry to those oppressed by Roman power is viewed as such a threat. As “the Christ,” Jesus acknowledges this risk but does not back down, and he expects no less of his followers. Second Lesson (Mark 9:2–50) As Peter’s “confession”—and its aftermath, perhaps Peter’s “confusion”— clarifies for the audience how the title “Christ” is to be applied to Jesus, so the transfiguration confirms how that other title in the narrative’s title (1:1), “Son of God,” applies to Jesus. Here the “voice” from the cloud echoes the “voice” from heaven at Jesus’ baptism, but with a significant variation. The words of the voice are now addressed to the audience: “This is my Son, the Beloved; listen to him!” (9:7). And what does Jesus say? He says “to tell no one about what they had seen”— repeating the usual messianic secret theme, but with a significant variation: “until after the Son of Man [Humanity] had risen from the dead” (9:9). A “Son of God” is one obedient to God. Jesus’ obedience to God entails both proclaiming and enacting God’s realm in this present age and risking the inevitable suffering that such

service to the powerless may elicit from the powerful, who are threatened by any challenge to the status quo. The death of John at the hands of Herod demonstrates this observation, as the discussion about “Elijah” by Jesus and his disciples coming down from the mountain of the transfiguration reminds the audience (9:11–13). Apparently while the three disciples experience the transfiguration of Jesus on the “high mountain” (9:2), the other nine disciples experience their inability to cast an unclean spirit out of a boy. Everyone in the story is frustrated at this failure: the boy’s father, the disciples, Jesus. Jesus is successful in the exorcism, the only exorcism in the second half of Mark—and one employing resurrection language. When the disciples ask Jesus what they were lacking this time, he answers, “Prayer.” Prayer, of course, was a powerful resource for Mark’s audience in the absence of the earthly Jesus, something Jesus is trying to prepare his disciples for at this point in the story. These experiences of the three disciples (transfiguration) and the nine (failed exorcism) set the stage for the second passion-prediction unit. The second passion prediction is short and framed by the narrator’s introductory statement, of Jesus’ desire to keep hidden on his journey south so that he might teach his disciples, and the narrator’s concluding statement, that “they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him” (9:32). But that concluding statement is only the introduction to the misunderstanding of the disciples. Two examples follow: “On the way” (9:33) the disciples are arguing about who is the greatest, and the disciple John reports stopping another from casting out demons in Jesus’ name “because he was not following us” (9:38). Jesus’ renewed discipleship instruction in response to the first misunderstanding is to assert—explicitly to the Twelve—“Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all” (9:35), and to take a child in his arms, saying that one who welcomes a child welcomes both Jesus and God who sends Jesus. Both a child and a servant are powerless; both are required to do what those with more power (fathers and masters) order them to do. But Jesus is saying paradoxically that his male disciples who have some possibility to exercise power over others—at least women and children—are voluntarily to serve those in need, those with less power than themselves.

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Jesus’ second teaching response is to assert that not only are followers to serve those in need rather than serving the powerful in order to become a bit more powerful themselves, but also they are to accept such basic service (a cup of water) from others graciously. Although some scholars have searched for a historical analogue of the disciples whom “Mark” is critiquing, this move is unnecessary. The rhetorical function of the narrative seems obvious: every time Jesus teaches the disciples, the Markan author gets to teach the Markan audience, which is, after all, the point of the story. Third Lesson (Mark 10:1–52) Building on the developing theme of a revisioning of power relations and the image of a child, an extended teaching section is presented in chapter 10. Included are three teaching episodes having to do with the household: marriage and divorce, children, wealth. In each case, Jesus reverses the values of the hierarchical status quo, in which men are valued over women, adults over children, and the rich over the poor. In first-century Judaism, divorce could be initiated only by a husband, not by a wife (although women of means could initiate divorce in the larger Greco-Roman world). Adultery was considered an offense of one man against another man’s honor and property; a man (even a married man) who had sexual relations with another man’s wife wronged her husband (not his own wife). But Jesus calls anyone—man or woman—who divorces a spouse and marries another an adulterer against the first spouse—woman or man. Men are not to be valued over women in the new household. Nor are children to be less valued than adults. Jesus again takes children into his arms, something women were more likely do, and critiques the disciples for keeping them away—as if protecting Jesus’ time for more important work with adults. Anyone who would enter the realm of God must receive it as a gift like a powerless child, not as one ordering others what to do. In the ancient world, the household—several generations of parents and children, with slaves and hired workers in more wealthy households—was the unit not only of consumption but also of production. Thus wealth was a household matter. Those who have wealth are called upon by Jesus to distribute it to those who are poor, enabling themselves to follow Jesus and “have treasure in heaven,”

that is, with God (10:21). Following the commandments while accumulating and preserving wealth is thinking in a human way, not in God’s way. Whoever is open to God’s presence and to doing the will of God will be part of a new family, a new household. Thus Peter’s response that “we have left everything and followed you” (10:28) and Jesus’ reply that you will receive even more than you have left, form a conclusion to this three-unit teaching section that overturns the values of the status quo with regard to households. But, Jesus adds, this new and larger family (brothers and sisters, mothers and children—but no fathers in this patriarchal world) and household (houses and fields) that followers will receive “in this age” will come “with persecutions” (10:30). The way still leads to Jerusalem. “But many who are first will be last, and the last will be first” (10:31). The hierarchical status quo is being entirely stood on its head, but those at its top in this age will fight back. Against this background, the third and most detailed passion prediction is presented, a virtual outline of the passion story soon to come. But James and John, perhaps having learned that they are not to expect power “in this age,” ask for the seats of honor, on Jesus’ right and left, in the age to come, the time of Jesus’ “glory” (10:37). Jesus points out that he has no power to bestow such future honors in God’s realm—it is, after all, God’s realm. The other ten disciples are upset with James and John (because the two did not understand? or because they asked first?), and Jesus directs his final discipleship instruction to all twelve men: “You know that among the Gentiles [e.g., the Romans] those whom they recognize as their rulers lord it over them, and their great ones are tyrants over them. But it is not so among you; but whoever wishes to become great among you must be your servant, and whoever wishes to be first among you must be slave of all. For the Son of Man [Humanity] came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life a ransom for many” (10:42–45). Not only are Jesus’ disciples not to replicate the power structure of the powerful in their own group by “lording it over” each other, but they are to reverse this power structure by serving those in greater need than themselves, even putting themselves at risk to do so. This third and final discipleship instruction is the culmination of what Jesus has been trying to communicate about the discipleship God’s

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realm requires and enables. The usual mode of power relations (among Gentiles, Romans, and humans!) is for the powerful to order the less powerful to serve them. The way of participating in God’s power is for persons willingly to serve those with less power and status than themselves. Those with the least power in Jesus’ world—women, children, and slaves—are not the audience of this instruction. However, such service to those at the bottom of the social hierarchy inevitably antagonizes the powerful. The powerful will protect their stake in the powerlessness of the oppressed. Thus Jesus’ disciples can expect “persecutions,” and Jesus expects “to give his life a ransom for [the] many” (10:45). Ransom refers to the release of a hostage or a slave. “The many” means the people as a whole, as opposed to oppressive rulers—the many as opposed to the few, not some as opposed to all. And it is Jesus’ way of living, his life, not his death, that frees the oppressed. Mark’s Gospel does not regard Jesus’ death as a sacrifice atoning for sin. Certainly forgiveness of sin is a reality of God’s realm, but such forgiveness is not dependent on Jesus’ death according to Mark (2:1–12; 11:25). The verb “to serve” derives its meaning from service in a basic sense—preparing meals, caring for children—things women usually do, and always do in peasant households. It is particularly not what powerful men are accustomed to doing, but it is the way of discipleship in the realm of God. Such service is not commended as a way to earn a reward from God later; it is commanded as a way to experience God’s presence here and now. Such service comes from strength, not weakness, and is empowering for both giver and receiver. Jesus is not committed to suffering as a way to please God, but he will not back away from a life of challenging service, even to avoid a predictable death. At this point, Jesus and the disciples arrive in Jericho, and the second story of the healing of blindness completes the frame around the “way” section. At Bethsaida, people bring a blind man to Jesus, but the healing of the unnamed man takes place in two stages. At Jericho, people try to prevent a blind man from being heard by Jesus, but the healing takes place instantly and Bartimaeus immediately follows Jesus “on the way” (10:52). To Bartimaeus, Jesus says the words he says earlier to the bold and daring woman who touches his cloak: “Your faith has made you well” (10:52; 5:34). Both

women and men serve as models of faith and, as the story continues, of discipleship.

The Risk of Serving the Powerless in the Face of Power (Mark 11–16) Chapters 11–16, set in Jerusalem, parallel chapters 1–8, set in and around Galilee; each section has a major speech of Jesus in the middle: chapter 4 (parables) and chapter 13 (eschatological discourse). Between these two major sections, chapters 8–10 try to make clear for Jesus’ followers that his ministry of preaching, healing, and feeding in and around Galilee will have predictable consequences with those in authority in Jerusalem: temple authorities and the Roman officials who dominate them. Chapters 11–16 portray the playing out of those consequences. The Prelude to the Passion of Jesus (Mark 11–12) Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem is marked with a curiously ambiguous story, the so-called ­triumphal entry. On the way into the city, the people welcome him with honor, although their reference to “the coming kingdom [realm] of our ancestor David” (11:10) contrasts with Jesus’ consistent proclamation of the already inbreaking realm of God. But once Jesus arrives in the city, the conventional welcoming party of city officials is not reported to be there to greet him. Jesus looks around at everything and retires to establish his own home base just outside the city, in Bethany. On his way back into the city the next day, Jesus curses an unfruitful fig tree, even though “it was not the season [Gk. kairos] for figs” (11:13). The story of the so-called cleansing of the temple is also poorly named. In Mark, the event is more like the clearing of the temple or its closing down, because Jesus casts out both sellers and buyers. Without the essential activities of changing secular currency for temple currency and procuring approved sacrificial animals, the temple could not serve its function as the sacrificial center for Israel. Jesus’ critique of the temple officials is steeped in Jewish prophetic tradition, echoing Isaiah and Jeremiah. Jeremiah accuses the leaders of Israel of taking economic advantage of the poor and unfortunate in their overall dealings with them, then taking refuge in the temple as a robbers’ den (11:17, quoting Jer. 7:11).

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On the way back from Bethany the next day, the disciples notice that the cursed fig tree has withered, and the audience notices the intercalation: fig tree/temple/fig tree. Holy trees and holy temples were often associated in the ancient world. Here the fig tree, whose time (kairos) has passed, is an emblem of the temple, whose time has probably literally passed for the Markan audience, living in the immediate aftermath of the Roman destruction of the temple. What remains, what it is the time for, is “prayer for all the nations” (11:17, quoting Isa. 56:7). Imagine what comfort Jesus’ sayings on the power of prayer independent of the temple must have offered to the Markan community in that devastating time (11:22–25). When Jesus returns from Bethany to Jerusalem the next time, he encounters representatives of various Jewish authorities as he is “walking in the temple” (11:27). Sitting is an authoritative position of a rabbi while teaching, but Jesus does not sit in the temple because it is not his base of authority. First, the chief priests, scribes, and elders, whose authority is templebased, question Jesus about the source of his authority. Jesus deflects their question by his own question about the source of John’s authority, which silences them. Then Jesus tells the parable of the Wicked Tenants “against them” (12:12). Second, some Pharisees and Herodians appear with flattering lines but in order “to trap him in what he said” (12:13). This pairing of antagonists was previously noted at 3:6, the close of the set of five controversy stories in Galilee, a section clearly echoed in 11:27–12:27. At issue is paying taxes to the emperor; Jesus avoids the trouble that either expected answer would bring, by saying, “Give the emperor what’s the emperor’s and God what’s God’s” (12:17, my trans.). Third, the Sadducees, who do not believe in the resurrection, ask a tricky question they hope will stump Jesus. But Jesus, challenging their assumption that their patriarchal rules of marriage will apply in the age to come, and quoting the Torah to this group that focuses on the Torah, stumps them instead. Just when the audience may be assuming that the Jewish Jesus is opposed to all Jewish authorities, the narrative presents an exception. Jesus and “one of the scribes” mutually agree on the centrality of the Shema, the commandment to love God completely, and the commandment to love your neighbor as yourself. There is even greater affirmation by Jesus of basic Jewish

beliefs here than in the earlier controversy stories in 2:1–3:6. In challenging the temple hierarchy in general, precariously existing under Roman overlordship, Mark avoids asserting that it is monolithic. Later interpreters, including some early feminist interpreters, have not always so successfully avoided stereotyping the Jewish authorities portrayed in the Gospels and have even gotten trapped in anachronistic assumptions that the controversies presented in Mark represent the liberating Jesus of “Christianity” over against the patriarchy of “Judaism.” Both these categories developed later than Mark, which still seems to reflect an intrareligious struggle. Finding “gender equality” (also an anachronistic concept for the first century) in Mark by buying into religious stereotypes is a price too steep to pay. Amid overlapping hierarchical cultures, Mark struggles to challenge stereotypes and the status quo. Later interpreters must meet these same challenges. After that conversation with one of the scribes, “no one dared to ask him any question” (12:34). Jesus himself, however, questions how the scribes can say the Christ is the Son of David, which would make the Christ part of the elite establishment that Jesus is presently challenging. Jesus also warns of the scribes’ typical behavior of seeking the greatest honor while taking economic advantage of the most vulnerable, widows. Finally, moving to an outer courtyard of the temple, Jesus points out to his disciples the exemplary behavior of one poor widow who, in putting two small coins into the collection box, has put in “her whole life” (12:44, my trans.). Later interpreters misuse this poor widow by making her the model for a stewardship campaign. She is, rather, an image of the demands and risks of discipleship that Jesus has proclaimed and is, at the moment of his telling of her story, in the midst of enacting—giving his whole life. One group of the Jewish elite after another has tried to establish the superiority of its own position; the poor widow, perhaps even careless of her own position, has simply given abundantly. That is the image Jesus captures for his disciples as he leaves the temple for the last time. The Passion of the Community (Mark 13) Chapter 13, a speech in the middle of the Gospel’s second half, parallels chapter 4, a speech in the middle of its first half. The parables of the first speech suggest how the realm of God begins

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to take hold on the earth in the present age. Traditional images of the “last things” (eschatology) in the second speech suggest how the realm of God will culminate in the age to come. Jesus is “sitting on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple” (13:3), and the speech opens with his prediction of the temple’s destruction. If Mark’s first audience heard this speech not long after the actual destruction of the temple by the Romans, it must have provided assurance that the catastrophe was bound to happen but was not the end of the age—it was survivable. The speech builds on common Jewish apocalyptic imagery: birth pangs, disasters natural (earthquakes, famines), political (wars), cosmic (failures of the sun, moon, and stars), and cryptic (the “desolating sacrilege” from Daniel). The speech also warns specifically that the persecution Jesus’ disciples were already instructed would be an inherent risk of discipleship and service will continue in the foreseeable future: persecution by authorities both religious (Jewish “councils” and “synagogues”) and political (Roman “governors and kings,” 13:9). The very existence of the community will be precarious. False christs and false prophets will try to lead “the elect” astray, but the Son of Humanity will send out angels (messengers) to gather the elect from the whole earth. Jesus’ words may be trusted not to pass away. But what are Jesus’ final words in this speech? “But about that day or hour no one knows, neither the angels in heaven, not the Son, but only the Father” (13:32, followed by the parable of the Doorkeeper). All that traditional apocalyptic imagery does not add up to a calendar for calculating the end time. It adds up to the command: “Beware, keep alert; for you do not know when the time [kairos] will come” (13:33). Live in mindfulness of a future beyond human knowing. The focus of Jesus’ speech here, portrayed as given to four disciples but opened out “to all” (13:37), is what Jesus’ followers will face in the near future as they anticipate the fullness of the realm of God in some assured future but at an unknown time. The realm of God has already begun, but, not unexpectedly in terms of apocalyptic Judaism, God’s realm is being challenged by the powers of this age that it challenges. This glimpse of the passion of the community, presented in Jesus’ final speech, is set in the middle of the narrative of the passion of Jesus. That should give the community some perspective.

The Passion of Jesus (Mark 14–16) Jesus’ conflict with the Jerusalem authorities escalates. Our labels for these authorities are problematic at best: “Jewish” is anachronistic; “religious” as opposed to “political” is modern and Western. In first-century Jerusalem, the temple authorities, whom we might call “Jewish” or “religious,” also had some limited “political” authority, but they were constrained by the occupying Roman imperium. Mark notes briefly their looking for a way to arrest Jesus, but then gives more attention to the story of an unnamed woman who anoints Jesus’ head with oil in the house of Simon the leper in Bethany. The juxtaposition is significant and ironic. Such anointing of the head signified being set aside for a special task; prophets or priests might be anointed, or a prophet might anoint someone as king. Here an unknown woman prophetically anoints Jesus as the Christ, the anointed one. She is as bold and faithful as the woman who touches Jesus’ cloak, as bold and clever as the Syrophoenician woman who argues for her daughter’s healing. She is also as symbolically significant as the poor widow who gives her last coins; together they frame Jesus’ speech on the fullness of God’s realm in the age to come—these two women in contrast to many men seeking to advance themselves. But only of the anointing woman, of all the Markan characters—women or men—does Jesus say, “Truly I tell you, wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her” (14:9). In keeping with the Markan understanding of the full implications of messiahship, Jesus connects this prophetic anointing with his approaching death and burial. Death at the hands of the Roman Empire was not among any of the varying “messianic expectations” of Mark’s day. But at least from Mark’s “way” section on, persecution is never far from proclamation of the good news of the Christ and God’s realm. The passion story continues to be filled with ironic events: the celebration of the Passover, the festival of freedom, as the plot moves closer to Jesus’ death; Jesus’ betrayal—with a kiss—by one of his own disciples; Peter’s denial, in contrast to his “confession”; arrest privately at night when Jesus had taught publicly day after day; Jesus’ initial silence before the high priest, and then his speaking in a way that assures his death; Peter’s denial of his identity as a follower of

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Jesus (fulfilling Jesus’ “prophecy”) when questioned by the serving girl of the high priest, at the same time that Jesus is affirming his identity as the Christ under the high priest’s questioning (and just after Jesus is taunted to “prophesy”). And these are just the events narrated in chapter 14! Irony best depicts the double assertion of Mark’s Gospel: God’s realm is breaking into this age with new power for believers, and the powers of this age are still fighting against it, leading to persecution of believers. In chapter 15 the passion story moves from the Jewish authorities to the Roman authorities, the ones with the real political power and the ones responsible for Jesus’ crucifixion. The Romans reserved the humiliation and torture of crucifixion for low-status persons thought to be a threat to their authority. The accusation of the Roman governor Pilate of Jesus as “King of the Jews” would certainly fall into that category and is picked up by the mocking of his soldiers. Jesus’ reply to Pilate’s question (“You say so,” 15:2) is ambiguous at best and not enough to stop the wheels of Roman violence turning against him. Although Jesus only makes claims about God as king, that proclamation has political weight, because the subversive power of God’s realm to empower the powerless challenges Roman imperial power. The details of Jesus’ Roman punishment highlight that felt threat and the need to assert Roman authority dramatically and publicly: flogging, mocking, stripping of clothes, impressing a passerby to carry the cross, crucifying two other insurrectionists alongside Jesus. The public joins in as the Roman authorities hope—both passersby and chief priests and scribes. Jesus’ cry from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (15:33, quoting Ps. 22:1) is also ambiguous. There is despair, but also continued personal prayer to God, and the psalm ends with assurance. At Jesus’ death two momentous events are narrated: one in the Jewish world of the story— the curtain of the temple is torn from top to bottom (that is, by God); and one in the story world of Roman characters—the centurion says, “Truly this man was God’s Son!” (15:39). Both are boundary-breaking events, and both suggest the power of the good news of God’s realm to move further out into the world. The tearing of the curtain echoes the tearing of the heavens at Jesus’ baptism; both are cosmic affirmations.

The centurion’s statement, whether interpreted as sincere or sarcastic, is ironic in coming from one of Jesus’ executioners but marking for the audience Jesus’ obedient sonship to God in risking his life to proclaim and participate in God’s realm. At this low point in the story, with all male followers gone, including the mysterious young man who flees naked at Gethsemane (14:51– 52), the narrator adds: “There were also women looking on from a distance; among them were Mary Magdalene, and Mary the mother of James the younger and of Joses, and Salome. These used to follow him and served [NRSV “provided for”] him when he was in Galilee; and there were many other women who had come up with him to Jerusalem” (15:40–41). “Follow” and “serve” (NRSV “provided for” misses the point) are discipleship words in Mark. “Follow” is used of women and men, although all the twelve named disciples are men. But the only characters said to “serve” prior to these women are the angels who minister to Jesus in the wilderness, Simon’s mother-in-law, and the Son of Humanity “who came not to be served but to serve” (10:45). The word for this service (diakonia) gives us the word “deacon.” Not only does Jesus take up women’s work, but women take up Jesus’ work. Women, from near the bottom of the hierarchy of power, have served and remained faithful followers to the end— although even they are “looking on from afar.” Possibly the first-century audience had imagined women followers of Jesus all along. If contemporary readers do not, the fault is ours, and we need to reimagine the story from the beginning. But it is striking that Mark chooses to emphasize the presence of women followers in the absence of the male disciples at the crucial moment of Jesus’ death. Those with power can learn from those with less power. One crucified on a Roman cross would normally be denied burial as part of the process of humiliation. But Mark tells of Jesus’ burial by Joseph of Arimathea, both “a respected member of the council” that turned Jesus over to Pilate and one “waiting expectantly for the kingdom [realm] of God” (15:43), and thus another exceptional Jewish leader (along with Jairus and the scribe commended by Jesus). Two of the named women see where the body is laid, and all three of the named women (although the names of the “other” Mary appear slightly differently

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each time) come to the tomb with spices after the Sabbath is over, being observant Jews. The Open-Ended Ending As early as possible, the three named women come to the tomb to complete the Jewish burial rites by anointing the body. The audience recalls that Jesus’ body was anointed “beforehand for its burial” (14:8) by an unnamed woman. When the young man in white speaks to the women, the audience also recalls the young man in white who fled at Jesus’ arrest. Can those who flee in fright experience resurrection? The young man’s message is twofold: Jesus is not here, because he is on the way to Galilee, as he told the disciples he would be (14:28); go and tell the disciples, especially Peter. The women are not told to tell the disciples to go to Galilee; the male disciples are presumably already running for their lives, back home to Galilee. The surprise is that Jesus will greet them there, even Peter who denied him, ready to forgive them and renew the proclamation of God’s inbreaking realm with them. But the story ends before the implicit becomes explicit. The women flee from the tomb, terrified and amazed, and they say “nothing to anyone, for they were afraid” (16:8). The women, like the men, are fallible followers, humans struggling to think the surprising things of God. But, as everyone in the audience knows, the story gets out. Jesus’ execution at the hands of Rome’s imperial power is not the end of the subversively powerful good news for all people. The good news is resurrected, so that the whole of Mark’s story becomes just “the beginning of the good news of Jesus Christ, the Son of God” (1:1).

Later readers, perhaps more literal minded, added other endings onto Mark’s genuinely open-ended empty tomb story. These endings close with a bang the story of Jesus on the way to renew his presence with his followers as they take up their lives again, substituting a majestic Jesus sitting at the right hand of God in heaven (16:19). But Mark’s Gospel itself ends with an opening: an opening for the women; an opening for the male disciples, even Peter; and an opening for the women and men of the audience. What will all these characters, inside and outside the narrative, do now? Clearly some have taken up the work of going and telling. Bibliography

Anderson, Janice Capel, and Stephen D. Moore, eds. Mark and Method: New Approaches in Biblical Studies. 2nd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. Dewey, Joanna. “Mark.” In Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 470–509. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Levine, Amy-Jill, ed. A Feminist Companion to Mark. Sheffield, England: Sheffield Academic Press, 2001. Malbon, Elizabeth Struthers. Hearing Mark: A Listener’s Guide. Harrisburg, PA: Trinity, 2002. Rhoads, David, Joanna Dewey, and Donald Michie. Mark as Story: An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel. 3rd ed. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2012.

Gospel of Luke Jane D. Schaberg and Sharon H. Ringe

Introduction Warning! The Gospel of Luke is an extremely dangerous text, perhaps the most dangerous in the Bible. Because it contains a great deal of material about women that is found nowhere else in the Gospels, many readers insist that the author is enhancing or promoting the status of women. Luke is said to be a special “friend” of women, portraying them in an extremely progressive and almost modern fashion, giving them a new identity and a new social status. But read more carefully! Even as this Gospel highlights women as included among the followers of Jesus, subjects of his teaching, and objects of his healing, it deftly portrays them as models of subordinate service, excluded from the power center of the movement and from significant responsibilities. Claiming the authority of Jesus, this portrayal is an attempt to legitimate male dominance in the Christianity of the author’s time. It was successful. The danger lies in the subtle artistic power of the story to seduce the reader into uncritical acceptance of it as simple history, and into acceptance of the depicted gender roles as divinely ordained. This Gospel also contains challenge and promise, however, because close reading of it can be an empowering education. It stimulates valuable questions rather than provides final answers, and points to issues that demand rethinking. Those whose study of Luke is informed by contemporary critical methods and by the concerns of women will fully appreciate this new promise. It is necessary to distinguish different aspects of the text (historical, ideological, theological,

and literary) and the different levels of transmission. The reader is challenged to recognize the ambivalence of the tradition, both to enter into the text to appreciate it, and to stand apart from it in order to assess its truth and helpfulness. Insights valuable for the building of an egalitarian society and of a theology that preserves and respects women’s experience are indeed present in Luke. But learning to untangle and free them from the harmful elements of the tradition is a difficult task. The author of Luke is interested in the education of women in the basics of the Christian faith and in the education of outsiders about Christian women. The Gospel attempts to meet various needs, such as instructing and edifying women converts, appeasing the detractors of Christianity, and controlling women who practice or aspire to practice a prophetic ministry in the church. One of the strategies of this Gospel is to provide female readers with female characters as role models: prayerful, quiet, grateful women, supportive of male leadership, forgoing the prophetic ministry. The education that the study of Luke offers today involves a conscious critique of this strategy. It is not at all the education Luke had in mind!

Narrative Summary This Gospel is organized into eight parts. It begins with a prologue (1:1–4) setting forth the purpose of the work. The author, a third-­ generation Christian, has researched and written “an orderly account” of the events concerning Jesus, in order to reassure “Theophilus” 493

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and other readers about the instruction they received. This named addressee (literally “Friend of God”) may have been a Christian convert being instructed in the faith, perhaps a leader of Luke’s community, or else a symbolic name referring to Gentile “God-fearers” who may have made up the majority of Luke’s community. The description of Theophilus as “most excellent” suggests that the Gospel is directed to people of high status. Luke writes about “the poor,” but to those whom Jesus has called to accept a special responsibility for those pushed to the margins of their society. The “orderly account” does not claim factual accuracy, but only that the author’s presentation of the traditions about Jesus is deliberate and carefully chosen. That “order” itself is part of the writer’s message, which traces Jesus’ story from his conception in Galilee, through ministry there, then on a journey that culminates in Jerusalem. There he dies, and the Risen One is met in Jerusalem and its suburbs, where the community gathers at the beginning of Acts to begin the second volume of Luke’s account. Following the preface, an infancy narrative (1:5–2:52) parallels and intertwines the annunciations of conception, the births, and the childhoods of John the Baptist and Jesus. Mary and Elizabeth are the focal characters of this part of the story, as our progress through the account follows the rhythms of their pregnancies and deliveries. The larger framework for their personal stories is set by the identification of the political leaders at the time: King Herod, Caesar Augustus, and Quirinius the governor of Syria (1:5; 2:1–4). This story of God’s action is anchored in human history. Furthermore, the literary style in which these chapters are written sounds “biblical.” In other words, it mimics the style of the Septuagint. The author does not explain this factor: perhaps it was present already in the source on which the author drew, or else it may have been a deliberate choice by which to affirm that these stories are part of the narrative of God’s commitment to God’s people that is contained in the Bible they knew so well. (See detailed comment below.) The third part (3:1–4:13) entails preparation for Jesus’ ministry: John the Baptist’s preaching, the baptism of Jesus, his (all-male) genealogy, and his resistance to temptation by the devil. Except for the genealogy, this section interweaves Mark and Q, the sources Luke drew upon, much the same as in the parallels

in Matthew. One difference that might be overlooked seems rather to be significant. In 3:5–6, the quotation from Isaiah 40:3–5 is longer than in either Mark or Matthew. The part found only in Luke, “all flesh shall see the salvation of God,” reflects Luke’s affirmation that God’s holy, “chosen” people now includes Gentiles as well as Jews. This affirmation is mirrored in Luke’s genealogy, which traces Jesus’ ancestry back to Adam, and not only to the patriarch Abraham (3:38). The sequence of tests presented to Jesus by the devil has theological significance in both Matthew and Luke. Matthew’s account culminates in the Shema (Matt. 4:10), while Luke’s follows the pattern of the narrative of Jesus’ life, climaxing at the temple in Jerusalem (4:9–12). The fourth part, Jesus’ ministry in Galilee (4:14–9:50), begins with Jesus’ inaugural sermon in the synagogue at Nazareth (4:16–30), focused on the jubilee text of Isaiah 61:1; 58:6. The ministry in Galilee includes his teaching, exorcisms and healings, choice of followers and companions, opposition from religious leaders, and predictions and foreshadowings of suffering and glory. The accounts of the call and choice of Jesus’ followers (5:1–6:19) feature male characters from beyond the inner circles of religious leadership in Palestine. These men who will become the apostles undergo intensive training for their work (6:20–9:6), training that includes reckoning with the place of women in the alternative “kingdom” or “empire” (basileia) of God that Jesus both proclaims and inaugurates. A chapter of vignettes that demonstrate Jesus’ identity (9:7–50) concludes the report of his ministry in Galilee: Jesus in Luke is a masterful, emotionally restrained figure, empowered by God and focused on God. The fifth part of Luke’s Gospel is a lengthy account of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem (9:51– 19:27). It details a period of intensive training in discipleship: its demands, powers, and dangers. Much of his public teaching (often by parable) takes place at meals and is about table community and/or the distribution of wealth. This section is less about the geography of the journey than about the escalation of warnings and calls for preparedness that have been introduced earlier. Women such as Mary and Martha (10:38–42), the bent-over woman (13:10–17), the woman who lost one of her dowry coins (15:8–10), and the widow who wrests justice from a reluctant judge (18:1–8)

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mitigate the dominance of male characters, who still predominate. In the sixth part (19:28–21:38) Jesus enters Jerusalem hailed as “the king” and teaches in the temple. His now-deadly opposition is primarily from the chief priests, scribes, and elders, who fear his popularity. Only the brief story of the impoverished widow (21:1–4)—is she a model to be emulated or a cause for lament?—breaks up the chorus of male voices and actions that set forth this conclusion to Jesus’ public ministry. In the seventh section (22:1–23:56a) the passion narrative begins with the Last Supper and ends with the burial of Jesus. The action slows to a crawl, as we are forced to take in each moment of Jesus’ final day. The apostles are given final preparation for leadership and (except for Judas) are not depicted as failing Jesus. He is portrayed as strong in the face of death and innocent (his innocence recognized by Pilate, Herod, a criminal crucified with him, and the centurion). The people at first fail by following their leaders in calling for his crucifixion, but there is a mass repentance after his death. The final portion of the Gospel concerns the vindication of Jesus—God’s verdict of “yes!” to the official “no!” spoken to who Jesus was and to the message he brought (23:56b– 24:53). It contains narratives of the empty tomb, appearances of the resurrected Jesus, the commissioning of witnesses, and his ascension to heaven. Unlike the other three canonical Gospels, the story told by this evangelist continues in the book of Acts in a narrative of the foundation and spread of the Christian movement from Jerusalem to Rome. Because the Acts of the Apostles is implied in its prologue to be the second volume written for Theophilus, and because the style of the author of Acts appears to be that of the third evangelist, almost all scholars hold that the same person wrote both volumes. If this is so, they should be read together. In fact, when they are, it can be seen that the Gospel of Luke lays the basis for Acts’ pictures of the church, of salvation, and of the meaning of the Christ. Acts, in turn, is the author’s own commentary on the Gospel story and its concepts and tendencies.

Source Theory In the prologue (1:1–4) the author says that this Gospel builds on the written work of others, who themselves utilized the traditions of

“eyewitnesses and servants of the word,” and on the author’s own careful investigation. This is not, then, the work of an eyewitness or a servant of the word, nor is it the first “orderly account” of the story of Jesus. The theory most commonly accepted, and followed provisionally in this article, is that the author of Luke used the Gospel of Mark (with some omissions, e.g., of Mark 6:45–8:26), a source called Q (available also to the author of the Gospel of Matthew), and sources—probably oral and written—called L (material available only to Luke). Source analysis provides essential clues about the workings of the author’s mind, the audience’s makeup, and important historical and theological issues. Of special interest here will be the L material, since much of it features women. The following passages focusing on women are often classified as part of L: sections of the infancy narrative (Luke 1–2, featuring Elizabeth, Mary of Nazareth, Anna); the raising of the son of the widow of Nain (7:12–17); the forgiven prostitute who anoints Jesus (7:36–50); Galilean women followers of Jesus (8:1–3); Martha and Mary (10:38–42); the woman crying out from the crowd (11:27–28); the bent woman (13:10–17); the parable of the Sweeping Woman (15:8–10); the parable of the Persistent Widow (18:1–8); the daughters of Jerusalem (23:27–32); women at the cross (23:49); women preparing spices (23:56). It has been proposed that Luke may have had access to a women’s source—a collection of stories and teachings perhaps written or preserved by women and providing insight into women’s experience of the Jesus movement. Scholars have wondered whether 7:11–17; 7:36–50; and 8:2–3 might not have been at one time a narrative collection reflecting the early community’s concern about the question of women. Others have asked if the story of the bent woman, “daughter of Abraham” (13:10–17), was once connected with Luke’s infancy narrative (see 1:5, where Elizabeth is said to be “of the daughters of Aaron,” and 2:36, where Anna the prophet is called “the daughter of Phanuel”). There is evidence that much of the material concerning women is traditional, not part of Luke’s own editorial work. But if it originally came from a women’s source or sources, it cannot be taken as simply expressing the viewpoint or reality of early Christian women. Luke responds to concern about the role of women by incorporating and editing material,

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subtly making the point that women must be restricted. Some of the material, however, bears traces of women’s greater involvement and leadership. Perhaps it is related to the “old wives’ tales” 1 Timothy 4:7 warns against, or was produced in circles like that of the widows whom 1 Timothy 5:2–16 attempts to control.

Distinctive Characteristics Some of the distinctive characteristics of Luke provide clues about its author, date, and intended early audience and about the context in which women are depicted. History and Eschatology Luke is precise about the broad historical and political context of the story of Jesus, marking events with references to specific Roman and Jewish rulers (1:5; 2:1; 3:1–2). The period of Israel (from creation to John the Baptist) is seen as leading up to the period of Jesus (from his ministry to his ascension); the period of the church under stress (from the ascension to the Parousia or return of the risen Christ) stretches ahead indefinitely in a mission to all nations. Imminent expectation of the Parousia and the final inbreaking of the reign of God is modified in Luke by the sense that the reign is already “among you” (17:20–21) and by emphasis on the work to be done before the end (21:12–13). This appears to be a document from the generation that has confronted and accepted the fact of the delay of the Parousia. Accommodations are being made to ongoing life in the Roman Empire. Romans and Jews There is evidence that the author had detailed knowledge of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE (21:20, 22; cf. 13:35a). Rome’s military triumph is interpreted as punishment for Israel’s rejection of its Christ (19:39–44), a harsh anti-Jewish polemic that continues in some circles today. Roman involvement in the execution of Jesus has been downplayed in this Gospel, and responsibility has been shifted so heavily onto Jewish leadership that the impression is given that “the Jews” killed Jesus (22:54; 23:23–26; 24:20; cf. Acts 2:22–23; 3:17; 7:52– 58). This historically inaccurate and unjust depiction is due in part to a desire to show the reader that the founder and his movement were not revolutionary and therefore were not

dangerous to the state. Those who are repentant in Israel form the nucleus of the people of God and are presented as a tiny minority within a people called “prophet killers” (11:47–51; 13:34; Acts 7:52). Jewish messianic hopes are said to be “fulfilled,” as Luke depicts Christianity as the logical and legitimate continuation of Judaism and thus as a lawful religion in the Roman Empire. The split between synagogue and church is evidently wide, and most of the followers of Jesus for whom this Gospel is written are Gentiles in a predominantly Gentile setting. Wealth and Poverty This is often called “the Gospel of the poor,” just as it is called “the Gospel of women,” meaning that Luke’s concern for the marginalized and oppressed is apparent. It is important to analyze the link between these concerns, since most of the poor in every age are women and the children who are dependent on them. In this Gospel the economically destitute are called “blessed” (6:20; cf. 4:18), and a reversal of their situation by God is expected (1:53; 16:19– 31). Luke seems to be particularly interested in the help given by Jesus to disabled beggars (18:35–43; Acts 3:1–10) and the hungry (14:13– 14, 21). The disciples are called to leave “all” to join Jesus (5:11, 28; 18:22), which is tantamount to joining the poor, becoming poor as Jesus is. Women do follow Jesus in this Gospel, but not at such a cost; they are benefactors, giving out of their evidently retained wealth (8:2–3). They are like a bridge to what seems to be Luke’s primary interest in this regard: interest in the rich. All the rich are repeatedly warned by parable and by short sayings (7:25; 12:13–21; 16:14) that they can be lulled into false security and callousness, ruled by their possessions. They are told that if they hope to participate in the reign of God (i.e., in what God is doing for the poor), they must be transformed and share with the poor by loans and outright gifts (6:30–35; 12:33). The Jerusalem community in Acts functions like those explicitly called disciples in the Gospel: it is demanded that they give up private ownership and eradicate Christian poverty (Acts 2:44–45; 4:32), and for the most part they meet that demand. But for the rest— the women followers in Galilee and others, and the later believers outside Jerusalem—adjustments are made to the normal workings of society. Some have, some do not; those who have are urged to be voluntarily generous. The radical

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friendship lifestyle sometimes called “primitive communism” is not promoted for all. An unrelieved tension exists in this Gospel between the ideal and the accommodation, the radical attitude toward wealth and the moderate attitude.

Date and Authorship The New Testament Gospels are anonymous; that is, they do not name their authors. Tradition going back to the end of the second century CE attributes this Gospel to one Luke, a companion of Paul on his journeys, a physician (Col. 4:14; Phlm. 24; 2 Tim. 4:11). Indirectly, Paul’s own authority is invoked in the writings of his supposed companion. Many scholars conclude, however, that internal evidence does not support this claim. The theology of Paul in Acts is unlike that of Paul’s own letters: there is no evidence of professional medical knowledge, and—most important—Luke–Acts supports values similar to those of other New Testament works from the end of the century, the Pastoral Epistles (1 and 2 Timothy, Titus), which also lay claim to the authority of Paul. By the end of the first century and into the second, Paul’s name was used to encourage the organization of churches in Asia Minor into patterns of patriarchal domination and submission, assimilating the radicalism of the Jesus movement and the early Christian missionary movement into what some have called “love patriarchalism.” In that process of assimilation, inequalities inherent

in social, economic, and political hierarchies and in differentiated roles were to be willingly accepted by those said to possess inner equality “in Christ,” and those with power were to wield it nonabusively. In Luke’s writings this process of acceptance is reflected and promoted. The author of Luke, probably a Gentile Christian, was well educated in Hellenistic literature and rhetoric, familiar enough with the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible to be able to imitate its style, skilled and artistic in the use and blending of sources, and theologically creative. It is not impossible that the author was a woman. Women of wealth or status in this period were able to be educated, and some were writers. Female authorship is improbable, however, mainly because of the Gospel’s attitude toward women. Further, the narrator speaks as a man (in the Greek of 1:3). But in fact the author’s identity is an open question that raises other questions. Because of the use of Mark as a source, references to the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE), and reflections of some political and social trends of the 80s, the Gospel of Luke is usually dated around 85–90 CE. It was written after Colossians and Ephesians, with their household codes, and probably before the Pastorals (written at the turn of the century), with their even more blatant prescriptions subordinating women. Antioch in Syria, the third-largest city in the Roman Empire, is often identified as the place of composition.

Comment Issues of Special Concern Women in Luke The number of women depicted in Luke and the emphasis on their presence in the narrative are surprising. Women characters are taken over from Mark and from Q, and many others are found only in Luke’s special source (L). The technique called “pairing” is very noticeable. One version of a story or teaching refers to a man and the other to a woman, reinforcing the message and encouraging women as well as men to identify with the characters. This pairing occurs most often in the discourse of Jesus: for example, the man who plants the mustard seed and the woman who takes leaven (13:18–21 Q); the man

who searches for the lost sheep and the woman who searches for the lost coin (15:4–10 L). Some healings form pairs: the widow’s only son and Jairus’s only daughter (7:12; 8:42); Sabbath healings of the bent woman and the man with dropsy (13:10–17; 14:1–6). There are two lists of the names of Jesus’ followers: one of the male apostles (6:12–19) and one of women (8:1–3). There is also a noticeable tendency in this Gospel to defend, reassure, and praise women. Luke refers to widows more frequently than do the other Gospels (2:37; 4:25–26; 7:12; 18:3, 5; 20:47; 21:2–3), often in passages that presuppose their economic helplessness in a maledominated society. The “sinner” who anoints Jesus is contrasted with the Pharisee (7:36–50).

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The bent woman is given the unusual designation “daughter of Abraham” (13:16), affirming her dignity. The “impure” woman with the flow of blood is praised for her faith (8:48). Mary of Bethany is defended against the complaint of her sister Martha and is affirmed in her choice of the “good portion,” listening to the word of Jesus (10:38–42). Mary the mother of Jesus is often considered Luke’s model of obedient, contemplative discipleship (1:38; 2:19, 51). She is not defined by her biological motherhood but blessed for her belief (1:45), as are all who “hear the word of God and obey it” (11:27–28). The harsh contrast seen in Mark 3:31–35 between Jesus’ mother and brothers and his true family of disciples is changed in Luke to a saying that seems to praise the former (8:19–21). The women who travel with Jesus and the Twelve and serve them from their possessions (8:3) are models of sharing. These are the loyal ones who are among those who see the crucifixion (23:49) and the burial (23:55) and who have “a vision of angels” (24:23) at the empty tomb, which they do report to the Eleven and all the rest (24:9; contrast Mark 16:8).

Comparisons. Luke emphasizes Jesus’ ministry to women, but whether this emphasis is regarded as enhancing or restricting the position of women depends on the angles from which the evidence is examined and on that to which it is compared. It is important to analyze why certain aspects are stressed and others not, and who benefits—to analyze, that is, the sexual politics of the Gospel. Attention must be paid not just to the number of women but also to what they are doing and saying and what they are not doing and not saying. Women in Judaism. The claim is often made that women in Luke (and in the ministry of the historical Jesus) are much more liberated than Jewish women of the first century CE. Jesus is considered a revolutionary “feminist” pitted against his religious environment and heritage. Later Christian restriction of women is then often seen as rooted in necessary capitulation to Jewish or Jewish-Christian tradition. This position, which can be embedded in and foster an attitude of anti-Judaism, is not supported by recent research on women in the various types of first-century Judaism.

Inscriptions, papyri, and archaeological data as well as literary sources indicate that there was great diversity. Some Jewish women were leaders in synagogues, were financially independent landowners and businesswomen, and acquired religious education, even devoting their lives to the study of Torah. Others were legally disadvantaged and powerless. The comparative situation of women in ancient Judaism and early Christianity is not yet clear, but it is clear enough that no simple contrast favoring Christianity can be drawn.

Roman Women. Luke restricts the roles of women to what is acceptable to the conventions of the imperial world. The capitulation, in other words, is more to repressive forces within the Roman Empire than to forces within Judaism. Evaluation of Roman law concerning women shows that in the classical period even the small numbers of wealthy Roman women of the upper classes were “emancipated” only in a very restricted, vicarious sense. They were without real decision-making authority and leadership. The expanded role for women in the ministry of Jesus and in early Christianity was looked on with suspicion, as involving un-Roman religious activities, magic, and permissiveness dangerous to family and state. Motivated by the desire that Christian leaders and witnesses be acceptable in the public forum of the empire, the world of men, Luke blurs traditional and historical traces of women’s leadership and exaggerates the leadership by men. Women in the Other New Testament Gospels. In terms of sheer quantity, Luke has more material about women: forty-two passages, of which twenty-three are unique to Luke. But careful comparison must be made of the quality of female roles and functions and of the liberating potential of each Gospel. A few examples follow. Luke has no women who challenge Jesus or initiate a mission to the Gentiles. The story of the feisty Syrophoenician woman in Mark 7:24–30 is part of Luke’s great omission of Markan material; there is no counterpart in Luke to the Samaritan woman of John 4. The Johannine Martha and Mary (John 11 and 12) have more significant and powerful roles than the Lukan Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38–42). The interpretation of Mark’s abrupt ending at 16:8 is pivotal to any evaluation of the

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treatment of women in that Gospel: by condemning the women who flee from the empty tomb and are silent, Mark is urging women to break their fearful silence. Luke, on the other hand, fosters women’s silence in the Gospel as a whole, although the women at the tomb do speak out. Matthew’s treatment of leadership as shared (Matt. 16:19; 18:18) is theoretically more egalitarian than Luke’s treatment. Furthermore, the women at the tomb in Matthew not only receive a commission, but as they run to tell the disciples, the risen Christ appears first to them (Matt. 28:1–10).

Historical Women in the Early Christian Movement. Luke’s depiction of women must be placed alongside reconstructions of the early Christian movement, which indicate that the movement was truly egalitarian in its initial stages, with women in positions of leadership and authority (see, e.g., Rom. 16). The roots or sources of the experiment in inclusive community remain a historical puzzle, but Jewish egalitarian movements based in apocalyptic and wisdom traditions seem likely keys. Internal Comparisons. Finally, the Gospel’s depiction of women must be compared with its depiction of men, especially with respect to those elements constitutive of character: name, speaking and being spoken to, action, and responsibility. The women of the Gospel must also be compared with the women in Acts, where most scholars agree that the author’s interests are more apparent. With respect to characters named and unnamed, a few statistics are instructive. There are ten women named in the Gospel of Luke. As characters in the story, thirty-nine named men appear, but the proper names of ninety-four more are mentioned (seventy-six in the genealogy alone), a total of one hundred thirty-three men. The named men outnumber the named women by more than thirteen to one. In Acts, seven women are named, of whom only one (Mary the mother of Jesus) is mentioned also in the Gospel. Luke has ten unnamed women with parts to play and two groups of women. Of unnamed males in the Gospel, there are forty individuals and twenty-seven groups (one consisting of five thousand men). So these individual men outnumber the women four to one, and male groups outnumber the female groups

by almost fourteen to one. In Acts there are three unnamed women characters and thirteen groups of women. In the teaching of Jesus in Luke, women are mentioned eighteen times, contrasted to the one hundred fifty-eight times men are mentioned. In Acts, in the teaching of the apostles women are mentioned only once. The conclusions are obvious. First, the impression of “many” women in this Gospel is conditioned by expectations of finding none or very few and by the impression, documented by psychologists, that numbers of women in mixed groups seem (to both men and women) much larger than they actually are. Second, there is a drastic reduction of interest in women in Acts, where Luke’s own perspective is more visible. Statistics again provide an interesting picture of who speaks and who is spoken to in Luke’s writings. In Luke, women speak fifteen times. Their words are given ten times and are not given five times. In Acts, women’s speaking is reduced to five instances, their words given three times, not given twice. Women, then, are gradually silenced. In contrast, an attempt to count the hundreds of times that men, including Jesus, speak leads one to realize the virtual din of male voices. In Luke, women as groups and individuals are spoken to fifteen times, nine times by Jesus (to defend, correct, and praise them). In Acts, women are spoken to six times, five times by the apostles. No sermon in Acts is addressed to women. The two individual women of Acts spoken to in direct speech are condemned and silenced (Sapphira in Acts 5, like her husband Ananias, is silenced effectively by death; the slave girl in Acts 16 who has been annoying Paul is silenced by an exorcism). A quick reading shows that men are spoken to constantly, with affirmation as well as condemnation. These analyses drive home the fact that both works are androcentric (male-centered), but Acts much more so than Luke. With respect to women’s action and responsibility, Acts shows us the roles Luke affirms for women in the early Christian community, and looking back at the Gospel of Luke through the lens of these roles clarifies the author’s position. With the exception of Priscilla, who is recognized as a missionary (Acts 18:18) and teacher (Acts 18:26) in full partnership with her husband Aquila, the primary female role in Acts is that of “mother” to the fledgling community,

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one who out of her wealth provides home, hospitality, and material aid to believers. The women of Acts are also “receiving women,” beneficiaries of the preaching and healing powers of men. Only men decide the affairs of the church in Acts. In the Gospel, women are also nurturers. Luke never calls them “disciples” or “apostles.” In fact, Luke insistently speaks of the twelve males chosen in 6:13 as “the apostles,” even though the term has a wider use elsewhere in the New Testament. As in the other Gospels, there is no call narrative in which Jesus summons a woman to follow him. Instead, Luke presents a pattern of women healed or exorcised, who then serve “them” (the male disciples and Jesus, 4:38–39; 8:2–3). No women are commissioned as apostles in Luke (cf. Mark 16:7). A comparison of Luke 18:28–30 with its probable source, Mark 10:28–30, shows that Luke made important changes that confine discipleship to men. (Inclusive-language translations obscure this aspect of Luke’s intention.) Luke’s addition of “wife” (with no corresponding addition of “husband”) to the list of what must be left for the sake of the kingdom of God means that the disciples are imagined as men. Only in Luke’s version of the parable of the Marriage Feast is “marrying a wife” given as an excuse for refusing the invitation (14:20). Even though in the Gospel women are present during Jesus’ ministry, at the cross, burial, and empty tomb, in Acts 1:21–22 the replacement of Judas as witness to the resurrection must be drawn from the males who accompanied them from the baptism of John to the ascension. Luke thinks of a woman’s proper attitude as that of a listener, pondering what is not understood, learning in silence. The women in this Gospel, like those in Acts, can be called a “hearing community.” The only questions asked by a woman are the questions of Mary of Nazareth (1:34; 2:48). The only christological insight expressed by a woman is that of Elizabeth, who recognizes that Mary is pregnant with her “Lord” (1:43). No women in Luke, by word or action, identify Jesus as Messiah or Son of God. Anna the prophet (2:38) is given no speech. Only the woman with the flow of blood, who progresses from denying that she touched Jesus to giving thanks (8:45–47), makes a public proclamation of his power; but her words are not quoted, and, moreover, Luke shifts emphasis from her to Jesus.

In the Gospel as in Acts, receptive women are nurturers of men. A woman’s blessedness is not restricted to being the mother of a great son (11:27–28), but emphasis on biological motherhood is replaced by an emphasis on what might be called spiritual motherhood, a role perhaps even more confining. Luke is concerned to evoke in the audience the question, “What shall we do?” (3:10, 12, 14; 10:25; 18:18). The proper answer is that one should “hear the word of God and do it” or “keep it” (2:19, 51; 6:47, 49; 8:15, 21). But “doing” for men is not what “doing” is for women. In contrast to the role approved for women, full discipleship in this Gospel involves “the power and authority” to exorcise, heal, and preach (9:1–6; 10:1–16). Women can be assumed to be present when the risen Jesus appears to “the Eleven and their companions” (24:33), announces a worldwide mission of proclaiming repentance and forgiveness, and promises “power from on high” (24:47–49). Women can be assumed to be present when the Holy Spirit is said to fill those assembled at Pentecost (Acts 2:1–4; cf. 1:14). But Luke shows only the men empowered to speak and act and bear responsibility within the movement. Androcentrism Since the Gospels are male-centered, women have had to read as though they were men, in order to hear themselves fully addressed and challenged. This effort can lead to misreadings that have harmful consequences. For example, many of women’s deepest concerns, fears, weaknesses, and needs are not addressed in the Gospel—nor indeed in the whole biblical tradition. As Valerie Saiving has pointed out, pride and the will to power are not the principal temptations for women, who are more apt to accept for themselves the roles prescribed by society and tradition—believing in their inabilities and inadequacies, acquiescing in their own powerlessness, failing to act responsibly, sacrificing rather than developing their own selves. Only with great difficulty can women, to whom no authority or power is given in this Gospel, see themselves addressed by texts that criticize the techniques and results of power grabbing, and call for repentance. For example, just before Jesus commissions the Twelve at the Last Supper, he warns them about the abuse of power (22:24– 27). He counters their desires to be “greatest” with his own example: “I am among you as one who serves.” Luke has not seen the loose ends

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left flying: the “leader” should be “as one who serves.” But the only followers who “serve” in this Gospel narrative are women (4:39; 8:3; 10:40), and they are not appointed leaders. A real temptation for women, it can be argued on this basis, is to remain unauthorized, unempowered. Several passages from Luke’s Gospel, if seen through the eyes of a battered woman, can be read to condone violence. Luke omits Mark’s prohibition against divorce but retains the prohibition of remarriage after divorce, with no exceptions (Luke 16:18; cf. Mark 10:11–12 and Matt. 5:31–32). This prohibition (addressed only to men) may have been experienced as protecting some women in antiquity and later from being replaced and dismissed into lives of humiliation and poverty, or as freeing the divorced for the ascetic life (a lifestyle Luke appreciates; see 20:34–35). But interpreted in rigid fashion, this prohibition has also often condemned women and men to the alternatives of an intolerable bondage or a life of isolation and sexual repression. Luke 6:29 (Q) counsels offering the other cheek; 6:27 expands the command to love one’s enemies by doing good to them, blessing them, praying for them. In 9:23 Luke adds the word “daily” to the saying of Jesus about taking up the cross. That addition extends the symbolism of the cross and depoliticizes it, altering the emphasis from martyrdom to sacrificial living, which women have understood differently from men. In 24:26, one of Luke’s major themes appears: that it was necessary that the Messiah suffer (13:33; 17:25; 22:37; 24:7) and “enter into his glory” (see 2:49; 4:43; 24:26, 44; Acts 14:22). Why must his suffering happen, according to Luke? Because it manifests the coherence of God’s plan and work of salvation and because it corresponds to the will of God. While these texts are not meant to glorify suffering or victimization, they have been so used. Luke 4:18–20 quotes Isaiah 61:1; 58:6 to announce that Jesus’ ministry is to the oppressed. But this Gospel has no scene that illustrates release for an abused woman, freeing her from low self-esteem, guilt, and masochism as well as from the brutality and intimidation of another—freeing her, in effect, from such texts as those mentioned above. This Gospel does have, however, stories such as that of the woman bent over for eighteen years with “a spirit of infirmity” (RSV 13:10–17), which some women have read as allegories of their oppression and release.

An examination of the parable of the Good Samaritan (10:29–37 L) illustrates difficulties a woman encounters reading self-consciously as a woman. It is a story about the world of men, who travel, rob and beat, pass by, have compassion for a fellow traveler (even one who is an enemy). The male experience is presented here as universal human experience. But if there may be places in the world a woman can walk, the dangerous, isolated road from Jerusalem to Jericho is certainly not one. Without altering the dynamics of the story, most women cannot easily imagine themselves as women in the ditch, or passing by, or even having such an opportunity to help as the Samaritan does. Efforts to enter the parable in this way, to read as a woman, either complicate it with the theme of sexual violence or dissolve it into an abstract statement about being a neighbor. Many other passages in Luke—such as the parable of the Prodigal Son/ Father (15:11–32, which can be read as the parable of the Missing Mother, who is never mentioned) and Luke’s passion narrative (in which male political and religious powers crush the innocent, while the women watch)—are occasions to confront androcentrism, to explore precisely how women have read themselves into the texts, and to recognize the urgent need for women’s own parables, women’s own narratives.

Five Passages Against this background of the role of women in Luke, one can examine in more detail passages unique to Luke that focus on women. The Origins of John the Baptist and Jesus (Luke 1) Three women appear in this section (Elizabeth, Mary of Nazareth, and Anna) in roles far more powerful than the roles of women in the rest of the Gospel. This is the only section in which women are given speeches that are not followed by the women being corrected. It is likely that Luke has permitted powerful women characters here in the narrative mainly because the context is the traditional women’s role of bearing and raising children. However, even here, in the parallel accounts of the birth, circumcision, naming, and maturing of John the Baptist and of Jesus, the major focus of Luke’s interest is the sons, not the mothers. Elizabeth is the barren woman whom God makes fruitful (like Sarah, Rachel, Hannah,

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and others). Barrenness canceled what was regarded as a woman’s main function in life, the bearing of children—especially sons—to her husband; it denied her the highest status and security a woman might achieve. Barrenness was thought of as the woman’s fault (as here in 1:7), a punishment for sin or at least a result of God’s “forgetting” the woman (1 Sam. 1:11). Luke 1:6, however, insists that both Zechariah and Elizabeth are righteous. Nevertheless, Elizabeth can still call her barrenness “my disgrace among men” (RSV 1:25; cf. Gen. 30:23). God mercifully intervenes to take away this disgrace. At the scene of the visitation with Mary, Elizabeth, though not given the title, functions as a prophet. “Filled with the Holy Spirit,” she praises Mary as “blessed among women,” for her belief (1:42). Elizabeth makes the first and only christological confession by a woman in this Gospel: “Why has this happened to me, that the mother of my Lord comes to me?” (1:43). “Lord” is for Luke here and in many other places a Christian title for Jesus, affirming his transcendent dominion. Mary is directly in touch with the heavenly world in her dialogue with the angel Gabriel (as are the women at the tomb, spoken to by two supernatural men [24:4–7]). Luke depicts Mary as the model female believer. Almost—but not quite—commissioned as a prophet or disciple, she is the only woman to whom Luke has given a full speech of proclamation, the Magnificat. Elsewhere Luke takes pains to present a positive picture of her. In Acts 1, Mary makes her last New Testament appearance in the upper room in Jerusalem, where the Eleven “were constantly devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women,” including her. The widow Anna, the only woman in the Gospel called a “prophet,” is said to have publicly “returned thanks” to God and to have continually spread abroad the word about the child (or about God; the Greek is ambiguous) “to all who were looking for the redemption of Jerusalem,” a phrase that has a revolutionary ring. Unlike Simeon, however, Anna is given no canticle and the Spirit is not said to be with her, though the Spirit is three times said to empower Simeon (2:25, 26, 27), who has two canticles. What is stressed, besides Anna’s silent witness, is the great length of her widowhood and her continual presence fasting and praying in the temple (presumably in the outer court, the only part of the precincts women were allowed

to enter). This portrait of Anna may provide a trace of the important ministry of widows in the early church, but it does not elaborate on the nature of that ministry. The conception of Jesus by Mary merits special attention. Matthew’s account of Jesus’ origin is very different from Luke’s, but a close reading shows that the two accounts contain many points in common. If Matthew and Luke wrote independently of each other, these agreements stem from the older tradition they inherited and worked with. Both Matthew and Luke report that the parents of Jesus were Mary and Joseph, who was of Davidic descent. They agree that Mary’s pregnancy occurred between their betrothal and the home-taking or completion of the marriage (Matt. 1:16, 18; Luke 1:27). They agree also that Joseph was not the biological father of Jesus (Matt. 1:18–19; Luke 3:23). In both Gospels, an angel announces the role of the Holy Spirit in this pregnancy (Matt. 1:18, 20; Luke 1:35), gives the child the name Jesus (Matt. 1:21; Luke 1:31), and predicts his role in the history of Israel (Matt. 1:21; Luke 1:32– 33). Matthew and Luke both consider Mary a virgin (Matt. 1:23, by implication; Luke 1:27). Both allude to Deut. 22:23–27, the law concerning the seduction or rape of a betrothed virgin (Matthew in his description of Joseph’s dilemma; Luke in 1:17, 48). They insist that the birth of Jesus took place after his parents had come to live together (Matt. 1:24–25; Luke 2:5– 6), in Bethlehem during the reign of Herod the Great (Matt. 2:1; Luke 2:4–6; 1:5). Both evangelists speak of Jesus as accepted from the very beginning by the just and pious of Israel (Matt. 1:19; Luke 1:41–45; 2:25–32, 36–38). It is traditionally and commonly claimed that both Matthew and Luke agree also that Jesus was “virginally conceived”—conceived, that is, by the direct act of God, without male sperm or intercourse, like a new creation from nothing, with Mary the nurturing “vessel.” If this idea is indeed found in Matthew’s and Luke’s infancy narratives, these are the only two places it is found in the New Testament. An audience acquainted with stories from the Jewish traditions would not be prepared to think of a virginal conception, since in those traditions divine paternity does not replace human paternity. An audience acquainted with stories of the marvelous or miraculous conceptions of heroes, immortals, and benefactors of humanity in Greco-Roman biographies would think

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either of divine and human paternity or of the divine mating with the virgin, in literal or symbolic penetration (the sacred marriage). Theologians today differ widely in their interpretation of the meaning that “virginal conception” is meant to convey and in their conclusions about its importance. Homage given to the mother of Jesus as “the Virgin Mary” (maternal but not erotic; honored for the nonuse of her sexuality) and development of her image and legend in Christian imagination and devotion have made her a figure that functions in many ways like a goddess, Christianity’s adaptation of the feminine dimension of the Divine. Luke 1 is the major New Testament source for that development, which has had both positive and negative effects on women’s spirituality, selfunderstanding, and political empowerment. In contemporary New Testament scholarship, the tendency is to find the virginal conception clearly asserted in Matthew and less clearly (if at all) in Luke. It has been claimed that Luke 1 can be read as not about a virginal conception. Read in and for itself, without the overtones of the Matthean account (so the argument goes), every detail of it can be understood as referring to a child to be conceived in the usual human way. Gabriel appears to Mary who is at that time a virgin and tells her she will conceive a son. Her question in 1:34 stresses that she and Joseph are in the period of betrothal and not having sexual relations. The question gives Gabriel an opening to speak about the character of the child to be born. Gabriel’s statement in 1:35 about the Holy Spirit “coming upon” and “overshadowing” Mary is a figurative way of speaking about the child’s special relation to God, not implying the absence of human paternity (cf. Gal. 4:29, where Isaac is called “the child who was born according to the Spirit”). Conception with Joseph as the biological father is an idea not expressly denied in Luke 1 or 2. However, it is denied in 3:23: Jesus is only the “supposed” child of Joseph. The reader who understands Luke 1 to be about a normal conception is thus faced with another alternative: the biological fatherhood of some unnamed person and the illegitimacy of Jesus. It is possible that both evangelists inherited a tradition of the illegitimacy of Jesus and transmitted it very differently. Both evangelists, it must be pointed out, stress the messiahship and holiness of this child (Matt. 1:21, 23; Luke 1:31, 35), in spite of or perhaps because of his origins.

When Luke’s account is viewed as preserving and working with a tradition of Jesus’ illegitimacy, several of its details fall into place. For example, in the dialogue between Gabriel and Mary, Gabriel’s response (1:35) is not an explanation of how the pregnancy is to come about but is a statement of reassurance, urging trust. The verbs “come upon” and “overshadow” promise empowerment and protection (cf. Acts 1:8; Luke 9:34). These verbs have no sexual or creative connotations. Mary’s question “How?” is sidestepped and remains unanswered. This scene echoes aspects of the commissioning or call of prophets. But Mary is commissioned to be a mother, not a prophet. Her response is to consent freely to motherhood (1:38). With this expression of her consent in faith, Luke creates the positive portrait of Mary as model believer. At the same time, Mary’s characterization of herself as the “slave” of the Lord is the text most responsible for the impression of her as a passive character, the antithesis of a liberated woman. Is this Luke’s way of setting her up as the model for submissive feminine behavior and of articulating an acceptance of patriarchal belief in female inferiority, dependence, and helplessness? Slaves held the lowest social position within the Israelite, Jewish, and Christian communities and were without rights at law, unable to own property, or have a family or a genealogy in the proper sense. The term “slave” has a shock value that can be felt by those today who are aware of their heritage of slavery and who are anguished by the slavery that exists in our world. Luke, however, surely intends the term to have a positive value here. It must be seen in connection with Jewish use of the honorary title “slave of God,” applied to a few outstanding men of Israelite history (Moses, Joshua, Abraham, David, Isaac, the prophets, Jacob) and to one woman (Hannah). The word associates Mary also with Jesus, portrayed as among the disciples “as one who serves” (22:27), though not called “slave,” and with the female slaves on whom God’s Spirit would be poured out “in the last days” making them prophets (Acts 2:17–18, citing Joel 2:28–32). In Luke 1 as a whole, there is a “step parallelism” between the stories of John the Baptist and Jesus. For example, whereas for the Baptist a prophetic destiny is predicted (1:17; cf. 1:76), Jesus’ destiny is royal (1:32–33). In the conception of the Baptist, the humiliation of his mother Elizabeth as a barren woman is

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overcome. In the case of Jesus, what is overcome is his mother’s deeper humiliation, the violation of a betrothed virgin. In this context, Mary’s canticle, the Magnificat (1:46–55) is powerfully appropriate. The Magnificat is the great New Testament song of liberation—personal and social, moral and economic—a revolutionary document of intense conflict and victory. It praises God’s liberating actions on behalf of the speaker, which are paradigmatic of all of God’s actions on behalf of marginal and exploited people. The powerful memory is evoked of God’s deliverance of Israel throughout its history. Key themes for the Gospel that follows are introduced here, especially the proclamation of good news to the poor (4:18–19; cf. Isa. 61:1–2). Mary’s song is precious to women and other oppressed people for its vision of their concrete freedom from systemic injustice—from oppression by political rulers on their “thrones” and by the arrogant and rich. In the transformed social order that is celebrated, food is provided for the hungry. The spiritual realm is understood as embedded in socioeconomic and political reality. Focus is on the might, holiness, and mercy of God, who has promised solidarity with those who suffer and who is true to those promises. God is “magnified” for effecting changes—now, in history. The Magnificat has many allusions to Hannah’s song (1 Sam. 1:11; 2:1–10) and was probably written in the circles of the Jewish Christian ‘anawim (“poor” in a spiritual and often literal sense). Here it celebrates Mary’s own vindication by God, who protects her and her child, recognizing this child as God’s Son and Messiah. Her experience of reversal anticipates the resurrection. The point is not that the girl who utters the Magnificat is lowly, humble, and insignificant in comparison to the mighty God. It is rather that God has looked on her “humiliation” (1:48) and has “helped” (1:54) her and the child. Mary preaches as the prophet of the poor. She represents their hope, as a woman who has suffered and been vindicated. However, the author’s picture of Mary is ambiguous, and some aspects of her role already hint at the restriction of women seen in the rest of the Gospel. In chapter 1, while she is evangelist and prophet, she is without an explicit commission to preach. Her submission to the word of God is total. In the second chapter she is the model listener (2:19), a dependent, contemplative heroine (2:33–35, 51) who never

initiates any action. Hers is what Luke considers a woman’s perfect response to the word of God: obedient trust and self-sacrifice. The dominant mood of Luke’s first chapter is one of celebration and serenity, and the narrative atmosphere is one of delicacy and restraint, in contrast to the story of danger and moral dilemma in Matthew 1. Any potential scandal of the tradition of Jesus’ origins, like the scandal of his death, has been defused in Luke’s Gospel. If Luke knew of an illegitimacy tradition, it has been muted and almost silenced here. The annunciation scene is too beautiful, too positive, and too indirect to convey that difficult message. Rather, Luke’s subtlety opens the story of Jesus’ conception to miraculous, supernatural interpretations, especially for readers of Gentile background. Luke conveys the “good news” of the power and respectability of the Christian faith. Still, this scene, in which a betrothed virgin is visited by the angel of God and told of her forthcoming pregnancy and of God’s empowering protection of her, is the only biblical instance of God’s direct interest in such a woman. The tradition affirms that the child to be born will be God’s, because the Holy Spirit is ultimately responsible for his conception. The pregnancy is no accident or mistake, but divinely ordained. The Magnificat is not the song of a victim but one that proclaims liberation with tough authority. The Sinner (Luke 7:36–50) Accounts of a woman anointing Jesus appear in all four Gospels: Mark 14:3–9; Matthew 26:6–13; John 12:1–8; Luke 7:36–50. Critics are puzzled about exactly how the accounts are related. What seems likely is that one event lies behind them, an event that was changed radically in the telling, and to which Mark’s version is in some respects the most faithful. Some elements of Luke’s account apparently derive from a pre-Lukan stage (e.g., the anointing of feet, the parable of the Two Debtors, perhaps the story of a prostitute touching Jesus), and some are the products of Luke’s creativity. What is certain, however, is that Luke’s version, in which the anointing woman is a sinner, is the one most people remember. Luke’s brilliant and dangerous artistic ability is evident in what has been called one of the great episodes in the Lukan Gospel. Until feminist criticism began to probe the differences among the accounts

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and show special interest in Mark’s, it was Luke’s that overpowered the other three in the popular Christian imagination. Further, in all four Gospels, Jesus is physically anointed only by a woman. But his baptism was early interpreted as his anointing by God with the Holy Spirit. This tradition overshadowed any human anointing as the source of Jesus’ authority and identity as the Anointed One (“Christ”). A comparison of all four accounts, laid side by side, is necessary to a critique of Luke’s. In the other three Gospels, anointing by a woman is a prelude to the passion of Jesus in Jerusalem. In Luke, however, a woman anoints Jesus during his ministry up north in Galilee at the house of Simon the Pharisee. Luke has moved the story backward from where it was found in the Markan source. It is possible that 7:36–50 is meant to illustrate how Jesus is a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” (7:34; cf. 5:32) and how the Pharisees rejected “God’s purpose” (7:30). It is also possible that Luke means it to illustrate the type of woman who became part of Jesus’ entourage (8:2–3). In any case, placement of the story of the sinner before the list of women on the road with Jesus is responsible for an extremely important distortion in the imagination of Western Christianity: the characterization of Mary Magdalene as a prostitute. She, mentioned in 8:2, is identified in later Western Christian interpretation as the anonymous “sinner” in 7:37. But there is no warrant for this identification in the text. As Eastern Christianity recognized, 8:2 and 7:37 are about two different women. No name is given the woman in Mark and Matthew; in John she is Mary of Bethany. Luke also does not name her but calls her “a woman in the city, who was a sinner.” It is likely that Luke means the audience to identify this woman’s sin as notorious sexual activity, prostitution. Her action in Mark and Matthew consists of bringing an alabaster jar of expensive ointment and pouring it on the head of Jesus, as prophets anointed kings (1 Sam. 15:1; 16:13; 1 Kgs. 1:45; 19:15–16; 2 Kgs. 9:1–13; and the eschatological prediction in Dan. 9:24). In John, the woman takes a pound of expensive ointment, anoints Jesus’ feet, and wipes them with her hair. Luke’s “sinner” wets Jesus’ feet with her tears, wipes them with her hair, kisses his feet, and anoints them with ointment. Normally, feet were not anointed with perfume, except for the feet of the dead. Washing the feet was an act of hospitality,

but kissing them was usually an act of gratitude for pardon. Unbound hair may be the mark of a “loose woman” (Num. 5:18 LXX; Mishnah Sotah 1:5); in Corinth, however, it was associated with women prophesying (1 Cor. 11:5–6). Reaction in Mark, Matthew, and John is protest over waste. In these Gospels Jesus defends the woman, saying that the anointing is his embalming for burial. That interpretation of her deed as a prophetic acting out of the anointing of his corpse corrects and depoliticizes the claim to royalty (which was probably the point of the earliest account), by means of the prediction of suffering. Mark 14:9, followed by Matthew, has Jesus predict that wherever the gospel is preached in the whole world, “what she has done will be told in memory of her.” In Luke’s version, however, the anointing itself is not central. Rather, focus is on the emotional extravagance of the woman’s actions, Jesus’ acceptance of the touch of such a person, and her being forgiven. Jesus tells the parable of the two debtors who are forgiven, the one forgiven more loving more. Then the parable is applied to the woman, who has shown Jesus more love than has Simon, the inadequate host. Love, in the logic of the parable, is both cause and result or sign of divine forgiveness. The woman embodies that love. Because of the emotional quality of her action and its lavish sensuousness, her love has a strong erotic dimension, though its essence may be thought to be grief and gratitude. The prophetic and political aspect of the event behind Mark’s story and John’s (and whatever love that might have involved) is lost in Luke. Jesus, not the woman, is shown to be a prophet (cf. 7:16; 24:19), who knows intimately the human heart and the mind of God, who has forgiven her sins. In Luke the anointing also bears no relation to the death of Jesus; it is reduced to a display of unusual affection on the part of an intruding woman. A social outcast takes on herself the role of servant in gratitude to Jesus. But by erasing the female prophet from the Markan source, Luke has refused to honor her memory. Given the emphatic nature of Mark 14:9, Luke’s editing displays real arrogance. Politically, prophetically, what she has done will not be told in memory of her. Women Traveling with Jesus (Luke 8:1–3) Luke mentions two groups who were with Jesus as he traveled through cities and villages

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in Galilee: the Twelve and “some women who had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities.” From the second group, three are named: Mary called Magdalene; Joanna the wife of Chuza, Herod’s steward; and Susanna. These and many other women are said to have “provided for them [or “served them”] out of their resources.” These deceptively simple verses raise many questions—on the historical level about the makeup and lifestyle of the Jesus movement and on the redactional level about Luke’s depiction of the involvement of women, who are never explicitly called “disciples.” One of the names in Luke’s list and the verb that describes the women’s activity are drawn from other Synoptic traditions. Mark 15:40–41 tells of many women looking on from afar at the crucifixion, who had followed Jesus when he was in Galilee and provided for him. Luke appears to be using this Markan verse but also to have other information. A comparison of the names of women at the crucifixion and empty tomb in the four Gospels shows that the name of Mary Magdalene is constant—based on a strong, unshakable, widespread memory—and suggests that the names of others were remembered in different communities. The tradition that seven demons were exorcised from Mary Magdalene is found also in Markan Appendix 16:9, with no indication that this links her with prostitution. Only Luke’s Gospel gives us the names Susanna and Joanna. As the wife of the manager of Herod Antipas’s estate, the latter is the first of many women of wealth and status mentioned by Luke (Acts 13:50; 17:4; 17:12; 25:13). The Greek verb translated in Mark 15:41 and in Luke 8:3 as “provided for” is diakoneō, “to serve, wait on, minister to as ‘deacon.’” Whereas in Mark 15:41, followed by Matthew 27:55, the women are providing for or ministering to Jesus alone, in Luke 8:3 the object of their attentions is Jesus and the Twelve. The women are cast in a nonreciprocated role of service or support of the males of the movement. Since in Luke–Acts the Twelve are the major witnesses and leaders, the women’s role is subordinate. The wording of 8:2–3 implies that they are acting out of gratitude for being healed, unlike the Twelve. On the historical level, several questions are prompted by these verses. Did women (with or without husbands) travel with Jesus and the other males in an itinerant, charismatic ministry, dependent on hospitality in various

Galilean cities and villages? Or, since the area is small, and since only the male disciples are said to have left their homes to follow Jesus (18:28), did the travel for the women consist of day trips from home bases? Scholars often remark that the practice of including women in such a ministry was scandalous. If this is true, why did that scandal leave no mark on the traditions, and why was the practice never explicitly defended? Unfortunately, these questions cannot be answered on the basis of present knowledge of the activities and lifestyles possible for Jewish women in the time of Jesus. In the various lists of women, some are identified by their relationship to husbands or sons (e.g., Joanna in 8:3), but other women are listed without such an identification. Were they unmarried, divorced, or widows? Although Luke narrows the term “apostle” to refer to the Twelve, in this Gospel seventy(-two) disciples are also appointed and sent out two by two, returning with joy in their success (10:1–20). Women are not mentioned in this connection, so most readers have imagined male partners. But is this an instance of the erasure of women who may have traveled in pairs or with male counterparts? The silent disciple on the road to Emmaus, for example, could be thought of as a woman (24:13–35). Some commentators have demonstrated that women can be read into the texts of Luke where disciples are mentioned (e.g., at the Last Supper)—a practice that probably gives us a more accurate historical picture—but it is important to be clear that the resulting picture is not the one Luke intends. The separate lists of male and female followers of Jesus in the Synoptic Gospels stand in contrast to the integrated list of church leaders in Romans 16. Does Luke think of the women as a distinct and separate community within the movement, analogous perhaps to the women gathered at the synagogue by the river in Philippi (Acts 16:13) or to the Therapeutrides, female contemplatives discussed by the Jewish philosopher Philo? Many different opinions are found in the commentaries concerning the type of work or service (diakonia) the women may have done. Some scholars see it as domestic (shopping, cooking, sewing, serving meals), the work of a traditional wife. Some see it, in line with the mission of the Twelve and the seventy (-two), as involving preaching about the kingdom, although women are not explicitly

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commissioned to preach in the New Testament. The term diakonia referred in the early Christian community not to domestic chores but to eucharistic table service and to proclamation of the word (Rom. 11:13; 15:31; 1 Cor. 12:5; 2 Cor. 4:1; 5:18; Acts 6:1, 4). There may be a tradition behind Luke 8:2–3 and Mark 15:41 that women were significant figures in the table community and the intellectual activity that marked the original movement. (The example of Priscilla [Acts 18:26] shows that a woman could be accepted later as an important teacher.) Other scholars think of the women in Luke 8:2–3 as wealthy philanthropists, “benefactors.” However, this does not fit with the widely accepted suggestion that most members of the earliest movement were from the ranks of the poor. Luke’s redactional interest, in placing women followers only in financial support roles, cannot be taken as historical memory. The fact that Luke presents the women as providing or serving out of their “resources” is important for an understanding of Luke’s perspective on wealth and discipleship, as well as the perspective on women. That they (still) have resources means that they are not among the destitute poor. Nor are they disciples in the mind of Luke, since disciples are called to sell “all” and distribute to the poor (18:22; 14:33; see below, however, on 12:33). The women thus are shown aiding the poor (disciples and Jesus), but as patrons from outside their ranks. Apart from divestiture of wealth (a practice adopted according to Luke by the early church; see Acts 4:32–5:11), Luke shows special interest in the right use of possessions or resources by the wealthy (12:15–21; 16:19–31; 19:1–10). Although the saying appears in a sermon to the disciples, the command to “sell your possessions, and give alms” (12:33) seems to be exemplified in the behavior of the women in 8:2–3. These women have “purses that do not grow old,” which Luke opens wide to the men of the movement. Luke’s depiction of a femalesupported, male-led organization has been mirrored down the centuries by many Christian organizations. There is an unintended ironic parallel between the women in 8:2–3 and the widow in 21:1–4, who dropped into the temple treasury “all that she had to live on.” This scene follows the saying condemning scribes who “devour widows’ houses” (20:47). Thus Jesus is not praising the widow’s action but lamenting

it. Despite this overt meaning of the story, however, her story turns out to be that of the women in Luke’s vision of the church as well. Unlike wealthy women who may have contributed financially as well as otherwise to the early phases of a movement in which they were historically full members, the women in Luke– Acts are inadvertently described as supporting a nonegalitarian system that subordinates and exploits them. Martha and Mary (Luke 10:38–42) Popular literature and traditions associated with Martha give evidence that many women have long been uncomfortable with this familiar story, which pits sister against sister. A glance at different commentaries will show that there is no agreement about its basic meaning. Jesus is a guest at the house of Martha, who is “distracted with much serving” (diakonia). Sitting at his feet listening to his “word” is Mary, who is silent throughout. Martha says, “Lord, don’t you care that my sister has left me to serve [diakonein] alone? Tell her then to help me” (my trans.). Her question echoes that of the disciples in the sinking boat in Mark 4:38 (a story Luke does not relate): “Teacher, don’t you care if we die?” Unlike the response of Jesus in the storm at sea, which indicates that Jesus does care (he calms the storm), here he gently chides Martha and leaves things as they are. Her request denied, Martha is silenced. She is the loser, with whom the reader is not supposed to identify, but with whom many readers do. The textual variant found in some manuscripts at verse 42 (“few things are necessary, or only one”) is often understood incorrectly as a comment on the menu for a meal and Martha’s excessive preparations. However, the shorter reading, “one thing is necessary,” is probably more original. Nothing is said about a meal. The “one thing” that is necessary is the “better part” Mary chooses. The implication is clear, that Martha’s part is lesser. One traditional interpretation sees the two women as abstract principles or types. For example, they are said to represent active and contemplative lifestyles, or justification by works and justification by faith, or Judaism and Christianity. Another approach pays attention to the fact that the protagonists are women and attempts to read the story in terms of female careers or priorities or jealousies. Some see here a feminist manifesto of the rights of women to theological education.

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Jesus defends Mary’s right to study with him. His action is often contrasted—incorrectly— with the denial of the right of Jewish women to study Torah. But no such rule existed in Jesus’ day, and so to oppose Jesus to Judaism in this way is simply inaccurate. Recently the narrative has been read by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza as reflecting a debate at the end of the first century CE, both over the roles of women and over emerging offices in the house churches, some of which were founded and led by women. As has been noted above, in Christian usage, diakonia became a technical term referring to eucharistic table service, proclamation, and ecclesial leadership. In the story of Mary and Martha, however, Luke distinguishes diakonia (Martha) and “listening to the word” (Mary) as two distinct roles. Mary’s choice of the latter over the former is praised and defended by the Lord. Luke, Schüssler Fiorenza argues, is thus prescribing for the church of the time, not describing a condition that prevailed then or earlier. It has long been seen that there is some connection between this story and Acts 6:1–6. In the latter passage, there is also a separation of the two tasks of diakonia (preaching and table service) and the subordination of the latter (cf. 1 Tim. 5:17 and 3:8–13). It is clear, however, from the description of the preaching ministry of those devoted to table service (Acts 6:8–7:60), that in the tradition Luke is using, diakonia still refers to both ministries. “Service” (diakonia) and “the word” are not really split apart, as they are in the story of Martha and Mary, the two sisters who do not even speak to each other. With that split, the diakonia of women is reduced and discredited. Finally, it disappears: Acts does not mention any diakonia of women, but only of men (Acts 1:17; 6:1; 11:29; 12:25). Several additional points of contrast should be noted between Mary’s diakonia of the word and that of various male characters. “The word” is preached by both the Twelve and the Seven in Acts, but it is only listened to by Mary, who never speaks, even to question. Her study is totally receptive and passive, not creative learning. In contrast, the missing twelve-year-old Jesus is found in the temple “sitting among the teachers [not at their feet], listening to them and asking them questions” (Luke 2:46). The next verse mentions his answers, not his questions. The Gerasene demoniac sits healed at the

feet of Jesus, begs to stay with him, but is sent away to proclaim what God has done for him (8:35–39). Mary’s position at the feet of Jesus is like that of Paul, brought up at the feet of Gamaliel (Acts 22:3), but Paul’s subordination to his teacher is temporary. In contrast, Luke tells of no subsequent independent teaching or other leadership by Mary. The disciples and apostles in Luke learn often in dialogues (e.g., 5:1–11; 8:4–15; 9:10– 11), but Mary is silent. Her attitude is that of a disciple, but she is not a disciple. She is only an audience. What she has heard and learned at the Lord’s feet is private; it does not instruct and shape the whole community. In contrast to their fate in Luke, Martha and Mary of Bethany, evidently well remembered in the early church, appear in quite a different light in John 11:1–45; 12:1–8. There, both are loved by Jesus, and they are not in competition with each other. Martha, who serves at table, makes the central christological confession of this Gospel, of Jesus as the Christ (cf. the confession of Peter in the Synoptics), and Mary, who also enters into dialogue with Jesus, performs the prophetic action of anointing Jesus’ feet. In John’s portrait of the two sisters, diakonia of the table and of the word remain integrated. Luke does not present Jesus saying, “I permit no woman to teach or preach” or “Women must be silent” or “Only men can be apostles or disciples or deacons.” In the world of Luke, Jesus is not a “divider” (see 12:13). Approved women are shown choosing for themselves the passive role, which the Lord in Luke calls “the better part” (10:42). Martha, who serves unaided, is called “distracted,” “anxious,” and “troubled” about things that are not necessary. Her request for Mary’s help is understood as a spiritual threat to her “sister.” But if Luke 10:38–42 is called on to authorize women’s solid theological education, this text can perform a subversive function—subversive, that is, of Luke’s intent, which is to undermine the leadership of women. The educated woman sees through the text, sees its different levels, and sees Luke’s strategy. Most important here is recognition of the tone of affection and concern and perhaps exasperation, as in the repetition, “Martha, Martha . . .” This is the kindly voice of what has been called “love patriarchalism.” But if one listens—as this passage urges—to the “word of the Lord,” in one’s own experience and that of other women, one may hear behind the

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text another voice encouraging women’s leadership and reconciliation. Women at the Cross and Empty Tomb (Luke 23:49; 24:1–12) In the final three chapters of this Gospel, women all but disappear. This is so because the reader enters the world of male politics, violence, and bonding, but also because Luke is describing last preparations and authorization of male figures for future leadership. The near disappearance of women is achieved in three ways. First, the women become part of a crowd. Second, compared to Mark’s treatment, their role is reduced in significance as those of male characters gain power and become more positive. Third, they are erased as the essential, designated witnesses. Luke’s description of the final events is important for understanding the narrative of the women at the empty tomb. At the Last Supper in Luke, Jesus sits at table “and the apostles with him” (22:14). They are the nucleus of the eschatological community. The Eucharist is Jesus’ legacy, given to them. Jesus confers on the Twelve a kingdom in which there will be continued table community and in which they will “sit on thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel” (22:30). No women are mentioned as present at this scene, or at the Mount of Olives, or at the hearings before the Sanhedrin, Pilate, and Herod. As elsewhere in Luke, the editing of Mark and the addition of new material present the disciples in a more favorable light. It is stressed that they have “stood by” Jesus in his trials so far (22:28) and that they will stand by him to the end. Simon will be tested, but Jesus prays that his faith not fail and that he will in the end strengthen his “brothers” (22:31–32). Some have read these verses as a special commissioning of Peter (cf. Matt. 16:17–19; Mark 1:17; John 21:15–19). Unlike the other Gospels (Mark 14:27; Matt. 26:31; John 16:32), Luke contains no prediction that all the disciples will lose faith and be scattered. They do not abandon Jesus when he is arrested. At a crucial point, the “people” fail in their support of Jesus by following their leaders, the chief priests and rulers (23:13, 18). But this failure is not complete. On the road to The Skull (23:33), Jesus is followed by Simon of Cyrene, carrying the cross of Jesus like a disciple (9:23; 14:27). Also following is “a great multitude of the people, and of women who were beating

their breasts and wailing for him” (23:27, my trans.). The construction and grammar of this sentence, with “who” in Greek referring only to the women, indicate that Luke has added “of the people and” to a source fragment dealing only with the women; this type of addition will be made again in 23:49. The daughters of Jerusalem (23:28), not to be identified with the Galilean women who appear in 23:49, are possibly professional mourners. Representing the city destroyed in 70 CE, they are warned to weep rather for themselves and their children. The coming destruction will be so terrible that barren women will be considered “blessed.” Contrasted now with their scoffing rulers, “the people” stand by watching the crucifixion (23:35). After the death of Jesus, Luke mentions a mass repentance (23:48). Then, in contrast to the other Gospels, which name the small number of witnesses important to the Christian community, Luke describes another crowd: “And all his acquaintances and the women who had followed him from Galilee stood at a distance and saw these things” (23:49 RSV). The important participle at the end of the sentence is feminine plural: the women who had followed him from Galilee “saw.” The Greek again shows that Luke has added others (here, “all his [male] acquaintances”) to a tradition dealing only with women (cf. Mark 15:40). Most commentators think that the phrase is meant to include at least some of the apostles, but Luke cannot state that they were present if it was widely known that they were not. According to Mark and Matthew, only women followers of Jesus witnessed the crucifixion. In John, four women are joined by the male “beloved disciple.” Mark, emphasizing the importance of the women’s witness to the crucifixion, burial, and empty tomb, names them three times in the space of a few verses (Mark 15:40, 47; 16:1) and remarks that they had followed and served (diakonein) Jesus in Galilee. In contrast, Luke neither names them nor mentions their service at this point in the narrative. After the body of Jesus is wrapped and laid in a tomb by Joseph of Arimathea, “the women who had come with him from Galilee followed, and they saw the tomb and how his body was laid. Then they returned, and prepared spices and ointments” (23:55–56). The plan of these Jewish women is to give him a proper burial once the Sabbath is over. (Note that the “acquaintances” have disappeared from the narrative.)

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It is sometimes argued that the tradition of women finding the tomb of Jesus empty is late apologetic, not based on historical memory. One reason given for this position is that no mention of an empty tomb is made in the earliest preaching fragment that Paul hands down (1 Cor. 15:3–7; cf. Acts 13:28–31). Further, Philippians 2:8–11, the Gospel of John, and the Epistle to the Hebrews may reflect an earlier mode of speaking about Jesus’ ultimate destiny, in terms of eternal life of the soul instead of bodily resurrection. However, because of the strong agreements here among the four Gospels, in contrast to the variety in their accounts of resurrection appearances, and because the tomb tradition involves the witness of women (an unlikely choice if invented), many scholars are inclined to treat the narrative as having a historical core. Unfortunately, it may be impossible to reconstruct the Galilean women’s experience and interpretation of the death of Jesus, the empty tomb, and his appearances. But their witness is the bedrock of Christian faith. Luke’s account of the empty tomb is quite different from the narratives found in the canonical Gospels and in the apocryphal Gospel of Peter. Most important, in Luke the women are not commissioned to go tell the disciples that they will see the risen Jesus in Galilee. Instead, reference is made to a prediction of the passion and resurrection made by Jesus to them in Galilee. Strangely, however, this prediction does not match any in Luke’s Gospel (9:22, 44; 18:32–33) but rather is closest to the non-Markan tradition found in Matthew 20:19. Nevertheless, the women remember, and in spite of not being commissioned, they do tell “all this” to the Eleven and the rest. At this point Luke finally names the women: Mary Magdalene, Joanna, and Mary the mother of James. Other women are said to have been with them (24:10). The first two appear also in Luke 8:2–3 and the third in Mark 16:1. Only the name Mary Magdalene is found associated with the empty tomb in all the canonical Gospels and in the Gospel of Peter. Luke says that the report of the women seemed to the apostles “an idle tale,” and they did not believe them (24:11). The Greek term applies to the wild talk of a person in a delirium, hysterical nonsense. The reader, of course, knows that the women’s report is true, and the disciples, as the risen Jesus will later say, are “foolish” and “slow of heart” (24:25). But Luke’s point is not to contrast believing, faithful women

with disbelieving, unfaithful men. Nothing is said about the women believing, although they do remember, and the men have not been unfaithful. The point seems instead to be that the faith of the men who are Jesus’ successors is not based on the word of women, on indirect testimony. Nor is it based on the empty tomb: Peter verifies that it is empty, but the sight creates amazement, not faith (24:12; cf. 24:24). Rather, in this Gospel, faith that Jesus has been raised is based on appearances and teachings of the risen Lord: to Simon (24:34), to the two disciples going to Emmaus (24:31), to the Eleven and their companions (24:41–43, 46, 52). But in Luke the risen Jesus does not appear to women. Their witness is not essential to the Christian faith. In this Gospel, as in 1 Corinthians 15:3–8, there is no appearance to Mary Magdalene or the other women who had been at the cross; contrast Matthew 28:9–10; John 20:11–18; Markan Appendix 16:9, where the first appearance is to her. It is impossible to know for sure what traditions were available to Luke. Perhaps Luke was ignorant of any accounts of appearances of Jesus to women. However, the links with John 20:3, 4, 5, 6, 10 in this section of the special Lukan material can lead one to speculate that Peter’s race to the tomb may have been followed in Luke’s source L, as it is in John, by the tradition of an appearance to Mary Magdalene. But since Acts stresses that only men can witness officially to the resurrection (1:21–26) and lead the Christian community, we can surmise that if Luke had a tradition of an appearance to Mary Magdalene or to another woman, it would have been suppressed in the interests of this perspective on leadership and power, which overarches Luke’s entire work.

Conclusions and Open Questions The oppressive dynamics of the Gospel of Luke have been explored here far more than the liberating elements. Luke is read as showing and exercising pressure on the minority group of Christians in the cities of the Roman East to conform to traditional gender expectations and roles. When that pressure is recognized, one begins to see how influential Luke has been in the creation of Christian assumptions, ideals, and institutions that do not affirm women but instead relegate them to the margins of the community and especially of its leadership.

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The artistic beauty of this Gospel, in its elegant structure, style, and portraits, is in part at the service of this pressure to conform. If one asks about the truth of women’s historical participation in the Jesus movement, the truth of women’s experience and full potential, then in this case beauty is not truth, nor truth beauty. The reader learns to be suspicious of such beauty and to resist certain ways Luke has led women and men to imagine themselves, and led them to act, dream, think, and pray. Luke’s Jesus is the prophet of the Wisdom of God (7:33–35), but he does not call a community of equals. Women are included in Jesus’ entourage and table community, but not as the equals of men. Women speak prophetically (e.g., 1:47–55), but they suffer as prophets no one hears (24:11). Women are models of “listening to the word,” but their prayer and study, unlike that of Jesus and other male characters, does not lead beyond itself to decisive action or to their being recognized as teachers in their own right. With unintended irony, this Gospel contains an exhortation to fearless and irrefutable confession (21:15) and yet silences women. The text excoriates those who reject and murder the prophets, yet itself “kills” female prophecy. It hands on the tradition of the healing of the bent woman (13:10–17), while it praises the posture of female inferiority and passivity. Once the negative side of this ambivalent tradition is recognized and worked with, the reader is freed in relation to the text. What is positive and promising in Luke’s Gospel can be explored with enthusiasm and even respect. Reading with new eyes against Luke’s intent may

bring to light egalitarian traditions preserved in the sources of this Gospel. Rethinking elements of the markedly God-centered Christology of Luke, and of Luke’s insights about poverty and wealth, may prove helpful in creating inclusive visions bent on eliminating rather than glorifying suffering. But enthusiasm for Luke–Acts, the most massive work in the New Testament, is enthusiasm for a formidable opponent, not for an ally. Freedom in relation to this work is freedom to answer back, when the silenced find their voices. Bibliography

Reid, Barbara E. Choosing the Better Part? Women in the Gospel of Luke. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Ringe, Sharon H. Luke. Westminster Bible Companion. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995. Saiving, Valerie. “The Human Situation: A Feminine View.” Journal of Religion 40 (1960): 100–112. Schaberg, Jane. The Illegitimacy of Jesus. New York: Crossroad, 1990. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. “A Feminist Critical Interpretation for Liberation: Martha and Mary: Luke 10:38–42.” Religion and Intellectual Life 3 (1986): 21–35. Seim, Turid Karlsen. The Double Message: Patterns of Gender in Luke and Acts. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1994. Vinson, Richard B. Luke. Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 2008.

Mary and Her Interpreters Brittany E. Wilson

Virgin Mother, Second Eve, Theotokos, Queen of Heaven, Woman of Valor, Mater Dolorosa, Mediatrix, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Mariyam, Black Madonna, Mary of Nazareth: all of these portrayals and more have been applied to Mary over the centuries. As the most iconic woman in the Christian tradition, Mary is the subject of countless texts and artistic renderings, as well as mystical visions, devotional hymns, and prayer practices such as the rosary. She has inspired soaring cathedrals and stirring arias, as well as inner-city murals and massproduced tourist trinkets. She has captured the attention of women and men, theologians and laity, the politically powerful and the politically oppressed. From the ethereal to the mundane, from theological doctrine to personal devotion, Mary is a complex, multifaceted figure who appears in a myriad of manifestations around the world. Despite Mary’s considerable presence in the history of interpretation, she plays a relatively small part in the New Testament itself. Paul may reference Mary when he writes that Jesus was “born of a woman” (Gal. 4:4), but the Gospel authors are the only ones who discuss her at any length. In Mark, Mary appears briefly in 3:31–35 and again in 6:3 in conjunction with Jesus’ other family members. Matthew and Luke include these brief accounts as well (Mark 3:31–35//Matt. 12:46–50//Luke 8:19–21; Mark 6:3//Matt. 13:55), but mainly discuss Mary in the context of their respective infancy narratives (Matt. 1–2; Luke 1–2). Matthew also includes Mary in Jesus’ genealogy (1:16), and Luke references her an additional two times, once implicitly (11:27–28) and a second time explicitly at the outset of Acts (1:14), where she appears alongside the disciples. John positions Mary at both the beginning and end of his Gospel, framing the story of Jesus’ ministry with Mary’s presence at the wedding of Cana (2:1–12) and at the cross (19:25–27). Of these accounts, Luke’s infancy narrative is most often mined for information about Mary, since Luke,

unlike Matthew, presents the story from Mary’s point of view and includes other details such as Mary’s Song, known in tradition as the Magnificat. Outside of the Gospels, however, Mary has also often been identified with John the seer’s vision of “a woman clothed with the sun” in Revelation 12. Although this vision may represent Mary insofar as the woman gives birth to a messianic figure, most scholars today agree that this woman in all likelihood symbolizes Israel. Early Christian interpreters, however, did not confine Mary to these few New Testament references, but searched Israel’s Scriptures for prophecies and typologies concerning her. Early exegetes, including Matthew himself, often thought that the prophet Isaiah foretold Mary when he spoke of a “virgin” or “young girl” who would conceive and bear a son called Immanuel (Isa. 7:14; cf. Matt. 1:22–23). In the vein of increasingly popular allegorical approaches, Christian interpreters also found intimations of Mary in the form of “types,” or female figures from Israel’s Scriptures who prefigured Mary. Of these “types,” the most popular female figures included Moses’ sister Miriam in Exodus and Numbers, Woman Wisdom or “Sophia” in Proverbs 8 and the Wisdom of Solomon, and the bride in the Song of Songs. Yet in all of Israel’s sacred texts, Eve in Genesis 1–3 emerged as Mary’s most famous “type,” or rather “antitype.” From the second century onward, male authors paired the two in opposition, extending the distinction Paul makes between Adam and Christ in Romans 5 and 1 Corinthians 15 to include Eve and Mary. According to the early church father Irenaeus, who is the first to develop this Eve/Mary parallel at length, “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was loosed by the obedience of Mary” (Against Heresies 3.22.4; Ante-Nicene Fathers 1:455). Here and elsewhere, Mary is fashioned as a “Second Eve” whose obedience brings salvation and undoes the disobedience of her sinful predecessor. Aside from her scriptural precursors, Mary’s virginity was also an early point of interest,

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as seen in the second-century infancy narrative known as the Protevangelium of James. In this noncanonical Christian text, Mary is both the main character and the paragon of sacred purity. Not only is she miraculously conceived to the delight of her parents Anna and Joachim, but Mary remains a virgin before, during, and after Jesus’ birth. This emphasis on Mary’s chastity and perpetual virginity is probably due in part to Jewish polemic that identified Mary as a harlot who conceived Jesus out of wedlock. Regardless of its apologetic function, however, this influential second-century text had a huge impact on understandings of Mary that can still be felt to this day. In addition to belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, numerous Christian authors later created their own encomiums to Mary’s virginity, with ascetics in particular holding up Mary as a model for the life of sexual abstinence and self-denial. Along with her virginity, interest in Mary’s maternity also figures peripherally in early christological debates. On the one hand, some Christians known as Docetists maintained that Jesus only appeared to be a human being and that Mary was merely a vessel through whom Jesus passed, akin to water passing through a tube. On the other hand, other Christians argued that Mary’s human child could not possibly be the Son of God, and that he only became God’s Son when God later adopted him. Other early Christians countered both of these claims, affirming that Jesus was in fact born of the woman Mary and that this same Jesus was also God. In 431, Mary’s maternity was further specified at the Council of Ephesus, which declared that Mary was Theotokos, “God-bearer,” or “Mother of God.” By naming Mary Theotokos, the council countered the position of Nestorius, bishop of Constantinople, who denied Mary this title and said that she was only the Mother of Christ, or Christotokos. The council decided that the position of Nestorius and his followers undermined the unity of Christ’s personhood as both divine and human and so ruled in favor of the Theotokos title. Although the ruling was primarily christological in nature, popular response to the council’s decision affirmed that Mary’s more exalted role as Mother of God was important to many. This early attention to Mary, however, pales in comparison to the virtual explosion of Marian discourse and devotion during the Middle Ages. During this period, Mary emerged as

a person of interest in her own right and was bequeathed a number of intersecting titles and roles. By drawing on the imagery of Revelation 12, Mary often appeared as royalty, specifically the Queen of Heaven, enthroned at Christ’s right hand and receiving a crown. Queen of Heaven iconography also became standard in depictions of female rulers and political figures, a trend that extended well beyond the Middle Ages to women such as Elizabeth I (the “Virgin Queen”) and Eva Peron. The medieval portrayal of Mary also celebrated her as the Woman of Valor, drawn from Proverbs 31:10 of the Vulgate, to signify her role as warrior and conqueror. Mary’s blessing would be invoked by armies before going into battle, and her image would fly high on banners overhead, especially during the Crusades. Just as Mary, the “Second Eve,” was believed to have vanquished Satan, so was she believed to help vanquish one’s enemies. Another pervasive medieval Marian motif concerns Mary’s grief at the death of her son. Mary’s portrait as a grieving mother draws from her appearance at the crucifixion in John’s Gospel, as well as the prophecy in Luke 2:35 that a sword will pierce Mary’s soul. This Mater Dolorosa, or Mother of Sorrows, motif traverses art, poetry, sacred song, and visions throughout the medieval period and is especially prominent among women mystics. Birgitta of Sweden, for instance, recounts in her mystical Revelations that Jesus identifies his mother’s suffering with his own, and she elsewhere paraphrases the account of the crucifixion from Mary’s own point of view. More than any other literary or artistic representation, however, Michelangelo’s sculpture Pietà most famously captures the depth of Mary’s grief, as she sits cradling the broken body of her crucified son. In addition to Mary’s portrayal as Mater Dolorosa, there was also a growing emphasis on Mary’s role as Mediatrix, a title that gained widespread acceptance during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As Mediatrix, Mary held a twofold mediating position: first with respect to the plan of salvation and second with respect to her continuing intercession between Christ and humanity. As the theologian Bernard of Clairvaux explains in his sermons “In Praise of the Virgin Mary,” God’s decision to indwell in Mary and her consent to this decision made the incarnation, and therefore redemption, possible. Furthermore, Mary’s role as a merciful mother also continues to make her an

Madonna and Child, a woodcut by an unknown artist, is from Der sechs vn[d] dreyssigist psalm Dauid: eynen Christlichen Menschen tzu leren vn[d] trösten widder die Mütterey der Bössenn vnnd freueln Gleyssner by Martin Luther (1521).

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efficacious intercessor between sinful humanity and her son, who is both God and Judge. With the rise of the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, however, this widespread attention to Mary came under attack. Reformers especially took issue with Mary’s role as Mediatrix, arguing that the intercessory implications of this title could be interpreted as diminishing the glory of Christ, the sole Mediator. In response to what reformers deemed Mariolatry, Luther and Calvin among others applied the principle of sola scriptura to Marian devotion, rejecting “maximalist” approaches that could not be supported in canonical texts. To be sure, many reformers still held Mary in high esteem, with Calvin, for example, deeming that she was granted one of the highest honors among humans and Luther asserting her perpetual virginity. Overall, however, Mary bore the brunt of reformers’ iconoclastic zeal and was primarily viewed as a model of faith. Although Mary held a more diminished role in Protestant circles, she continued to have a place of privilege among Orthodox and Catholic Christians. In the wake of the Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church for instance made it officially clear that God and Christ were central in the plan of salvation, but that Mary still played an important part in that plan. Such discussion coalesced in the “Marian movement” from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, a period marked by papal definition of two Marian dogmas and numerous Marian apparitions (some recognized by the church and some not). In 1854, Pope Pius IX decreed the doctrine of the immaculate conception (which means that Mary was without original sin from the moment of her conception), and in 1950, Pope Pius XII decreed Mary’s bodily assumption to heaven. Furthermore, from the 1830s to the 1930s, an unprecedented number of laypeople and peasants were recipients of Marian apparitions. Of these, the most celebrated occurred in 1858 at Lourdes, France, and in 1917 at Fatima, Portugal. An earlier apparition in 1531 at Guadalupe, Mexico, known as Our Lady of Guadalupe, also held iconic sway in Mexico during this time period and served as an important symbol throughout struggles for independence from Spain in the nineteenth century and the Mexican Revolution in the twentieth century. During the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, however, Protestants have increasingly turned their attention to Mary, often in the

form of ecumenical dialogue with Catholic and Orthodox Christians. Mary also plays an integral role in interfaith dialogue between Christians and members of other world religions. For example, one of the longest sections in the Qur’an focuses on Mary, named Mariyam (Surah 19), and many Muslims honor Mariyam as the mother of Jesus and as one of God’s chosen. Commonalities between Mary and various female deities in Buddhism and Hinduism have also been noted by those interested in interfaith dialogue. Mary’s religious syncretism has also become a recent point of interest, since Mary frequently embodies a blending of different cultures and religious traditions. This syncretism is especially manifested in the phenomenon of the Black Madonna, a mixture of Marian imagery and ancient Mother Goddess imagery indigenous to Eurasian, Native American, and African cultures. In addition to Our Lady of Guadalupe (a blend of Spanish depictions of Mary and Mexican Aztec goddesses), the medieval icon of Our Lady of Częstochowa in Poland is perhaps the most popular Black Madonna, with pilgrimages to Częstochowa persisting to this day. Mary has also recently garnered a lot of attention among liberation theologians and feminists. For liberation theologians, Mary is an important symbol of the downtrodden and oppressed via her identification with the “lowly” in the Magnificat. Our Lady of Guadalupe is in particular associated with the class and ethnic struggles of the native Indian population under Spanish colonial domination, and she continues to hold national and political significance as the unofficial mother of Mexico. Feminists, however, are ambivalent about Mary’s role. On the one hand, some feminists view Mary with suspicion, highlighting how she has been a source of oppression for women. Men, in an effort to define and control female lives, have long preached to women that they need to model themselves after Mary—especially her humility, obedience, and subservience. Mary has been held up as the “female ideal,” yet as both virgin and mother, Mary is also the “great exception.” Mary is the unsullied, privileged woman who is idealized over against all other women; as Marina Warner concludes, Mary is “alone of all her sex.” On the other hand, other feminists view Mary as a potential source of inspiration and empowerment for women. Mary can help counterbalance

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a patriarchal view of God and has been a wellspring of resistance, comfort, and strength for millions of women over the years. Elizabeth Johnson is paradigmatic of this position when she argues that feminists should not be too hasty to abandon Mary to their patriarchal opponents. So long as she is not a symbol or “female ideal,” Mary offers a subversive power that enables women to see her as “truly our sister.” Overall, there is a plethora of portraits in Mary’s long and multivalent interpretative history. She is virgin and mother, warrior and weeper, mediator and model, oppressor and oppressed. She is cast as both black and white, rich and poor, heroic and humble, powerful and powerless. Despite these often contradictory manifestations, many of which extend well beyond her few scriptural appearances, Mary still reigns as the most readily recognized and richly textured woman in the Christian tradition. Bibliography

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts, and Cynthia L. Rigby, eds. Blessed One: Protestant

Perspectives on Mary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002. Irenaeus. Against Heresies. Vol. 1 of AnteNicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A.D. 325. Edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1986. Johnson, Elizabeth A. Truly Our Sister: A Theology of Mary in the Communion of Saints. New York: Continuum, 2003. Oleszkiewicz-Peralba, Małgorzata. The Black Madonna in Latin America and Europe: Tradition and Transformation. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2007. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Tavard, George H. The Thousand Faces of the Virgin Mary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1996. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf, distributed by Random House, 1976. Repr., New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Gospel of John Gail R. O’Day

Introduction John’s Canonical Voice The basic plot structure of all four canonical Gospels is remarkably similar: all tell the story of a prophetic teacher and healer whose challenge of the status quo of religious and political systems led to his trial and public execution. All contain the promise of God’s victory over death in the resurrection. All four also share many particular narrative details, for example, the giving of sight to the blind, restoring the ability to walk to those who are paralyzed, a miracle of bread and fish. All four contain lengthy accounts of the trial and death of Jesus. The story and details that are shared by all four canonical Gospels form an important starting point for any introduction to the Gospel of John, because the differences between John and the other Gospels are often exaggerated, with little attention to what all canonical Gospels have in common. Matthew, Mark, and Luke are grouped together under the title the Synoptic Gospels (literally, “the Gospels that see together”), further suggesting that these three Gospels speak with a common voice and that John is the only Gospel with a distinctive voice. The lectionaries in current use in the church reinforce this view of the interrelationship of the canonical Gospels, because they follow a three-year cycle, with one year devoted to each of the Synoptic Gospels. The Synoptic Gospels do agree with one another in ways that John does not share. For example, in the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’ public ministry begins in Galilee, and Jesus moves out of Galilee into Judea only once, in the journey

to Jerusalem that culminates in his death. In John, Jesus’ ministry alternates between Galilee and Jerusalem. He makes three trips to Jerusalem (2:13; 5:1; 7:10) in contrast to the one trip of the Synoptic Gospels. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus’ public ministry lasts one year, whereas John narrates a three-year public ministry. In the Synoptic Gospels, Jesus often speaks in parables; in John he rarely does. Yet to identify the Synoptic Gospels as the single norm against which John should be measured and interpreted does a disservice to John in particular, but more importantly, also distorts our understanding of the New Testament Gospel literature more generally. There is no single New Testament story of Jesus, and John’s story of Jesus cannot be understood fully when it is read primarily as “other” or “different.” Each canonical Gospel is engaged in interpreting the meaning of the Jesus story for the faith needs of a particular community. Each Gospel selects details from the life and ministry of Jesus—none of them is encyclopedic in scope—to highlight a particular understanding of the ways in which Jesus revealed God to the world and the ways a community can shape its life and faith around that revelation. The church’s faith is fuller when the particularities of each Gospel story are recognized and celebrated for their distinctive contribution to the story of God in Jesus. Recognition of the range and distinctiveness of NT Gospel portraits of Jesus is an important starting point and building block of feministattuned readings of these texts. That the NT Gospels contain multiple stories and images of 517

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Jesus suggests that from early on, the NT writers recognized the depth and richness in presenting a variety of theological and narrative perspectives. To name and claim voices and emphases in the Gospel of John (or any NT text) that may differ from the dominant cultural or church narrative about Jesus and the Christian faith continues this theological practice.

Historical and Social Setting The author of the Gospel of John, like the authors of the other Gospels, is anonymous. The name “John” was attached to this Gospel by the church, and its author was identified as the apostle John. However, there is no evidence to suggest that the Gospel was actually written by this apostle. The Gospel names “the beloved disciple” as the guarantor of its tradition (19:35; 21:20–24) but does not give this disciple a name. That the guarantor of this tradition is identified by his relationship to Jesus (“beloved”) and not by his name reinforces one of the central emphases of this Gospel: the centrality of relationship with Jesus. Neither does the Gospel of John provide a clear indication of its place of composition; it is written in Greek, which was spoken throughout the Mediterranean world. In the late twentieth century, it was conventional for scholars to speak of a definitive rupture between the synagogue and the Jewish Christians for whom the Gospel of John was written, and to date that break (and hence the composition of the Gospel) to the late 80s or 90s. John 9 was seen as the signal passage that illustrated this break between the synagogue and those Jews who claimed Jesus as the Messiah. More recent scholarship has begun to take a more nuanced approach to this question, however. There is no doubt that tension between the Jewish religious establishment and Jesus and his followers permeates the Gospel of John. Yet the exact nature of that tension, and what John means by the term “the Jews,” is difficult to reproduce. This is not to soft-pedal the rhetoric of the Gospel of John; John 8, in particular, contains vitriolic language that parallels in intensity the anti-Pharisee language of Matthew 23. Yet solutions to this tension that point knowingly to the rupture with the synagogue often inadvertently create new problems, because the responsibility for the tension is shifted to the

Jewish religious authorities who forced the Jewish Christians out of the synagogue. The social context of the first-century Mediterranean world was much more complex than a simple Jew/Christian polarity. Everyone in ancient Palestine was first and foremost a subject of the Roman Empire, and all religious, economic, and social life took place under the reality of imperial domination. For all Jews, both those who understood Jesus to be the fresh and definitive revelation of God in the world and those who did not, life was fraught with tension. Among canonical NT books, this tension is most on display in Revelation, where one of the author’s central theological goals is to enable the readers to see the Roman Empire for what it is—a threat to God’s reign in the world—and to encourage them to resist accommodating their lives to the empire’s values. The Gospel of John was written in the same social setting, and the religious interactions in the book need to be read in that light. Much like the audience for Revelation, the community that read the Gospel of John was faced with a complex set of social choices: to stay in the synagogue as a member of a religious group officially recognized by the Roman Empire and thereby avoid the empire’s fresh scrutiny; to stay in the synagogue and also worship with Jewish Christians privately, outside of imperial view and safe from imperial sanction; to break with the synagogue, worship openly, and take the imperial consequences. For John, the third option was the only real choice, and he casts the choice throughout the Gospel in very stark terms. Like the author of Revelation, John has little patience with those who take what he perceives to be the safe course. He calls his readers to do exactly what Jesus did—live one’s faith and love of God publicly, even if the cost for that is execution at the hands of Rome. The values of resistance and witness that shape John’s Gospel are consistent with a feminist critique of power; John challenged his readers not to take the easy way and accommodate to existing social structures. Yet John’s rhetoric about “the Jews” and the demands of faithful witness has a tragic history of misappropriation by later Christian communities. John’s rhetoric has been turned into an instrument of power and oppression rather than understood as an instrument of resistance. A feminist reading of John’s language about “the Jews” enables a multifocused reading of this issue: one that

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is attentive to the voice of resistance in John’s worldview, but one that recognizes that, even in John’s original context, this language of resistance was not value-neutral and that whatever its original purpose, the consequences of this rhetoric of resistance continue to have ethical implications for all Christians.

Structure and Contents The Gospel of John opens with an eighteenverse prologue that signals to the reader what lies ahead. One helpful image for these opening verses is the overture to a musical or opera. The overture contains all the musical themes of the work that follows, but it is only as the opera or musical unfolds that the audience can recognize all the themes. The theme of the incarnation is clustered in the conclusion of the prologue, in verses 14, 16, and 18, so that—to continue to musical metaphor—the crescendo of the incarnation theme propels the reader forward into the Gospel’s story of Jesus. For the Gospel of John, the center of the Jesus story is the incarnation: “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.” The Gospel’s focus on incarnation and embodiment makes John an important resource for feminist theological

conversations on embodiment, because in John, salvation is found in and through the flesh, not apart from the flesh. John 1 ends with a promise that Jesus’ disciples will “see greater things than these” (1:51), and the Gospel story can be read as the narrative fulfillment of that promise. The Gospel divides into two large sections: chapters 2–12, Jesus’ ministry, and chapters 13–21, Jesus’ last days (arrest, trial, death, and resurrection). The central focus of both parts of the Gospel is always on how Jesus reveals God through Jesus’ words and his actions. Women characters play significant roles in the Gospel of John in ways unparalleled in the other canonical Gospels. The opening miracle in Jesus’ ministry occurs at a woman’s initiative (2:1–11). Women are Jesus’ main conversation partners in three pivotal stories that reveal Jesus’ identity and vocation and the nature of faithful discipleship (4:4–42; 7:53–8:11; 11:1– 44). Jesus’ death is watched over by the women from its preparation (12:1–8) through crucifixion (19:25–27) and resurrection (20:1–18). Men do not have a monopoly on witness and discipleship in John; rather, the Gospel of John narrates a faith world that would not exist without women’s participation.

Comment The Incarnation (John 1) The classic statement of 1:14 (my trans.), “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we have beheld his glory, glory as of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth,” establishes the incarnation theme. It is further amplified by 1:16, “From his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace,” and 1:18, “No one has ever seen God. It is God the only Son, who is close to the Father’s heart, who has made God known.” These verses are the necessary frame for understanding John’s story of the revelation of God in Jesus. God is made known in the enfleshed life of the Word in the world, and that life is one of fullness and grace. This contrasts sharply with themes of sacrifice and emptying, common in other NT writings and later Christian traditions. John 1:14 could not be farther removed from the kenotic perspective

of Philippians 2:6–7, for example. For Paul, the incarnation is a moment of emptying, of “giving up” that reaches its nadir in the death on the cross (Phil. 2:8). The low point of the death is then balanced by the high point of exaltation (Phil. 2:9). This perspective dominates most conversations, especially Protestant conversations, about the life and death of Jesus. But for John, the incarnation is not an emptying; rather, as 1:14 and 16 make abundantly clear, the incarnation is a moment of fullness. Flesh is where the action is—where the Word encounters and engages the world. The prologue also introduces the language of father and son, language that underscores the importance of embodiment for John. John 1:18 speaks of Jesus as monogenēs (regularly translated as “the only begotten”). Monogenēs is an adjective formed by adding “mono” (single) to the verb gennēthenai, which importantly can mean both “begotten” and “born or birthed.” The

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English reader of gennēthenai is forced to choose between a translation that favors the male procreative role (begotten—sired, to use an oldfashioned phrase), or the female role (birthed). Most translations favor the “begotten” side of that translation choice, yet it is a more accurate reading to imagine both aspects of gennēthenai at play simultaneously. The addition of the prefix “mono” names the distinctive relationship of the incarnate Word to God: the Son is the only begotten/birthed one of the Father. The use of this adjective with multiple meanings enables John to evoke in one word the full range of human birth and generation in describing the incarnation. That the Son is both “sired” by the Father and “birthed” by the Father suggests that conventional understandings of gender are being redefined. The vocabulary may name conventionally male roles, but the enactment of those roles by God and Jesus transform gender.

Jesus’ Ministry (John 2–12) The Wedding at Cana (John 2:1–11) John 2:1–11 is the opening event in Jesus’ ministry. In 1:35–51, Jesus gathers his first disciples, and in 2:1–11 he attends a wedding with them (2:2). Jesus’ mother is also in attendance (2:1). This is the first mention of Jesus’ mother in John. Verse 2 indicates that Jesus “was invited” to the wedding. He is not the host of the wedding feast but a guest like everyone else. Jesus’ mother is the catalyst for the miracle in this story. When the wine at the wedding feast runs out, Jesus’ mother informs him of this lack. When Jesus’ mother speaks to him in 2:3, she asks nothing explicit of him, but Jesus’ response in verse 4 makes clear that her words contain an implied request. Jesus’ words to his mother in 2:4 seem harsh to the modern ear: “Woman, what concern is that to you and to me? My hour has not yet come.” His words are not an act of rudeness to his mother, however, but are an important assertion of Jesus’ freedom from all human control. Verse 4 insists that Jesus’ actions will not be dictated by anyone else’s time or will. His mother’s response indicates that she understands this. She tells the servants with utter confidence that Jesus will do something. His mother enacts discipleship: she trusts that Jesus will act and allows him to act in freedom. The miracle that Jesus performs is appropriate to the personal setting of the wedding. Turning water into wine is an act of turning scarcity

into abundance, of repaying the initial hospitality offered him. Jesus’ first miracle in John takes place in the presence of friends and family, not in the presence of powers and authorities. This opening to Jesus’ ministry shows that the miraculous life-giving power of God is at work even (and perhaps, especially) in the intimate daily places of human lives. It also is a miracle of pure abundance and grace—nothing life-threatening was at stake here, as will be the case in many of Jesus’ healing miracles. This miracle illustrates the celebration of the prologue, “from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace.” New Birth (John 3) The monogenēs of the prologue occurs again in the Gospel at 3:3–8, in the conclusion to Jesus’ teachings to Nicodemus about new birth. The exchange between Jesus and Nicodemus centers around the meaning of birth and embodiment, expressed with two words with double meanings, gennēthenai and anōthen (which can equally be translated “anew” or “from above”). The most frequent translation choice for anōthen, “anew” or “again,” privileges its temporal dimension and renders invisible its spatial or physical dimensions. Nicodemus has difficulty understanding the language of anōthen, in part because he cannot hold the physical and the spiritual together (“How can anyone be born after having grown old? Can one enter a second time into the mother’s womb and be born?”). Jesus tries to clarify Nicodemus’s misunderstanding by restating the kind of birth he envisions with the phrase “born of water and Spirit.” This phrase highlights the new life of which Jesus speaks, because “water” evokes the waters of physical birth, and “spirit” points to a new birth from God. The physical birth and the spiritual rebirth go hand in hand here. They are not distinct options, because flesh and spirit belong together in the new birth Jesus envisions. One is not reborn to a new life apart from the physical body; one is reborn to a new life within the physical body. What Jesus offers Nicodemus is what Jesus himself embodies in the incarnation: Godmade-present in the flesh. The promise of new life that Jesus extends here is a promise that will be experienced in the body of the believer and made possible by the body of Jesus. Jesus engages believers with his body—the living water that flows from his belly (or, as it can also be translated, his womb, 7:37–39), his body

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bread, his blood wine (6:53). Jesus’ body is the temple (2:21). Jesus’ body is the place where God dwells, the place where God’s presence can be found in the world (cf. also 1:51). Jesus’ miracles are enacted in the realm of the body and its physical functions—a superabundance of wine, bread, and fish, healings, the raising of a man from the dead. The feminist theme of embodiment is central to this Gospel. Jesus and the Samaritan Woman (John 4:4–42) Prior to this story of Jesus’ visit to Samaria, Jesus’ activity has centered on the people and places of official Judaism (e.g., 2:13–25; 3:1–21). When Jesus travels to Samaria (4:4), he moves away from official Judaism. At the time of Jesus, Jews and Samaritans were bitter enemies (see 4:9). The source of the enmity between them was a dispute about the correct location of the cultic place of worship, a problem the Samaritan woman herself puts before Jesus (4:20). Although the break between Jews and Samaritans is first narrated in 2 Kings 17, the most intense rivalry began about 300 BCE. The Samaritans built and worshiped at a shrine on Mount Gerizim, a shrine that competed with the temple in Jerusalem. This shrine eventually was destroyed by Jewish troops in 128 BCE. When Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well, he meets someone who provides a striking contrast to all that has preceded. When Jesus speaks with Nicodemus in John 3, he speaks with a male member of the Jewish religious establishment. In John 4 he speaks with a female member of an enemy people. Nicodemus has a name, but the woman is unnamed. She is known only by what she is: a foreign woman. The woman herself notes the scandal of their conversation. She responds to Jesus’ request for water with the words, “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?” (4:9). The woman knows that a Jewish man should not talk with a Samaritan woman. Moreover, a Jew should not consider drinking water from a Samaritan vessel (4:9). The scandal is noted also by Jesus’ disciples when they arrive at the well (4:27). They are amazed that Jesus speaks with this woman. The disciples want to ask Jesus why he is speaking with her, but their question remains unvoiced. Their protests reflect traditional

cultural and social conventions and expectations, and their protests show their distance from Jesus and his work in the world. Jesus breaks open boundaries in his conversation with the Samaritan woman: the boundary between male and female, the boundary between “chosen people” and “rejected people.” Jesus’ journey to Samaria and his conversation with the woman demonstrate that the grace of God that he offers is available to all. This conversation challenges the status quo by offering the water of life (4:13– 14) to a Samaritan woman. Perhaps it is not surprising that commentators on this text have more readily accepted the offer of the gospel to the Samaritans, a despised people, than they have accepted the offer of the gospel to the woman, a despised sex. This resistance to Jesus’ boundary breaking in his conversation with the woman takes two main forms. First, many commentators raise questions about the woman’s moral character. Second, many commentators express doubts about the woman’s intellectual or theological ability to engage Jesus in serious conversation. Both strategies attempt to delegitimize the woman as a conversation partner for Jesus and hence as a recipient of the gospel. The popular portrait of the woman in John 4 as a woman of dubious morals, guilty of aberrant sexual behavior, derives from a misreading of John 4:16–18. In these verses, the Samaritan woman tells Jesus she has no husband (4:17). Jesus responds to the woman’s words by telling her the story of her life (4:18). The text does not say, as most interpreters automatically assume, that the woman has been divorced five times but that she has had five husbands. There are many possible reasons for the woman’s marital history, and one should be leery of the dominant explanation of moral laxity. Perhaps the woman, like Tamar in Genesis 38, is trapped in the custom of levirate marriage and the last male in the family line has refused to marry her. Significantly, the reasons for the woman’s marital history intrigue commentators but do not seem to concern Jesus. Nor does Jesus pass moral judgment on the woman because of her marital history and status. All such judgments are imported into the text by interpreters. When interpreters speak of the woman as “a five-time loser” or a “tramp” (as has been the case in scholarship about this story), they are reflecting their own prejudices against women, not the views of the text.

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When one sets aside the prejudicial misreading of John 4:16–18 and reads the story on its own terms, one sees that the conversation about the woman’s husbands serves two purposes. First, it illustrates Jesus’ ability to see and know all things. This is an important theme in John (e.g., 1:48–50; 2:24). Second, it is a moment of revelation for the woman, a moment when she is able to see Jesus with new eyes. She responds to Jesus’ announcement of her marital status with the words, “Sir, I see that you are a prophet” (4:19). This exchange between Jesus and the Samaritan woman about her husbands does not delegitimize the woman because of her supposed immorality but instead shows the woman’s growing faith. The woman’s recognition of Jesus as a prophet leads her to ask him the most pressing theological question that stands between Jews and Samaritans (4:20): Where is the proper place to worship God? Yet many commentators have dismissed the woman’s words to Jesus as a psychological ploy, as a classical act of evasion to change the subject from the embarrassing truth about her morals. Commentators doubt whether this woman would have been able to understand the substance of Jesus’ words to her. Once again we see presuppositions about women (women’s intellect and interests) skewing a faithful reading of the text. The text pre­ sents the woman as a character who is unafraid to stay in conversation with Jesus, who recognizes that a prophet is the perfect person of whom to ask her question. The woman is the first character in the Gospel to engage in sustained theological conversation with Jesus. At the end of the conversation about worship (4:20–26), the woman’s faith grows again, as she begins to think about the possibility of Jesus being the Messiah (4:29). The outcome of the story of John 4:4–42 itself offers a persuasive counterbalance to any attempts to diminish the woman’s identity and role. When Jesus’ disciples return from the city (4:27), the woman leaves Jesus and goes into the city to testify to her townspeople about Jesus (4:29). On the basis of the woman’s testimony (4:30, 39), many of the Samaritan villagers believe in Jesus and go to meet Jesus for themselves. To witness to Jesus—to see Jesus and tell others about that experience—is one of the primary marks of discipleship in John. John the Baptist witnessed to Jesus and led some of his own disciples to Jesus (1:29–37). Jesus’ first

disciples witnessed to him, and the number of his followers grew (1:40–49). Now the Samaritan woman witnesses to Jesus, and through her words many come to faith. When the Samaritan villagers hear and see Jesus for themselves, the woman’s witness is superseded (4:42). That is the appropriate pattern of discipleship and faith. The witness that leads to Jesus is replaced by one’s own experience of Jesus. The Samaritan woman is a witness and disciple like John the Baptist, Andrew, and Philip. A Textual Interlude: Scribes, Pharisees, and Women (John 7:53–8:11) The story traditionally known as “the Woman Taken in Adultery” has a complicated textual history. The passage is missing from the earliest Greek manuscripts of John. When the passage is found in manuscripts, it appears in several locations. This location after 7:52 is the best-attested, but some manuscripts place the passage after John 7:36, or at the end of the Gospel of John. The complicated textual history influences the way the passage is printed in most English translations (note the brackets that surround John 7:53–8:11 in the NRSV) and has occasioned much scholarly debate. The scholarly consensus holds that the story is an authentic piece of Jesus tradition, but opinion is divided on whether or not the story belonged originally to the tradition of the Gospel of John. When reading John 7:53–8:11, the interpreter finds a situation unique to the New Testament—a well-known Jesus story that is told and retold in the life of the church, but whose textual and canonical status is up for debate. This presents a challenge to the interpreter: while one can comment on the contents and theology of this particular passage, one cannot really move from there to talk about how this passage fits in the larger scheme of John. John 7:53–8:11 is a story without a time or place, a story to be read on its own terms without sustained reference to its larger literary context. Just as popular interpretation reads John 4:16–18 as a judgment against the Samaritan woman, popular interpretation of 7:53–8:11 reads this text as a judgment against the woman. In the most prevalent reading of this text, which can be traced back to Augustine, Jesus is the embodiment of grace and the woman is the embodiment of sin. A careful reading of the story, however, shows that this narrow polarity between Jesus and the woman distorts the text.

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The story consists of three scenes. The action of the story begins when the scribes and Pharisees bring the woman who has been caught in adultery to Jesus and ask him to judge her case (8:3–5). The second scene of the story begins in 8:6b when Jesus bends down and writes on the ground with his finger. He writes on the ground to indicate his unwillingness to spring the trap that has been set for him. The scribes and Pharisees continue to press him for an answer; so in 8:7 Jesus stands and addresses them directly. The last scene of the story begins in 8:8, when Jesus bends down and writes on the ground again. The crowd departs while Jesus writes on the ground (8:9). In 8:10 Jesus stands up again and speaks to the woman twice. When he finishes speaking to her, she is free to go, just as the rest of the crowd did. What is striking about this story is that Jesus treats the woman as the social and human equal of the scribes and Pharisees. Jesus speaks to both sets of characters about sin. His words to the scribes and Pharisees, “Let anyone among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her” (8:7), envision the past, the way the crowd has lived until this moment. His words to the woman, “Neither do I condemn you. Go your way, and from now on do not sin again” (8:11), envision the future, the way the woman could live from now on. Jesus invites both the scribes and Pharisees and the woman to begin life anew in the present moment. They are invited to give up old ways and enter a new way of life. When the scribes and Pharisees brought the woman who had been caught in adultery to Jesus, they dehumanized her, turning her into an object for debate and discussion. Interpretations of John 7:53–8:11 that focus exclusively on the woman, and on her sexual behavior as sin, continue to dehumanize and objectify her. The text does not isolate the woman’s sin, nor does Jesus single out the woman as “sinner.” Rather, the text identifies all the characters as in need of and receiving an invitation to new life. Jesus’ offer of grace and mercy to sinners is extended equally to scribes, Pharisees, and women. Mary, Martha, and Jesus (John 11:1–44) The miracle of the raising of Lazarus is the climax of John 11:1–44, but it is not its center. Of the forty-four verses that constitute this story, only seven of them take place at Lazarus’s tomb (11:38–44). The story centers on the

conversations in which Jesus participates as he travels to Lazarus’s tomb. These conversations highlight that the raising of Lazarus is the demonstration of God’s power for life. Jesus’ main conversation partners as he travels to Lazarus’s tomb are Mary and Martha, Lazarus’s sisters. The opening verses of this story contain many references to the family of Lazarus, Mary, and Martha. Lazarus and his illness are mentioned first in 11:1, but the town in which Lazarus lives, Bethany, is identified as “the village of Mary and her sister Martha” (11:1). The sisters are better known than their brother. Verse 2 tells us why Mary is so well known. She is the one “who anointed the Lord with perfume and wiped his feet with her hair.” Since the anointing does not take place until the next chapter (12:1–8), this reference testifies to the powerful place Mary occupied in the tradition of the early church. One could not speak of this Mary without remembering the story of the anointing (cf. Mark 14:9). Mary and Martha’s initiative sets this story in motion (11:3). Their message about Lazarus’s illness resembles the words of Jesus’ mother in 2:3 about the wine shortage. In both cases the women do not explicitly request anything of Jesus; they simply present Jesus with the facts. Yet in both cases the reader senses that these women address Jesus with the confidence that he will know what to do. The motivation for Mary and Martha’s address to Jesus, and perhaps the source of their confidence in him as well, is their knowledge of his love for Lazarus. Like the story of Jesus and his mother in chapter 2, this is a story about intimates. John 11:5 shows that Mary and Martha are correct: Jesus loves the whole family. Yet Jesus’ actions in response to that love are puzzling. Instead of rushing to the assistance of this beloved family, Jesus stays away longer (11:6). Jesus is not insensitive to the family’s needs, but he understands that this family drama belongs to a larger story. Lazarus’s illness is part of the story of the glory of God (11:4). This illness is not an isolated event but is part of Jesus’ ministry and mission (11:15). When Jesus finally heads for this family in Bethany, he does so knowing that his return to Judea carries with it the possibility of his own death (11:8). Jesus’ own future and the future of this family are inextricably linked. When Jesus arrives at Bethany, Lazarus has been buried for four days (11:17). Men and

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women from the Jewish community have come to mourn with the two sisters (11:19). When word of Jesus’ approach reaches this grieving family and community, Martha goes first to meet him, while Mary stays at home (11:20). This detail is reminiscent of the story of Mary and Martha in Luke 10:38–42. Luke and John both may be preserving memories of the same family. The conversation between Martha and Jesus is the theological heart of this story. Martha’s opening words to Jesus express both complaint and confidence: “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died. But even now I know that God will give you whatever you ask of him” (11:21–22). Martha’s bold and robust faith empowers her to speak forthrightly to Jesus. Even in the face of her brother’s death, she still trusts Jesus to make God’s gifts available. Jesus tells Martha that Lazarus will rise again (11:23). Martha understands those words as a statement of the Jewish belief in the resurrection at the last day (11:24); however, this is not the resurrection of which Jesus speaks. In 11:25 Jesus tells Martha, “I am the resurrection and the life.” The victory over death that resurrection represents is available in the present moment in the person of Jesus, not only in some distant future. Through faith in Jesus, death loses its power and life gains new power (11:26a). Jesus challenges and transforms Martha’s (and the reader’s) traditional understandings of life and death. Jesus places this promise of new life before Martha and asks her, “Do you believe this?” (11:26b). Martha responds to Jesus’ question with a confession of faith (11:27). Her confession, spoken in conventional language, rings more of the old than it does of the radical new life offered by Jesus. Martha embodies the central question of this Gospel: Will the faithful continue to contain Jesus within their own predetermined categories, however well intended those categories may be, or will believers allow Jesus to shatter those categories and offer them the radical fullness of his grace? Martha returns home and summons Mary to Jesus (11:28). Mary speaks to Jesus with the same forthrightness that Martha did (11:32) and also places her grief before Jesus. She and the Jews who have followed her continue their weeping in Jesus’ presence. Their weeping touches Jesus (11:33), and he is finally ready to go to Lazarus’s tomb (11:34), where Jesus himself weeps (11:35). Jesus’ tears may be a sign of

his love for this family, as some in the crowd suppose (11:36), but that is not all they signify. Jesus weeps also because of the destructive power of death that is still at work in the world. Once again one sees the intersection of the intimate and the cosmic: the pain of this family reminds Jesus of the pain of the world. At Lazarus’s tomb Jesus orders the stone to be taken away (11:39). Martha tries to stop him, reminding him of how putrid the four-dayold corpse will smell. Jesus reminds Martha of what he said earlier, “Did I not tell you that if you believed, you would see the glory of God?” (11:40). Jesus’ words hold sway, the stone is rolled away, and Jesus calls Lazarus from death back into life (11:41, 43–44). Jesus’ conversations with Mary and Martha transform this story from a miracle story about the raising of Lazarus into a story about the fullness of new life that is possible to all who believe in Jesus. For John, the initiative of these women in sending for Jesus, their bold and robust faith, the grief and pain that they bring to Jesus, their willingness to engage Jesus in conversation about life, death, and faith, and their unfaltering love for Jesus are marks of discipleship. The Anointing of Jesus (John 12:1–8) The family of Martha, Mary, and Lazarus returns to prominence in the story of the anointing in 12:1–8. In the interval between the raising of Lazarus and this story, the chief priests and the Pharisees have determined that Jesus must be killed (11:53). The upcoming feast of Passover seems a good time to capture him, because as an observant Jewish male, Jesus will probably come up to Jerusalem for the feast (11:55–57). All three family members are mentioned explicitly in this story. Martha, like the Martha in Luke 10:40, serves the meal. Lazarus dines at table with Jesus (12:2). Mary, who is mentioned last (12:3), has the central role in the story. Mary’s anointing of Jesus is narrated in one long sentence in Greek (although the NRSV punctuates it as two sentences): “Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (12:3). The anointing is an act of pure extravagance, underscored by the comment that the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume. Mary has anointed Jesus so lavishly that all present can participate in it.

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This is the second time a scent has been connected with this family. In 11:39 Martha worried about the odor of Lazarus’s rotting corpse. Here, however, the odor is the marvelous fragrance of nard. The odor of death has been replaced by the odor emanating from Mary’s extravagant love. Judas protests the anointing (12:5–6), but his protest does not diminish Mary’s act. Rather, it reaffirms the extravagance of her gesture: she has spent almost a year’s wages for Jesus. Judas tries to establish a situation of either/or love: either you love Jesus, or you love the poor. Jesus refutes Judas by affirming the kind of both/and love Mary has shown: one can love both Jesus and the poor (12:7–8). This story of the anointing anticipates three crucial parts of the remainder of the Gospel of John. First, as Jesus’ words to Judas suggest, the anointing anticipates Jesus’ death and burial. Jesus will be anointed again when he is laid in the tomb (19:38–42). At his death, however, Jesus will be anointed in secret by men who are afraid to make public their faith (19:38–39). In this story, Mary unashamedly anoints Jesus in front of all who dined with him. Mary’s declaration for Jesus is not deferred until after his death but is offered to Jesus while he lives. Second, this anointing, in which Mary anoints Jesus’ feet rather than his head (cf. Mark 14:3; Matt. 26:7), anticipates the footwashing in John 13:1–20. There are two dimensions to the footwashing: it models service and discipleship (13:12–16), but service and discipleship are possible because to participate in the footwashing is to participate in the expression of Jesus’ love that leads to his death (13:3–11). Mary’s anointing of Jesus anticipates both of these dimensions. It is an act of service, but it also participates in the events of Jesus’ death. Mary does for Jesus now what Jesus will do for his disciples later. Third, Mary’s anointing of Jesus anticipates the love commandment that Jesus will give his disciples: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another” (13:34–35). The depth of Mary’s love for Jesus is signaled by the extravagance of her gift. Mary is the first person in the Gospel to live out Jesus’ love commandment. In chapter 11 Martha modeled the robust faith that makes it possible to embrace Jesus’ gift of new life. In this story Mary also models

discipleship: to serve, to love one another, to share in Jesus’ death.

Jesus’ Last Days (John 13–21) The Farewell Discourse (John 13:1—17:24) Chapters 13–17 are known as the Farewell Discourse, because here Jesus speaks to his disciples just prior to his arrest, trial, and death. Jesus prepares his disciples for his departure from them and for their life in his absence. What Jesus envisions as the future for his disciples is the present reality for the reader of the Gospel, because the contemporary church lives without the physical presence of Jesus and is sustained by Jesus’ words. Jesus’ words in chapters 13–17 offer a vision of the new life that is possible for all who follow him. At the heart of this vision is the community’s love for one another: “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” This vision of love receives its most explicit statement in 13:34–35; 15:12; and 15:17, but the language of love runs throughout the Farewell Discourse (e.g., 14:15, 21, 23–24; 15:8–9). When the commandment to love one another is compared with the abundance and variety of ethical teaching in Matthew and Luke, the ethics of John are often found wanting. For example, in Matthew and Luke Jesus commands that one love one’s enemies, but in John, Jesus commands only one thing: “Love one another as I have loved you.” To find the ethical demand of this commandment too easy and somehow inferior, however, is to be deceived by the simplicity of its wording and the sharpness of its focus. It is also to dismiss the language of love and mutuality as not being serious ethical categories. The commandment to love one another is essentially sectarian; its primary focus is on the life of the Christian community. That focus does not provide grounds for dismissing the ethical seriousness of the commandment. Indeed, the history of the church and of individual communities of faith suggests that to love one another may be the most difficult thing Jesus could have asked. There are many circumstances in which it is easier to love one’s enemies than it is to love those with whom one lives, works, and worships day after day. The language of love is a different ethical language from the language of discipleship

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found in the Synoptic Gospels. It is language of fullness rather than language of emptying. One will give one’s life for one’s friends as an act of love (15:13), not as an act of self-denial and sacrifice, as it is understood in the Synoptic Gospels (e.g., Mark 8:34). In John, one gives out of the abundance of one’s love, not out of the denial of one’s self. The Johannine language of the fullness and abundance of love is very important for women, because a one-sided emphasis on emptying and self-denial has led many women (and some men) to subscribe to an ethos of perpetual self-sacrifice and the meaninglessness of self. The Gospel of John provides a much-needed balance to this ethos. Fullness and the sharing of love characterize discipleship and faith. The Christian community is known by how much its members love one another, not by how much they deny themselves. The ultimate sign of this love remains the willingness to give one’s life in love, but this gift, like Jesus’ gift, will be given in fullness of grace, not in self-denial. The Gospel of John makes clear that the Christians’ love for one another derives from and is modeled on Jesus’ love for his followers. Jesus loves his followers by making God known to them (14:10–11), giving them God’s word (17:14), embodying God’s love (17:23), calling many and varied sheep into his fold (10:16), calling his followers “friend,” not servant (15:14–15), and laying down his life for his friends (10:17–18). All of these ways, not exclusively the last, model how the community of Jesus’ followers is to love one another. In the Farewell Discourse Jesus also paints a picture of the Christian community with his metaphor of the vine and its branches (15:1– 11). The metaphor is quite vivid: Jesus is the vine, those who love Jesus are the branches, and God is the vine grower who tends the vine, pruning and trimming branches so that they bear fruit. Two aspects of this metaphor are striking. First, the vine metaphor characterizes the Christian community as a community of interrelationship, mutuality, and indwelling. This mutuality is conveyed by the use of the verb “abide,” which occurs ten times in 15:1–11. To “abide” means to “remain” and suggests constancy of presence. The term “abide” describes Jesus’ relationship to God (15:10), Jesus’ relationship to the community (15:4, 9), and the community’s relationship to Jesus (15:1, 7). In

their mutuality, Jesus and God anticipate the possibilities of life for the community. Individuals in the community will prosper only insofar as they recognize themselves as members of an organic unit. No individual is a free agent; rather, he or she is one branch of an encircling and intertwining vine whose fruitfulness depends on abiding with Jesus: “Just as the branch cannot bear fruit by itself unless it abides in the vine, neither can you unless you abide in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Those who abide in me and I in them bear much fruit, because apart from me you can do nothing” (15:4–5). The life envisioned in this metaphor stands in striking contrast to contemporary Western models of individualism, privatism, and success based on individual accomplishment. This metaphor assumes social interrelationship and accountability. In the vine metaphor, an individual is fruitful only as he or she abides with others in Jesus’ love. The mutuality envisioned by the vine metaphor is a sign of the presence and work of God: “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you; abide in my love” (15:9). Second, the metaphor of the vine provides a radical, nonhierarchical, perhaps even antihierarchical image for the composition and constitution of the church. One branch is indistinguishable from another; no branch has pride of place. All branches are rooted together in the one vine, and only as a result of their common root can they bear fruit. The task of assessing fruitfulness falls to God alone (15:2), not to any of the branches. As the vine grower, God works to prune and shape the vine so that it produces the maximum fruit. God decides what is dead wood and determines where and when to prune back a dead stick to find green wood and the promise of new life. Since God and God alone is the vine grower, all branches are equal before God. The future of the vine, of the church, is entrusted to God, not to any of the branches. There is no bishop branch, elder branch, or church bureaucrat branch with special status in this vine. One cannot distinguish between clergy and laity in this vine. Jesus is the vine of the church, out of, into, and around which all the branches grow. The vine metaphor is a powerful image of the church: the center vine out of which the branches grow is identifiable, but the mass of intertwining branches is indistinguishable. One cannot tell which branch sprouted first, which

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branch is longest, where one branch stops and another branch begins. Hierarchy among members is impossible in the vine of the church, because all members grow out of the same vine and are tended equally by the one vine grower. Jesus’ Mother and the Beloved Disciple (19:25–27) John 19:25–27 narrates the scene at the foot of Jesus’ cross. All four Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death agree that women keep vigil at Jesus’ death. Jesus predicted that all the followers would abandon him at his death, scattering to their own homes (16:32), but the women stand firm. In the face of death and the fear of reprisals, the women do not run away. They gather for the death watch (19:25). The tradition does not speculate on the reasons for the women’s faithfulness; it simply reports it as fact. In the Synoptic Gospels the women watch Jesus’ death from afar, but in John they stand near the cross, so near that Jesus is able to speak to his mother. Verses 26–27 focus on Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple, who stands with her. This disciple is unnamed in the Gospel and is identified solely on the basis of Jesus’ love for him. Like Mary in chapter 12, the disciple returns Jesus’ love by being present to Jesus in his need. Jesus speaks parallel sentences to his mother and the beloved disciple. To his mother he says, “Woman, here is your son” (19:26); to the disciple, “Here is your mother” (19:27). The precise symmetry of Jesus’ words reinforces the symbolism of this exchange. Both Jesus’ mother and the beloved disciple function as symbolic figures. As Jesus’ birth mother, she is a reminder of the incarnation. She also was the witness to Jesus’ first miracle (2:1–11), and so here at the cross Jesus’ mother is a connection to Jesus’ earthly ministry. The beloved disciple represents the community of disciples whose love and works will extend beyond the limits of the Gospel story proper. In this moment at the foot of Jesus’ cross, the past (Jesus’ mother) and the future (the beloved disciple) meet. At his death, Jesus ensures continuity between the past and the future. At the heart of Jesus’ ministry is the creation of a new family of God. The creation of this family is symbolized here when the beloved disciple takes Jesus’ mother to his own home (19:27). Jesus was rejected by “his own” (1:11), but the beloved disciple’s reception of Jesus’ mother signals the possibility of a future marked by

acceptance, not rejection. The new family that is born at the foot of the cross is marked by love and faith. In many of the stories from John, the gospel is expressed in language of intimacy and family. Jesus’ mother, the family of Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, and the beloved disciple are all bound to Jesus with the intimate bonds of love. The Gospel of John is frequently criticized for making Jesus seem distant and removed from the everyday realities and struggles of human life. Many of the stories in this Gospel, however, especially those whose principal character is a woman, call such criticisms into question. In these stories Jesus is shown in intimate, loving relationship with family and friends. Mary Magdalene and the Risen Jesus (20:1–18) All four Gospels agree on one vital detail about Easter morning: in the early morning hours, when it was still dark, women went to Jesus’ tomb. The specifics of that early morning visit vary from Gospel to Gospel (how many women were at the tomb, who greeted them at the tomb, how they responded to what they saw and heard), but the presence of the women is a constant. As with the women’s vigil at Jesus’ crucifixion, the tradition does not speculate about this further display of faithfulness by the women. It simply accepts it as an essential part of the story of the resurrection. The story of Mary Magdalene in chapter 20 is the most detailed of the four stories about women at Jesus’ tomb. It divides into two scenes: 20:1–10 (Mary at the empty tomb) and 20:11–18 (Mary and the risen Jesus). Verses 1–10 establish Mary Magdalene as the first witness of the empty tomb. When she arrives at the tomb, she sees that the stone has been rolled away (20:1). She runs and reports the news to Peter and the beloved disciple (20:2). She offers what appears to be the only logical explanation of the data: someone has taken Jesus’ body out of the tomb, and it cannot be found. Mary’s confusion reflects the worldshattering dimension of the empty tomb. Until the community encounters the risen Jesus, there are no categories through which to understand the empty tomb. The world cannot make sense of an empty tomb with any theory except grave robbing. On the basis of Mary’s words, Peter and the beloved disciple run to the tomb (20:3–4).

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Both men enter the tomb (20:5–8), but only the response of the beloved disciple is recorded. Verse 8 says that he “saw and believed.” His faith is only incipient faith, however, because the story goes on to say that they did not yet know about the resurrection (20:9). The male disciples, like Mary, could find no words out of their prior experiences to describe the empty tomb. Yet Mary bore witness to the tomb even in her confusion; Peter and the beloved disciple kept silent. The second scene (20:11–18) begins with Mary alone again at the tomb, weeping. She, like Peter and the beloved disciple before her, now looks into the tomb. She is greeted by two angels. The angels address her: “Woman, why are you weeping?” (20:13). (This greeting, “woman,” is the same word with which Jesus addressed his mother in 2:4 and 19:26 and with which the risen Jesus will address Mary in 20:15.) Mary’s answer to the angels resembles her initial announcement to Peter and the beloved disciple (20:2), but with one important difference. In 20:13 her words are more personal. She speaks of “my Lord” (not “the Lord”); she says, “I do not know” (not her earlier, “we do not know”). Her words to the angels are spoken out of her personal grief, not simply out of her confusion. After Mary answers the angels, she turns around (to face the garden) and sees Jesus, “but she did not know that it was Jesus” (20:14). The conversation that takes place between Jesus and Mary at the tomb is one of the most poignant and artfully drawn scenes in all of Scripture. The reader knows what Mary does not know— that the man she assumes to be the gardener is really Jesus (20:15). The power of the scene comes from the reader’s anticipation of Mary’s moment of recognition. Jesus speaks to Mary, repeating the angels’ question about her weeping and asking an additional question, “Whom are you looking for?” (20:15). These questions are the first words spoken by the risen Jesus. His question, “Whom are you looking for?” mirrors the first words he spoke in his ministry. When the followers of John the Baptist approached Jesus, he asked them, “What are you looking for?” (1:38). This question is an invitation that introduces one of the marks of discipleship in John: to look for Jesus. The repetition of that question in chapter 20 establishes continuity between Mary and the first disciples of Jesus.

Jesus’ questions to Mary do not penetrate her grief and confusion. Her world is determined by the seemingly harsh reality of the empty tomb, and so she begs the “gardener” for assistance: “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away” (20:15). Because Mary still has no categories with which to grasp the significance of the empty tomb, she assumes that the solution to the mystery of the missing body lies within her control. If the gardener would tell her what she needs to know, she would take care of the situation. The word the “gardener” speaks changes Mary’s world forever. The risen Jesus calls Mary by name, and when she hears her name spoken in his voice, she turns around again. But this time she sees Jesus, her teacher, not the gardener (20:16). Once again the intimate and the cosmic conjoin: through the intimacy of Mary’s name, the reality of the resurrection is revealed. When Mary hears the voice of the risen Jesus, she sees the garden and the gardener differently. She no longer understands the empty tomb as a manifestation of death, but as testimony to the power and possibilities of life. In the parable of the Shepherd in John 10, Jesus said, “[The shepherd] calls his own sheep by name and leads them out. . . . The sheep follow him because they know his voice” (10:3–4). Jesus called Lazarus by name to summon him from the tomb (11:43), and now his voice summons Mary to new life. Mary may have attempted to embrace Jesus after she recognized him, because he says to her, “Do not hold on to me, because I have not yet ascended to the Father” (20:17a). Jesus’ words may strike some readers as unnecessarily harsh, as a cruel rebuke to Mary’s expression of joyous recognition. To read these words as cold and harsh is to misread them, however, and to overlook their import. Jesus’ command, “Do not hold on to me,” is the first postresurrection teaching. When he speaks these words, Jesus teaches Mary that he cannot and will not be held and controlled. If Mary had stopped Jesus from ascending to God, holding him with her in the garden, the Easter story would be incomplete. This is an awkward narrative moment, as John tries to put into linear form something that actually transforms conventional categories of time and place. For John, crucifixion, resurrection, ascension is one continuous act, and so here it is as if he

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hits the narrative pause button, to give Mary and the reader a glimpse of something that is still in progress. Jesus’ prohibition is followed by a positive exhortation, “But go to my brothers [and sisters] and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (20:17). Mary is exhorted to spread the news of the resurrection and ascension and of the new life with God and one another that is now available to all. Those who follow Jesus have become members of the family of God and Jesus. Mary heeds Jesus’ words and goes to the disciples with the announcement, “I have seen the Lord” (20:18). Her announcement of the presence of the risen Jesus is the core of the Easter gospel. Her confusion and sadness at the empty tomb have been transformed by her encounter with Jesus into the witness of Easter. Mary is the first Easter witness: she is the first to see the risen Jesus, and she is the first to tell others what she has seen. She is the first disciple of the risen Jesus.

Hermeneutical Postscript: Father Language for God and the Gospel of John The question of the appropriate language to use for God is a vital one for many women in the church. Throughout the history of the church, the church has almost exclusively used male pronouns and images for God, overlooking both the rich variety of names and images for God in the biblical and historical material and the political and theological assumptions that undergird this language. The exclusive use of male language for God is not a neutral or objective act, simply reflecting the “reality of God” (as proponents of such usage would argue). Rather, all decisions about the language with which people speak about God involve political and theological choices, because language shapes how people understand their relationship to one another and to God. Many women feel excluded from a faith community that allows no visible place for women in its public language. While there are ongoing attempts to use more inclusive language for God, such attempts continue to be met with resistance, and there is no clear theological or ecclesial momentum to understand the theology behind the language that communities use to speak about God. Father language for God is particularly difficult for many women because of the burden

of patriarchy it frequently carries. “Father” has become a synonym for God in much of the church, but to use father language that way simultaneously reduces the power of father language and diminishes the richness of other parts of the Christian tradition. When “Father” becomes a synonym for God, one loses the specificity of that language in the stories and books of the Bible in which it first appears. A vibrant image of God is replaced by a theological absolute. God is called Father more times in John than in any other book in the New Testament (more than one hundred times), and to eliminate that term in the interests of inclusive language would destroy the particularity of the Johannine vision. Just as it is false to the richness of the Christian tradition to use father language as generic language for God, it is equally false to the tradition to speak about God in general terms that flatten the vitality and depth of biblical metaphor and language. God is Father in John, and the church’s job is to move beyond the assumption that “Father” is simply a synonym for God and discover what father language in John contributes to a fuller understanding of God and the Christian life. Father language in John is essentially relational: God is Father because Jesus is God’s Son. This language, then, is not primarily the language of patriarchy but is instead the language of incarnation, relationship, and family. From the very beginning of the Gospel, the explicit purpose of Jesus’ ministry has been to create a new family of God: “But to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God, who were born, not of blood or of the will of the flesh or of the will of man, but of God” (1:12–13). The promise in these verses is that a new family will be born, a family that is determined by faith, not by fleshand-blood relationships. People who have no families, who come from destructive families, or who are alienated from their birth families can belong to a new family by virtue of becoming children of God. This promise of a new family receives its most poignant expression in Jesus’ words in John 14:18: “I will not leave you orphaned.” All who believe are offered a family and a home (see also 14:1–3). The language of birth and family continues throughout the Gospel: for example, 3:3–10; 8:31–47; 14:1–3, 18–24; 16:20–24; 19:25–27; 20:17. Moreover, as has already been noted,

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many of the pivotal events in Jesus’ ministry occur in the presence of those whom he loves. Jesus’ announcement to Mary of the good news of Easter is couched in the language of family: “But go to my brothers [and sisters] and say to them, ‘I am ascending to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God’” (20:17). At Jesus’ ascension, the creation of the new family is fully under way: Jesus’ followers are now called his brothers and sisters, children of God. As the earlier discussion of “only begotten” suggested, for Jesus to speak of God as Father in John does not evoke conventional gender categories. John speaks of God as Father neither to reinforce patriarchy (recall also the nonhierarchical image of the vine in 15:1–11) nor to reinforce the primacy of the male gender. Importantly, “Father” is not the only name for God in John. Jesus refers to God as “the one who sent me” with even greater frequency than he refers to God as Father. One name for God highlights Jesus’ share in God’s identity (Father/ Son), and the other name highlights Jesus’ share in God’s work (the one who sends/the sent one). The church’s almost exclusive focus on maleness as the point of father language, and on Father as an essentialist and normative

category with no specific theological content, actually distorts the theological possibilities of that language to name relationship with God. Jesus calls God Father in John in order to evoke a new world in which intimate, loving relations with God and one another are possible. Bibliography

Carter, Warren. John and Empire: Imperial Explorations. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2008. Hylen, Susan. Imperfect Believers: Ambiguous Characters in the Gospel of John. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2009. O’Day, Gail. “John.” In New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 9. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1995. Reinhartz, Adele. Befriending the Beloved Disciple: A Jewish Reading of the Gospel of John. New York: Continuum, 2001. Ringe, Sharon. Wisdom’s Friends: Community and Christology in the Fourth Gospel. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1999. Schneiders, Sandra. Written That You May Believe: Encountering Jesus in the Fourth Gospel. New York: Crossroad, 2003.

Mary Magdalene and Her Interpreters Brittany E. Wilson

Apostle or prostitute? Witness to the resurrection or penitent whore? Prominent disciple or seductive temptress? Faithful follower or beloved wife? Over the centuries, a discernible trajectory can be traced in which Mary Magdalene begins as a principal witness and follower of Jesus, yet becomes known as a redeemed “woman of ill-repute.” Even today, in modern parlance, “Mary Magdalene” is virtually synonymous with “prostitute.” However, due in large part to recent feminist biblical scholarship, Mary Magdalene’s so-called sexually sinful past has itself fallen into disrepute. By interpreters’ turning to the New Testament and other early Christian texts, Mary Magdalene has once again taken her rightful place as an important figure in early Christianity. In the New Testament, Mary Magdalene holds a significant place in the Gospels, mainly in connection with Jesus’ crucifixion, burial, and resurrection. According to Mark and Matthew, she is present during Jesus’ crucifixion with a number of other women (Mark 15:40–41//Matt. 27:55–56), and she sees Jesus’ body laid in the tomb (Mark 15:47//Matt. 27:61). Luke also implies her presence during the crucifixion and burial (Luke 23:49, 55–56) and earlier identifies her as a follower of Jesus alongside the twelve disciples (Luke 8:1–3). In all three of these Gospel accounts, Mary Magdalene also discovers the empty tomb, along with various other women, and is told to share this good news (Mark 16:1–8; Matt. 28:1–10; cf. Luke 24:1–12). In the Gospel of John, however, Mary Magdalene is singled out even more. Not only does she witness the crucifixion (John 19:25), but she alone approaches the empty tomb (John 20:1–2), and she is the first person to whom Jesus appears in his resurrected state (John 20:11–18). Mary Magdalene’s significance as the first to witness Jesus’ resurrection is also picked up in the longer ending of Mark, a later conflation of the Gospel accounts most likely compiled in the late second century (Mark 16:9–11; cf.

16:8). Drawing on Luke, the longer ending also identifies her as having been cured of seven demons (Luke 8:2//Mark 16:9). While numerous Marys populate the pages of the Gospels, the epithet “Magdalene” differentiates Mary Magdalene from these other women and presumably derives from her place of origin, a city of Galilee called Magdala. And while other women often appear in conjunction with Mary Magdalene, the Gospel authors typically indicate her prominence by either singling her out or listing her name first. Mary Magdalene’s prominence is also apparent in a number of later Christian texts written around the second and third centuries and often identified as gnostic. While many of these texts were eventually deemed heretical due to their denial of Jesus’ full humanity and divinity, they reveal an interest in Mary Magdalene as a bearer of Jesus’ special knowledge or “gnosis.” To varying degrees, Mary Magdalene emerges as an important follower and interlocutor of Jesus in writings such as The Gospel of Thomas, The Sophia of Jesus Christ, The Dialogue of the Savior, The Gospel of Mary, The Gospel of Philip, and the Pistis Sophia, as well as the no longer extant Great Questions of Mary. Of these writings, the longest and most elaborately developed picture of Mary Magdalene occurs in the Pistis Sophia. Throughout the series of dialogues that comprise this lengthy work, Mary Magdalene is Jesus’ dominant conversation partner, and she consistently bests the male disciples via her verbal exchanges. Two of the other most important sources on Mary Magdalene include The Gospel of Mary, a fragmentary Gospel written in her name, and The Gospel of Philip. Both of these texts also contain controversial material that some have argued suggests a sexual relationship between Mary Magdalene and Jesus. In The Gospel of Mary she is identified as being one whom Jesus loves (10.1–3; 18.13–15), and in The Gospel of Philip she is called Jesus’ companion, whom Jesus loves above all the other disciples and 531

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bestows with kisses (59.6–11; 63.30–64.9). However, it is more likely, many argue, that this ambiguous material conveys Mary Magdalene’s favored status among the disciples as Jesus’ spiritual, not sexual, companion. The word “companion” can convey a number of meanings, ranging from marriage partner to coworker in faith, and kissing typically functions as a metaphor for transmitting special spiritual power in so-called gnostic texts. Jesus’ preferential treatment toward her does not prove that she was his wife, but rather her prominence over Peter and the other disciples. Overall, Mary Magdalene clearly played a critical role in a number of early Christian communities as Jesus’ favored follower and spiritually astute dialogue partner. The first influential identification of Mary Magdalene as a sinner who repents of her sexually lascivious past does not occur until the sixth century with Pope Gregory the Great. Mary Magdalene’s appearance in this guise arises from her conflation with a number of other women in the canonical accounts, including Mary of Bethany, who anoints Jesus’ head (or feet) (Mark 14:3–9; Matt. 26:6–13; John 12:1–8), and the nameless woman sinner who anoints Jesus’ feet (Luke 7:36–50). In a move that overturned earlier uncertainty regarding their unified identity, Gregory the Great claimed that all of these women were one and the same, designating Mary Magdalene as the anointing “sinful woman.” What is more, he not only identifies Mary Magdalene as sinful, but specifies that her sinfulness was sexual in nature. In a homily on Luke’s Gospel, he writes: This woman, whom Luke calls a sinner, John names Mary. I believe that she is the same Mary of whom Mark says that seven demons had been cast out. . . . It is evident, my friends, that a woman who had earlier been eager for actions which are not allowed had used the ointment as a scent for her own body. What she had earlier used disgracefully for herself she now laudably offered for the Lord. . . . She converted the number of her faults into the number of virtues, so that she could serve God as completely in repentance as she had rejected him in sin. (Homily 33)

Although Eastern Orthodox Christians never subscribed to this conflation of Mary

Magdalene with Mary of Bethany and the unnamed sinner, Gregory the Great’s interpretation cemented Mary Magdalene’s reputation as a penitent sinner for most of her interpretative history in the West. During the medieval period, Mary Magdalene continues to be depicted as a penitent whore, especially in her role as saint and advocate for sinners. As a popular saint who was associated with “worldliness,” Mary Magdalene became the patron of hairdressers, scent makers, seamstresses, and cosmeticians. Not only does she continue to be conflated with Mary of Bethany and the “sinful woman,” but she is also conflated with the Samaritan woman who has had five husbands (John 4:1–42) and the woman caught in adultery (John 7:53–8:11). Mary Magdalene is also conflated with the prostitute turned hermit saint Mary of Egypt, who spent thirty years in the desert repenting of her former life and clad only in her own hair. These and other legendary elements concerning Mary Magdalene were gathered together during the thirteenth century in Jacobus de Voragine’s Golden Legend, a famous collection of saints’ lives that propagated popular knowledge of the saints throughout Europe. In addition to being a saint, Mary Magdalene was also bestowed with the title apostola apostolorum, or apostle to the apostles, since she proclaimed the good news of the resurrection to the disciples (John 20:18). Preachers such as Peter Abelard never tired of pointing out that Jesus did not first appear in his risen state to one of his twelve disciples, but to a woman, and a sinner at that. With the rise of the Enlightenment, the portrayal of Mary Magdalene as a repentant prostitute persisted, even though modern scholarship began to question her harmonization with other New Testament women. In 1517, a scholar named Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples published a critique of the Magdalene-as-whore conflation, but met with fierce resistance from both the academy and the church. Regardless of attempts such as these, images of the penitent Mary Magdalene proliferated during this period, ranging from Donatello’s haunting sculpture La Maddalena to Titian’s sensual painting The Penitent Mary Magdalen. With the former, Mary Magdalene appears as a gaunt, ascetic figure whose ravaged features reflect her assumed thirty-year retreat, whereas with the latter, she appears as a voluptuous nude with flowing red-gold tresses that seductively

The Penitent Magdalen, a painting in oil on canvas by Georges de la Tour (1593–1652), hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The skull in her lap is a symbol of mortality.

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entwine around her body. In the years to follow, the line between religious and erotic art became increasingly blurred, with Mary Magdalene often surfacing as a beautiful, scantily clad temptress whose clothing, if present at all, revealed more than it concealed. From the eighteenth century onward, Mary Magdalene’s equation with prostitution became even more solidified. In the eighteenth century, this equation is especially evident with the establishment of charitable institutions called “Magdalene-houses.” In the vein of earlier convents and religious houses of similar nature, these more secular organizations sought to “reclaim” women from the street and brothel, and some even became forced-labor asylums. In the nineteenth century, a popular literary trend casts “fallen” women as protagonists with “Magdalene-like” characteristics, as found in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter (1864), Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877), and Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895). Other authors during this era specifically glorify Mary Magdalene as a noble courtesan, as in Paul Heyse’s drama Maria von Magdala, which won the Nobel Prize in 1910. When a heroine in literature or drama is rejected by society (and often pays with her life) due to her wicked behavior, the “Magdalene” motif is often in the background, even if it is not always expressly noted. Recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century popular culture continues this trend of linking Mary Magdalene with an infamous sexual past. In Jesus Christ Superstar, Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1970s rock opera, Mary Magdalene attempts to reconcile her sexual past with her current feelings for Jesus when she sings, “I don’t know how to love him.” In The Last Temptation of Christ, Martin Scorsese’s controversial 1988 film based on Nikos Kazantzakis’s 1960 novel, she appears as a prostitute to whom Jesus is physically attracted and the “last temptation” he must overcome. More recently, Dan Brown’s bestselling book The Da Vinci Code popularized the idea that Mary Magdalene was Jesus’ wife, along with a number of other legendary details that tend to resurface in different forms over the years. Despite the still widespread equivalence of Mary Magdalene with sex and prostitution, recent feminist interpreters have been instrumental in reclaiming her role as a witness and disciple in early Christianity. Numerous books have emerged that focus on her

significance in the New Testament, and her medieval title apostola apostolorum has also been revived, especially in the Roman Catholic Church. Since the discovery and publication of numerous gnostic texts during the mid to late twentieth century, an increasing number of books have also focused on her significance within early Christian communities. Many feminists, however, highlight that Mary Magdalene’s prominence here may not be as liberating as some claim, since the authors of these texts often reflect larger cultural assumptions regarding the inferiority of women. The infamous Logion 114 in The Gospel of Thomas, for instance, stresses that women—Mary Magdalene included—must be made male in order to enter the kingdom of heaven. All the same, feminists—along with biblical scholars in general—today agree that Mary Magdalene has been much maligned over the years. Our earliest textual references to her are silent about her sinfulness and sexual past, yet she has been deemed a sinner and a prostitute. She is specifically designated with the epithet “Magdalene,” yet she is conflated with a number of other Marys and nameless women in the New Testament. Although Roman Catholic and Protestant Christians now join Orthodox Christians in officially distinguishing Mary Magdalene from her past conflations, the association of Mary Magdalene with sexual sinfulness persists in the popular imagination still to this day. In the history of interpretation, Mary Magdalene has served as an object of the male gaze, an excuse to depict the female body, and an outlet for musings on Jesus’ own sexuality. She has also, however, been embraced as a saint, advocate, and apostle. Although Mary Magdalene’s interpretative history largely reflects a propensity to associate women with sinfulness and sexuality, her earliest depictions as a significant witness and disciple have never completely disappeared. Thanks to the efforts of many feminists, Mary Magdalene has resurfaced even stronger than before as one of the most important women in the Christian tradition. Bibliography

Good, Deirdre, ed. Mariam, The Magdalen, and the Mother. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005.

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Gregory the Great. Forty Gospel Homilies. Translated by D. D. Hurst. Cistercian Studies Series 123. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990. Haskins, Susan. Mary Magdalen: Myth and Metaphor. London: HarperCollins, 1993. Maisch, Ingrid. Mary Magdalene: The Image of a Woman through the Centuries. Translated by L. M. Maloney. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1998. Marjanen, Antti. The Woman Jesus Loved: Mary Magdalene in the Nag Hammadi

Library and Related Documents. Nag Hammadi and Manichean Studies 40. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. Translated and introduced by Members of the Coptic Gnostic Library Project of the Institute for Antiquity and Christianity, Claremont, CA. 4th, rev. ed. Leiden: Brill, 1996. Schaberg, Jane C., with Melanie JohnsonDeBaufre. Mary Magdalene Understood. New York: Continuum, 2006.

Acts of the Apostles Margaret Aymer

Introduction The Name and Place of Acts in the New Testament The Acts of the Apostles, or Acts, stands alone within the New Testament as the sole narrative (rather than epistle, homily, or apocalypse) written to address the period immediately following the resurrection of the Christ. Like much of the New Testament, its authorship is unknown, although most scholars are convinced by its literary style, common themes, and similar prescripts that it shares common authorship with the Gospel according to Luke. As a result, for convenience, the author of Acts is referred to as “Luke,” but who Luke was remains a mystery. The title “Acts of the Apostles” was supplied in the second century, but it is also somewhat misleading. Its principal character, Saul or Paul of Tarsus, is not, strictly speaking, an apostle, that title being reserved by Luke principally to the eleven male delegates chosen by Jesus, as well as Matthias, who was chosen by lot (Acts 1). Luke calls Paul an apostle exactly once, in Acts 14:14, and never repeats this designation. The apostles of note that function as key characters in the text are Peter and, to much lesser extents, John of Zebedee and James the brother of Jesus. Most of these disappear by chapter 6, and even Peter is largely silent after chapter 10, with the notable exception of Acts 15. The canonical placement of Acts allows it to serve as a bridge between the Gospels that precede it and the nonnarrative writings that follow it, many of which are attributed to the

primary character in Acts, Paul of Tarsus. However, this also causes some conflict among biblical scholars both theologically and historically. First, Acts differs on several points from Paul’s account of his own ministerial history in the epistles (compare, for example, Acts 9 and Gal. 2). These difficulties notwithstanding, Acts continues to play a pivotal, if occasionally controversial, role for scholars in the reconstruction of the history of the early Christian movement. Theologically, the canonical placement of the third-generation Lukan narratives of Acts before the first-generation and secondgeneration Pauline and Deutero-Pauline theology of the epistles can cause interpreters to read “Paul” through Luke’s lens, a reading that can lead to a domestication of Pauline radicalism in favor of Luke’s more conciliatory stance toward the Roman occupation and imperializing stance on behalf of the “kingdom” or empire of God. Both of these have implications for the growth of the Jesus movement.

Contents, Structure, and Composition Acts begins with an echo of the prologue of the Gospel of Luke, which suggests that Acts is a continuation of the “orderly account” that Luke promises Theophilus in Luke 1:3–4. In Acts, Luke continues that orderly account by demonstrating the growth of “The Way”: a political religious movement that asserts that Jesus of Nazareth is both Master and Anointed One (or Messiah—a political term normally used for the successor to the Davidic monarchy). Luke

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portrays its proponents as spreading that political religion as directed by the Holy Spirit, alternatively called the Master’s Spirit or “Spirit of the Lord” (5:9). The structure of Acts follows loosely two narratives. The first is Luke’s account of Jesus’ last instruction to the Eleven before his ascension: “you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth” (1:8). Tracing the travel of The Way from Jerusalem to Judea and Samaria and ultimately to “land’s end” (Malina and Pilch, 22) serves as a schema for the pre-Pauline mission. The second narrative expands the reach of The Way through Luke’s account that Paul is to be “a light to the Gentiles” (or outsiders) (13:47). This second narrative undergirds Paul’s travels through the Mediterranean as an ambassador of The Way. Following these schema, the contents of Acts may be organized into roughly four movements, although these are not sharp divisions within the text, and the content of each section tends to bleed into the next: The Way in Jerusalem (Acts 1–5); The Way among the Greek-Speakers (Acts 6–9); The Way among the Outsiders (Acts 10:1–19:20); The Way and the Empire (Acts 19:21–28:31). These, in turn, may be combined into the two broader commissions previously noted: the commission of Jesus to the disciples (Acts 1–9); and the commission of the Spirit to Paul (Acts 10–28). Two major questions of composition attend to Acts. First, there are two parallel Greek manuscript traditions for Acts: the currently accepted “critical” manuscript and the so-called “Western” manuscript traditions. The latter maintains a very strong anti-Jewish bias. Text critics have judged these additions to be suspect; however, they can still be found, on occasion, particularly in older translations of the English Bible (cf., e.g., Acts 2:47 in KJV and a modern translation) and in translations in other languages (such as Latin and Syriac). Second, Luke seems to have used a “we” source for Acts 16, 20, 21, and 27. This source narrates parts of Paul’s journeys in the first-person plural (we), that is, as one who was a fellow traveler. Outside of some minor issues surrounding dating Luke–Acts, the “we” source poses no significant difficulty in the interpretation of the book. In light of Luke’s dependence on at least Mark, if not also Matthew, in the Gospel, the use of sources in Acts comes as no surprise.

The Historical Context of Acts Scholars date Luke–Acts between 80 and 90 CE, despite the presence of the “we” narratives in Acts 16, 20, 21, and 27 (see above). Although some contend that the “we” narratives point to a much earlier date, Luke’s own admission of a third-generation status (Luke 1:1–2), as well as the Gospel’s obvious dependence upon Mark (and possibly Matthew), require the later dating. Luke wrote under the Roman Empire’s occupation and political domination of the Mediterranean basin. This occupation was violent militarily, economically, and religiously. Rome’s armies were notorious for their brutality, and Rome did not hesitate to make examples of anyone who might be seen as arousing a revolt against its absolute rule (Luke 23:37). Luke’s community would have known this, for Acts is written not more than two decades after the Roman siege and demolition of Jerusalem. Still, Rome’s power was usually maintained through less direct means. Client kings and procurators quashed revolts in exchange for power, privilege, and wealth. Occupied lands were impoverished, their goods exported to Rome for their consumption by the elite (Rev. 18). In the realm of political religion, the use of various media from temples to coins propagated the belief that the Caesar of Rome was divi filius, son of a god, and thus himself a god. This intersected with the majority polytheistic belief systems to create mass veneration for the absolute ruler. Socioculturally, extreme class differentiation, patriarchy, and slavery were normative. Approximately 2 percent of the population controlled the vast majority of wealth, and more than half lived at a subsistence level at least some of the time. The early attempts of The Way to redistribute wealth (Acts 2:45) would have been a political religious act that issued a strong challenge to the status quo. Patriarchy affected all women, although not all equally, as the rich and powerful were able to mitigate some of its effects and even participated in the oppression of the poor. Nevertheless, women were assumed to be inferior to men in all things, and this affected even political iconography. The famous representation Judea Capta, a picture of defeated Roman Palestine as a Jewish woman sitting in mourning under a palm in the face of a victorious Caesar or an

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unmanned (i.e., captured, hands bound) Jewish man, was minted onto Roman coins after the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Slavery was also an assumed normative institution in the first century, and it existed both outside of and within The Way (12:13). Luke–Acts illustrates no attempt on the part of The Way to emancipate its slaves or those of its community. Further, although other parts of the canon suggest Paul at least struggling with the question of slavery (in the letter to Philemon), no such potentially emancipatory document exists in the New Testament with regard to a female slave.

Four Hermeneutical Lenses: Reading Acts in a Darkly Gendered Postcolonial Way I will employ four hermeneutical lenses while reading Acts: gender, postcoloniality, theology, and reading “darkly,” for Acts is a study in contradictions. It names and even highlights people of subordinate and nonnormative genders, but subsumes them below a patriarchal structure headed by a masculine, imperial Deity. It reveals decolonizing impulses within The Way, but the narrative is framed by two imperializing premises (Acts 1; 9). It is the source of theological and ethical assertions that have been central within movements of justice, while stigmatizing entire groups of holy people who believe differently from The Way. It could be called the Christian justification for imperialism, and yet, when read “darkly,” also provides tools for dismantling the very imperialism that it propagates. By gender as a hermeneutical lens, I mean, first, the presence and visibility or invisibility of women, those with and those without social power. However, I will also consider nonnormative gender as well as the question of “unmanning”—ways in which men are deprived of their normative patriarchal power. Within Acts, this

means that I will discuss the chamberlain of the Kandake of Meroe, who is also a eunuch; the circumcision debate; and the ways in which the text builds upon narratives about imprisonment, beating, and chains, turning them from stories of being “unmanned” to narratives of being truly masculine. For the postcolonial critique, I turn to the questions Musa Dube raises in Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. With her, I will wonder aloud about the text’s stance for or against the Roman Empire, and consider critically how its narratives of travel, its descriptions of interactions among strangers, and its treatment of bodies of women (including the land itself) might further an alter-imperial rather than a decolonizing or anti-imperial agenda. At the same time, I will be paying attention, along with Demetrius Williams, to how Acts has been read darkly—read by those on the underside of society, particularly by African American readers, for several of the Acts narratives have been central in the African American fight against legal and systemic racism. These “dark” readers might give us a way to read against the imperializing agenda without compromising our critique of it. Finally, I will consider the theology of Acts, focusing specifically on those theological issues that intersect the above concerns. Among these are the gendered depiction of the Deity and how that undergirds structures of patriarchy and empire; gender and theological purity or impurity, particularly as this relates to questions of manliness; and the presence of holy peoples within the text, particularly the treatment of worshipers whose beliefs differ from those within The Way, such as the “Jews” (Ioudaioi) and Artemis-worshipers. Here I want to investigate how Luke seeks to shape Christian belief, and how that project might be affirmed and critiqued by contemporary readers of Acts.

Comment The Way in Jerusalem (Acts 1–5) The Beginning (Acts 1:1–2:21) Acts begins with an anticonquest ideology that “anesthetizes and sanctifies the exploitative act to make it acceptable” (Dube, 60). Through a command of Jesus (1:8), Luke authorizes

Jesus’ followers to travel to other lands and bear witness. Thus Luke paints as acceptable the exportation of a nonnative imperial political religion to “Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria, and to land’s end.” Luke does not specify that men alone are thus called; and women are among the number



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of the early movement (1:14–15). Thus women are present at the moment of Pentecost, translating the new imperial message into languages from Mediterranean North Africa, western Asia, and southern Europe alongside the men. Indeed, Peter explains the outpouring of Spirit as a gift of God regardless of gender, class, or age. Women are enlisted, from the start, into this inbreaking empire. Nevertheless, Peter’s insistence of the egalitarian outpouring of Spirit is suspect, for it masks his proclamation of the rise of an empire (2:32–36) and the persistent presence of slaves within it (2:18). And while the members of The Way undercut some of the class distinctions of imperial society by sharing their goods with one another (2:44–47), Luke reports no antipatriarchal or emancipatory action that accompanies this sharing of property. Ironically, those announcing this new empire are colonized subjects of Rome, preaching political religious treason, as is Luke. Acts thus illustrates the double bind of a colonized people imagining an alternative to empire, but in so doing imagining an empire that, centuries beyond their imaginations, would become militarized. Regardless of Luke’s intent, Acts 1–2 has also been upheld by dark readers for emancipatory purposes. Luke tells no stories of women preaching, yet African American women preachers cite Acts 1–2 to justify their call to preach. Julia Foote, for instance, cites both Peter’s quotation of Joel 2 in Acts 2 and the presence of women in Acts 1 to argue that “it certainly will not be denied that women as well as men were at that time, ‘filled with the Holy Ghost’” as preachers (Williams, 220). For Foote, Acts 1–2 proves that the God she worships, through the Holy Spirit, validates her and her fellow preaching women. Excursus 1: Reimagining Crowds and Synagogues In many scenes of Acts, “the crowd” or “the multitude” is depicted as acting with one mind (8:6). Further, male speakers often address the crowds as “Men” (Acts 2:22; 3:12; 5:35; 7:2, and others). Both of these Lukan preferences mask the likely presence of women among these crowds, whether as receptive of The Way or resistant to it. Special care should be taken when reading the synagogue scenes in Acts (such as 9:20; 13:5, 14, 43). Despite Luke’s admission in Acts 9:2 that Saul might find women and men in the synagogues of Damascus who are followers

of The Way, readers and commentators often fall into the habit of assuming that these political religious spaces were single-gendered gatherings. Yet according to Bernadette Brooten there is no clear archaeological evidence of singlegender gathering within synagogues (Brooten, 137–38), or of a women’s gallery above the men’s gallery. Further, there is archaeological evidence to suggest women in leadership in the synagogue from northern Africa to southern Europe. Readers would do well to read against the Lukan patriarchal lens, supplying the presence of women in crowds and synagogues. Such a reading against what appears to be the surface meaning of the text may well be closer to the truth. Sapphira (Acts 4:32–5:11) Sapphira’s story is perhaps the ideal example of the competing interpretative stances promoted by Luke’s narrative. Reading darkly, that is, from those without power or privilege, Sapphira’s story illustrates a divine option for a community in which there are no class distinctions, but wealth is shared in common. Such is the reasoning of the Rev. George Woodby, who in the early part of the twentieth century argued for socialism among African Americans on the basis of this passage (Williams, 221–24). In light of the segregated class distinctions with which African Americans lived, this was good news. Yet Sapphira also may be read as a woman caught between multiple forces of class, patriarchy, and empire. She is a woman of wealth, and thus is a member of the class that oppresses the poor. Her community is living out a radical solidarity with the poor by combining its resources, an action to which she is called as a community member. Yet she is also a married woman, the property of her husband, according to the customs and laws of her society. To dishonor him in public by calling him a liar would have been to risk her life. Thus she is caught between survival under patriarchy and the call to solidarity with the poor. Further, as colonized people, Ananias and Sapphira’s choice to withhold some of their earnings from the land, and not to tell those in the service of the emperor (in this case, the masculinized, all powerful God), may be understood as an act of resistance. Like a spy on behalf of an emperor, Satan uncovers and displays their disloyalty to their patron. The response from the new imperial power is not only swift but brutal. The punishment for their

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attempted shaming of their patron is immediate death. Of particular note is the extent to which even internalized dissent to the empire is impossible, a threat hidden from the implied readers by the assumed justice of the God who strikes Sapphira dead. The message is clear. For clients of The Way, resistance is futile. Excursus 2: On Being “Unmanned” “The ability to protect one’s body from violation was an essential dimension of the Roman code of masculinity” and “infiltration of family life [was] a challenge to the traditional authority of the paterfamilias” (Glancy, 258, 262). Thus, the number of imprisonments and beatings and other narratives of “unmanning” in Acts is striking. These include the beating and imprisonment of those teaching in the temple (5:17–42), the persecution and imprisonment of women and men of The Way (8:1–4), and the mob violence faced by Jason and Sosthenes (17:6–9; 18:17). In each case, those loyal to Rome and its clients (such as the temple elite) emasculate the males of The Way through the violation either of their persons or of those of the females of their households. Acts 5:41 offers us a rare glimpse into how Luke’s community “re-presents” this act of unmanning as a sign not of emasculation but of exaggerated masculinity with regard to the men and transgendered strength on the part of the women. In Luke’s narrative, only certain persons were “worthy to suffer dishonor for the sake of the Name.” In this way, Luke subverts the empire’s attempt to shame The Way, retelling emasculated shame as a mark of honor.

The Way among Greek-Speakers (Acts 6–9) The Daily diakonia (Acts 6:1–7) Movement two of Acts opens with a conflict typically described as the neglect of Greekspeaking widows in the daily distribution of food. However, nowhere else in the Greek New Testament or the Septuagint is any derivative of diakonein used with respect to distribution of food to the poor. Rather the diakonos was “a person who functioned as an agent of a higher-ranking person, . . . as a messenger or a diplomat” (Malina and Pilch, 55). Further, the Greek-speaking (NRSV “Hellenistic”) widows are not here depicted as the recipients of charity. Acts 6 does describe a dispute between two culturally distinct groups of widows within the

community. However, the nature of this dispute may center upon the right to lead, rather than to be served. The presence of tables in 6:2 does not obviate this reading. Serving at tables can be a euphemism for banking, and the ongoing disputes in the community, until this point in Luke’s narrative, have concerned money, not food. The solution to this crisis may be read as a liberating act. The appointment of Greekspeaking men to solve the conflict empowers a minority group within the community to ensure just relations. However, this presumes that Greek-speaking men, who would be able to converse easily with the Roman occupiers, were the disempowered in Jerusalem. Further, it ignores the Roman model of co-opting rulers from within a conquered people as client rulers of the empire. Regardless, Acts 6 certainly functions as an authorizing narrative for messengers or diplomats of the inbreaking empire, men who will fulfill Jesus’ command in taking the imperial message to “land’s end.” In any case, patriarchy remains in place in The Way, for although the disputants are widows, the chosen diakonoi are all men. Excursus 3: About Excursions The second movement in Acts shifts Luke’s narrative outside of Jerusalem, already a nonnative city for the Galilean nucleus of The Way. Luke narrates the movements of the diakonoi, as messengers of the Deity to Samaria, Gaza, Damascus, Lydda, Joppa, and Caesarea Maritima—land’s end. Paul and his companions continue these travels into the lands of the Gentiles, or outsiders, stopping in more than thirty cities or regions along the way. Readers of Acts may be tempted to read such travel narratives as innocuous tales of adventure. However, in imperializing texts, particularly ones that claim divine authorization for travel (13:2; 16:9), travel is often the precursor to conquest and colonization, in this case, ideological conquest. Luke and Luke’s colonized readers would have experienced this from Rome. Rather than imagine a new model of coexistence and learning from the other, however, Luke replicates imperialism in the narrative of church growth, a narrative that would one day be accompanied by military might. The Kandake’s Eunuch (Acts 8:26–40) The diakonos Philip travels to the desert of Gaza, authorized by “the Spirit” (8:26). His mission: the ideological conquest of “land’s end” to



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the south: Nubia (or Ethiopia), more specifically the city-state of Meroe ruled by the Kandake (NRSV “Candace”). Philip confronts the Kandake’s treasurer who, like him, is a multilingual Jew able to interface easily with empire, convinces him of The Way, and baptizes him. The eunuch, in turn, takes the new empire back into the heart of the Kandake’s realm. The Kandake in this narrative is uncharacteristic of women in conquest narratives. Conquest narratives often feature travelers meeting women like Rahab who “reflect the colonizer’s desire to enter and domesticate the land” and who “totally believe in the superiority of the colonizer” (Dube, 77–78). These women represent their lands, entered by the conqueror and prepared for colonization. By conquest, neither the Kandake nor any woman of her people represents her realm in this conquest narrative; her eunuch plays this role. The eunuch, Kandake’s treasurer, is colonized and “unmanned” (see Excursus 2)—that is, transgendered—but still exceedingly powerful. As the representative of his land, he accepts Philip’s proclamation of the inbreaking empire, believes in its superiority, and insists on being baptized (8:36). He, not his powerful queen, becomes Luke’s type for the African lands to the south of the Mediterranean: a powerful but unmanned land easily conquered by The Way. For African American readers, Acts 8 also represents a New Testament rarity: the presence and power of black-skinned people within the narratives of the New Testament. “Rarely is it admitted” in academic scholarship “that the Ethiopian eunuch is a recognizable black African from ancient Nubia” (Williams, 227). This omission, no less than imperialism or patriarchy, continues to perpetuate oppressive contemporary readings of this narrative. Saul Unmanned (Acts 9:1–16) In Excursus 2, and immediately above, I address preliminary issues of masculinity and “unmanning.” An understanding of ancient masculinity is critical in a “women’s Bible commentary,” because genderedness, particular female genderedness in the ancient world, is often expressed as a negation—what the male is not. Patriarchy is no kinder to those men who are “unmanned” than it is to biological females, indeed sometimes less so. As a result, narratives of unmanning are always of importance to those reading against patriarchy and empire.

Strikingly, Luke’s description of Saul’s “conversion”—more properly, the conquest of Saul— is decidedly a description of his “unmanning” by Jesus. Luke depicts Saul traveling to Damascus as an envoy of the current ruling elite who, in turn, are in league with the Roman Empire (4:27; 9:1–2). His encounter leaves him unable to stand and to defend himself. Further, he loses the ability to protect his body from violation. He is blinded and thus “unmanned.” The blinding of one’s opponent was a known form of domination, even related in the Scriptures (4 Macc. 18:21). And although this act is not violent or, as it turns out, irreversible, nevertheless the result is the same. The self-sufficient envoy of one empire loses self-control, a key aspect of masculinity (Glancy, 242). He is required to rely on others for existence, and even to rely on Ananias, one he would have led away in chains, for sight. This narrative of Jesus’ unmanning of Saul does contain decolonizing and antipatriarchal aspects. Yet Saul’s unmanning lasts only three days. Conquered and blinded, he succumbs to colonization and becomes a delegate of the new empire, the one who will push the imperial agenda beyond land’s end to the outsiders, and he never again accedes to being completely unmanned. Tabitha and the Joppa Assembly (Acts 9:36–42) Between the story of Saul’s unmanning and Peter’s correction (Acts 10) is the story of the only woman specifically named “disciple” (mathētria) in the Greek New Testament: Tabitha. Like Saul of Tarsus, she is a Greekspeaking Jew who has both a Jewish name and a Greek name, Dorcas. The story of Peter’s raising of Tabitha gives Luke’s readers insight into one role that women played in The Way. In Tabitha’s case, she uses her ability to sew and possibly her own financial resources (9:36), so that she might make clothing for widows and, presumably, others who might be in need. Tabitha’s role, especially among the widows of the community, once more calls into question the traditional interpretation of Acts 6, which styles the widows of The Way as passive recipients of food. The widows of Joppa also function as official mourners of the community, tending to Tabitha’s corpse and accompanying it until its intended burial. In both instances, these are women with clear and respected roles within The Way.

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Of course, Tabitha is a woman of wealth and status, whose death financially impoverishes the community, rather than a poor woman. Further, for Luke, the purpose of her resurrection is to spread the news about the inbreaking empire (9:42). Nevertheless, there is a decolonizing edge to this story of women. For, although Tabitha is colonized by Rome in her life—even her name is changed—this is not what Peter calls her. Possibly “commands of power to heal like Jesus were Aramaic ones” (Mark 5:41; Malina and Pilch, 75). However, Peter calling her to life not by her colonial name but by her precolonial, Aramaic name is itself a decolonizing narrative device.

The Way among the Outsiders (Acts 10:1–19:20) Gender, Circumcision, and Conversion (Acts 10:1–11:18; 16:1–3) The third movement of Acts opens with a gendered question: whether uncircumcised men may join The Way. Circumcision is a gendered question, and in non-Jewish circles it was viewed as a kind of “unmanning,” or genital mutilation. Further, the practice was not common within the Jewish Diaspora around the colonized Mediterranean basin. In fact, one scholar notes that “Jews and gentiles were corporeally, visually, linguistically, and socially indistinguishable,” and that circumcision was “neither a fallible nor a usable marker of Jewishness” (Shaye Cohen, in Malina and Pilch, 2). Peter, however, is a Galilean from Roman Palestine, whose identity markers and understandings of ritual purity follow closely the requirements of the Jerusalem temple. For him, lack of circumcision rendered one allophylos— someone of a different class of people, a different tribe or race, and thus common or unclean, regardless of one’s devotion to the inbreaking empire. Further, some Judeans understood circumcision as a decolonizing act. First and Second Maccabees kept alive stories of women put to death for circumcising their male children in defiance of the Seleucid invasion of Palestine (1 Macc. 1:60–61; 2 Macc. 6:10). In Acts 10, the Spirit intercedes on behalf of the allophylos man, Cornelius, rather than the adherent of temple purity, Peter. Further, the Spirit is silent regarding Cornelius’s rank as a centurion, an officer in the occupying empire. His too is a conquest of sorts, but one that does

not require his unmanning. Yet the struggle around circumcision continues later in Luke’s narrative as Timothy, the child of interethnic marriage, is circumcised. Perhaps his too is a political act of “choosing sides” between his Greek father and his Jewish mother. Excursus 4: Echoes of Mercy (Acts 10:34–36; 17:26) Through a lens of slavery and segregation, African Americans read Acts 10:34–36 and 17:26 as biblical critiques of oppression. Acts 10 became a rallying cry against slavery from the early part of the nineteenth century. In his Appeal, David Walker argued, “Surely the Americans must believe that God is partial. . . . Can the American preachers appeal . . . that they make no distinction on account of men’s [sic] color?” (Williams, 231). Equally popular was Paul’s assertion that God “hath made of one blood all nations” (KJV). As African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) minister Florence Spearing Randolph charged, “If I were white and believed in God . . . I would speak in no uncertain words against Race Prejudice, Hate, Oppression, and Injustice. . . . I would remember that of one blood God made all nations” (Williams, 237). These dark readings helped African Americans turn Acts from an ambivalent imperialist text to a rallying cry for justice. Mary, Rhoda, and Slavery (Acts 12:1–17) At the very end of the story of Peter’s imprisonment in Jerusalem, Luke gives readers a glimpse into one of the assemblies of The Way (or Christians, as they are now called [Acts 11:26]). Peter, having been freed from prison by a divine messenger, makes his way to Mary’s house. Mary, the mother of John Mark (like Tabitha, he has two names), is a householder, a rich patron of the assembly in whose home they meet. Like Tabitha, Mary provides a glimpse into the roles of women in the early assemblies. Rich Christian women provided of their means even at personal risk. At this point in the narrative, James of Zebedee has been executed by Herod Agrippa. Mary underscores what the story of Tabitha also reveals, the insistent presence and leadership of women in the early church. However, Mary also points to a troubling reality within the early church. Despite the NRSV’s use of the euphemism “maid,” the



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woman who opens the door is not the patron but her female slave (paidiskē) Rhoda. Further, Luke has not only included a slave girl in the narrative, without comment on her status within the Christian assembly, but further has made the slave girl funny. “Rhoda’s behavior, both the surprised absentmindedness and the running, are considered humorous” (Malina and Pilch, 85). Rhoda is not unlike Butterfly McQueen’s iconic “Prissy” character in Gone with the Wind, and Luke invites us to laugh at her, rather than to see the ways in which her colonized mistress doubly oppresses her by maintaining her status as community property. Rhoda reminds us that, even in the Christian assembly, class oppression continues. Excursus 5: Saulos or Paulos? (Acts 13:9) In Acts 13:9, without explanation, Luke changes the name of a principal protagonist from Saul (from Heb. Sa’ul) to Paul, a Greek name. Interestingly, this name change is subtly gendered. In Greek, Paul’s Hebrew name Sa’ul would have been pronounced Saulos. However, “the Greek adjective saulos (‘loose, wanton’)” was normally descriptive of “the peculiar walking style of courtesans and effeminate males” (Malina and Pilch, 90). Luke’s shift from Saulos to Paul is thus an intentional strengthening of Paul’s masculinity as he begins the heart of his imperial commission to be a “light to the Gentiles,” that is, to bring the imperial message to other lands besides his own (13:47). As in the rest of Acts, this imperialist travel is justified by divine sanction; but curiously, to fulfill it, Saul must colonize himself, leaving behind his identity, lest by his very name he be unmanned. Women and the Way (Acts 13:50; 16–17) The First Women of Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:50). As Paul and his companions announce The Way in outsider or “Gentile” cities, women of those cities help to receive or resist this new empire. In Antioch of Pisidia, the “Godfearing” (sebomenai) or devout women reject the inbreaking empire. These women probably worship in the synagogue, whether or not they are ethnically Gentile. That Judean loyalists incite them points to their involvement in Jewish community. They reject Paul, but not simply in a decolonizing stance. Instead, they, being of high rank, chose to preserve the colonial power in which their rank is secure. Luke does not report to

us whether these women of power considered poorer, less highly ranked women in their rejection of The Way.

The Women of Philippi (Acts 16:13–34). Luke’s narrative of Paul in Philippi illustrates how different kinds of women were affected by Paul’s imperializing teaching. The narrative opens with a gathering of women to pray at the river; this underscores again Brooten’s contention that there were women ritual leaders in Diaspora Judaism. From this gathering, Lydia enters into the traditional relationship of a female character to an imperial envoy (cf. the Kandake’s eunuch above): “reflecting the colonizer’s desire to enter and domesticate the land” and “totally believing in the superiority of the colonizer” (Dube, 77–78). A woman of wealth and status, dealing in purple cloth and thus economically interdependent with the Philippian elite, her baptism and hospitality signal that she has been colonized; and she becomes a representation of Philippi. A slave girl, by contrast, refuses to be colonized by Paul, Silas, and their companions. Instead she discloses their identity and agenda as slaves of the Deity who intend to rescue others. Even her naming Paul and his companions as slaves of the Deity exposes them, for it points to the anti-imperializing justification for their travel. Paul’s response is to drive out the truth-telling spirit, leaving her enslaved and silenced. However, in so doing, he impoverishes her owners, who have been exploiting her truth-telling, and this in turn leads to resistance of The Way by the people of Philippi. Silent but present in all of this are the women of the households of Paul’s jailer and of Lydia. They are baptized into the new empire with the rest of the household, likely without consultation or option. Luke thus portrays The Way as an empire that gives women like Lydia status and voice but nevertheless reifies class distinctions among women and silences those without control of their own households or persons. The Women of Thessalonica and Beroea, and Damaris of Athens (Acts 17:4, 12, 34). As in Philippi, so also in Thessalonica, Beroea, and Athens, The Way faces resistance. However, in all three of these cities, Luke repeats a refrain: women of status and power from the cities join The Way. Luke does not say this directly, but undoubtedly they, like Lydia and Mary, also

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become patrons of the movement. That Luke consistently notes the presence of women of substance, piety, and power as among the earliest conquests of The Way speaks to the importance of these women in the early assemblies as leaders and as funders. If they represent their cities open for plunder, they also, at least initially, govern the assemblies of The Way.

Priscilla of Italy (Acts 18:1–3, 18–19, 26). Priscilla (or Prisca, as she appears in the epistles), a refugee of the Claudian expulsion of Jews from the city of Rome, appears only briefly in Acts. However, she further illustrates the role of women in the Christian assemblies. In the New Testament, she is usually named before her husband, and it is possible that she outranks him. She is an artisan, but she and her husband own a house and house an assembly of The Way (1 Cor. 16:19). In Romans, Paul calls Priscilla synergos, a title also given to her husband Aquila, and to Timothy, Titus, Philemon, Mark, and Luke (Rom. 16:3). This seems to indicate significant leadership on her part. Luke portrays her sailing with Paul and teaching Apollos in the synagogue of Ephesus. Priscilla is more than a recipient of The Way. She is an envoy. The Way and the Empire (Acts 19:21–28:31) Artemis of the Ephesians (Acts 19:21–41) In Luke’s fourth movement in Acts, as in the Gospel, the protagonist turns to head for Jerusalem (Luke 9:51; Acts 19:21). As Luke relates this final portion of Paul’s journey, women and the poor become increasingly invisible, with attention paid instead to the representatives of Roman imperial occupation. The protest of the Ephesian silversmiths is a notable exception to this. While a human woman is not named, the protest breaks out in celebration of a goddess, Artemis of the Ephesians, in opposition to the very masculine God and Jesus of Paul’s proclamation. Ephesus was home to a temple to Artemis called the “Artemision, . . . one of the seven wonders of the ancient world” (Malina and Pilch, 140). As with all other temples, including the one in Jerusalem, for the Ephesians the Artemision was the center of political religious life. Therefore, Demetrius’s anxiety is well placed. When he charges that “the temple of the great goddess Artemis will be scorned and she will be deprived of her majesty,” he is

identifying, correctly, what the unnamed Philippian slave girl has also named (19:27). Paul and his companions are not innocent purveyors of knowledge. They are slaves of a Deity who has sent them to spread news of a new, nonnative political religion and the coming of a new, Jesus-centered empire. This will be a direct affront to the Artemision and the political religion conducted within and around it. Luke, of course, impugns those who are rioting and expects readers to do so also. Luke identifies the rationale for the riot as primarily financial—people will stop buying shrines from the silversmith—and portrays the crowd as irrational and very near the stage of riot, in which the Roman occupiers would have intervened, likely violently (Malina and Pilch, 141). However, the Ephesian protest reveals that the indigenous religions of Asia were neither insensible to nor passive recipients of the message of The Way. They resisted the new empire. Prophets within the Assembly (Acts 21:9) Luke’s last explicit reference to women in leadership in The Way takes place in Caesarea Maritima. There Philip (8:40), one of the original seven diakonoi, Luke tells us, has four prophetic daughters. The presence of these four women prophets as members of The Way echoes the Israelite tradition of four female prophets: Miriam (Exod. 15:20); Deborah (Judg. 4:4); Huldah (2 Kgs. 22:14); and Noadiah (Neh. 6:14). The silence of these women underscores that, even when named, women leaders of The Way are too often unheard, because of the patriarchal society of their day. Nevertheless, women played a vital role that challenged the patriarchy that they all experienced. Still, it is not enough to note that women were silenced by Luke in favor of male protagonists. Silent or speaking, women in The Way, no less than men, were both colonized and colonizer, representatives of the land and envoys of the empire. Women leaders, no less than men, preached, taught, and traveled under the guise of anticonquest theology that made their mission God-sanctioned and thus unassailable. Within communities outside of Roman Palestine, they harbored the representatives of this new ideology and bankrolled the assemblies of the kingdom of God. Women were slaves, like Rhoda, but also slaveholders, like Mary. They were converted as part of a household, as were the women of Cornelius’s household; and



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they, similarly, co-opted their households without discussion, as did Lydia. The silence of the female prophets of Caesarea reminds us that there is more to tell, both of women’s complicity in and resistance to the imperializing rhetoric of The Way. It also reminds us that some of those stories will never be told.

Reading Women, Reading Darkly, Reading Semoya (Dube, 570) The Acts of the Apostles is written in the rhetoric of an occupied and colonized people imagining an empire stronger and more powerful than that which oppresses them. As such, we might expect that it would be decolonizing literature. However, Luke’s reimagination of a divine imperial inbreaking did not remain a story of the disempowered. As the church became co-opted by the empire that it had first opposed, Acts became a central text in Christian imperialism, including a justification for the modern missionary movement. For their part, women in Acts were both colonized by Rome and colonizers of others’ lands, both oppressed and oppressors. Further, Luke’s portrayal of God is difficult to define. The relationship between God and Jesus is undefined, and the relationship of the Spirit “of the Lord” or the “Holy” Spirit to God and Jesus is never completely clear. Yet Luke’s God is clearly masculine, a patron that brooks no public shaming (Acts 5), but who will conquer and co-opt into his service those who he thinks might be valuable (Acts 9). Luke’s narrative portrays this deity as able to give Peter power over life and death (Acts 9) and as capable of blinding an opponent with a flash of light (Acts 9). Yet Peter affirms of this God, “God is no respecter of persons.” And concerning this God, Paul testifies, “God has made of one blood all nations of the earth” (Acts 10; 17). How then is Acts to be read by women, women who see themselves in places of power and of oppression, women who see the God of Acts as a liberator and women who have resisted what they can only describe as divinely authorized imperial conquest? I suggest that women read Acts in two ways. The first I have tried to demonstrate throughout this commentary. It is a postcolonial feminist reading that takes seriously the presence of women in Acts, but also their power differentials. It is a reading that takes gender seriously, particularly

nonnormative gender. For women readers of biblical texts, gendered readings must mean something broader than identifying characters who seem to have female biology. Patriarchy affects not only the power of women but also the power of all those who are unmanned. However, other readings of Acts are also possible, and some of these are indicated by the interpretations of African American readers that appear within this text. These readings, readings by persons with a history of slavery and segregation, point to the possibilities for the use of these imperializing narratives in dark, decolonizing ways. They call readers to acknowledge how these texts can be used not only to oppress and colonize but also to liberate and decolonize. The use of Acts 2 to oppose obstacles to women preachers; of Acts 6 to point to fair treatment for ethnic minorities; or of Acts 10 and Acts 17 to challenge slavery and segregation point to ways in which these texts can be used to challenge our own patriarchal, classist, racist, and imperialist structures. In the context of Botswana, Musa Dube might call these latter moves Semoya readings, readings that take seriously the transgressive nature of Spirit (Moya) in Acts. For Botswanan women in African Independent Churches, Moya “empowered them to reject the discriminatory leadership of missionary-founded churches and to begin their own churches. . . . Moya revealed to them . . . the call of justice and its liberating inclusiveness.” Such readings, dark readings, Semoya readings, “resist discrimination and articulate . . . healing” (Dube, 192). Perhaps such readings are possible only when oppressive patriarchal, imperialist, gendered, and classist structures are named in our sacred texts. For then the promise of Acts, to women and men, to those unmanned and envoys of occupying forces, to slaves and slaveholders, Gentile outsiders and the Judean temple elite may be fulfilled, as Moya continues to fall and to bring colonized and oppressed people to speech. Bibliography

Brooten, Bernadette J. Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscriptional Evidence and Background Issues. Brown Judaic Studies 36. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1982. Dube, Musa W. Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. St. Louis: Chalice, 2000.

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Glancy, Jennifer A. “Protocols of Masculinity in the Pastoral Epistles.” In New Testament Masculinities, edited by Stephen D. Moore and Janice Capel Anderson, 235–64. Semeia Studies 45. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 2003.

Malina, Bruce J., and John J. Pilch. SocialScience Commentary on the Book of Acts. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2008. Williams, Demetrius. “Acts.” In True to Our Native Land, edited by Brian K. Blount et al., 213–48. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007.

Romans Beverly Roberts Gaventa

Introduction Contents Paul’s letter to Christians in the powerful city of Rome expands on the customary letter opening (identification of the writer and the audience, 1:1, 7) with a brief summary of the gospel itself (1:2–6). The gospel concerns Jesus Christ, who is both a physical descendant of David and a powerful son of God, and through whom Paul’s work among the Gentiles has been authorized. The thanksgiving that follows (1:8–12) reveals that Paul himself has not yet been to Rome, although he knows the reputation of believers there. Paul also specifies that his work is among the Gentiles (“both to Greeks and to barbarians,” 1:13–14). With 1:16–17, the introduction culminates in an initial statement of the letter’s overall argument: In the gospel God acts with power to save all human beings, first Jews and then also Greeks. If the gospel reveals God’s salvation, it also reveals God’s “wrath,” that is, why that salvation is needed. In 1:18–3:20 Paul relentlessly argues that all human beings, without exception, are sinful in that they rebel against the very power and priority of God. The sin of Gentiles (i.e., all persons who are not Jews) consists of their refusal to acknowledge God. Even the advantage of God’s gifts to the Jewish people does not change the fact that they, along with Gentiles, are “under the power of sin” (3:9). In 3:21 Paul returns to unpack the central point he has already introduced in 1:16–17. Through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ, God reveals God’s own righteousness and thereby reclaims humanity from the deadly grip of sin.

Since this act of salvation is God’s doing, human beings have no right to boast of their own accomplishments (3:21–31). Like Abraham and Sarah (Rom. 4), who could not imagine the possibility of a child born in their old age, humanity finds that God has not only raised Jesus from the dead but has made right those who are ungodly (i.e., everyone). To explain the extravagance of God’s act of reconciliation, Paul takes up a comparison between Adam and Christ in chapter 5. Both lives affect every human being, yet Adam’s act of rebellion ushers sin and death into the world, while Christ’s act of righteousness inaugurates a new and gracious life of reconciliation. In this new life the Spirit of God rules in place of sin, and the Spirit empowers hope even in the face of suffering and pain. Indeed, by means of the Spirit, believers see on the horizon God’s final act of salvation for the whole of creation (Rom. 8). Paul’s bold statements about God’s unfathomable generosity prompt some predictable questions. First, if God justifies sinners (i.e., makes things right with them), does that mean in effect that God is actually encouraging sin? The answer is an emphatic no, because God’s justification means freedom from sin and freedom for a new obedience (6:1–7:6). Second, does this gospel of God’s free grace mean that the law of Moses is evil? Paul insists that the law is a good gift from God, but sin is so powerful that it can make use even of God’s holy law in order to bring about death (7:7–25). Third, since most Jews do not believe that Jesus is the Messiah, does God reject Israel and thereby reveal God’s own faithlessness to the ancient 547

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covenant? Chapters 9–11 strenuously deny this conclusion, insisting instead that God is faithful and that Israel’s final salvation remains secure in God’s hands. The call to transformation in 12:1–2 marks an important shift in the letter, as Paul takes up explicitly the implications of the gospel of God for daily life in community. Chapters 12 and 13 address the relationships between Christians and other human beings, as well as the relationships between Christians and the governing authorities. The next section, 14:1–15:13, addresses relationships among Christians, with the behavior of Christ as the example of an active acceptance of the “other.” Paul concludes the letter with comments about his own plans and his need for support from believers at Rome (15:14–33), followed by an extended set of personal greetings (Rom. 16). These personal greetings seem out of place in a letter to a city Paul has never visited. Because the letter apparently did circulate in ancient times without these greetings, an earlier generation of scholars suggested that chapter 16 originally belonged to another letter. Acts 18:2–3 places Prisca and Aquila (mentioned in Rom. 16:3) in Rome earlier, however, raising the possibility that they may have been among those banned from Rome by Claudius (see below) and may have met Paul during their exile. If Paul knew only a few such individuals, he may have referred to each one in order to reinforce his slender ties with Roman Christians.

Occasion and Purpose Students of Romans are deeply divided about Paul’s reasons for writing this particular letter and what he hoped it would accomplish. Certain features of Romans distinguish it from Paul’s other letters and make it difficult to understand why the letter was written. As the longest of Paul’s letters (thus its place at the beginning of the collection of letters), Romans is also the only one addressed to a church Paul did not found. By contrast with the heated polemical tone that characterizes portions of the Corinthian correspondence, Galatians, and Philippians (see, e.g., 2 Cor. 12:11–13; Gal. 3:1; Phil. 3:2–4), the language of Romans seems cool and dispassionate. Here Paul offers a more sustained, careful account of his own positions and makes little clear reference to the church in Rome. These distinctive features prompted

earlier generations of scholars to identify Romans as a summary of Paul’s thought, unlike his other letters that were written to address specific communities and their problems. There are two major problems with reading Romans as a summary of Paul’s thought: (1) Romans has little to say about some practices that are important in his other letters (such as baptism and the Lord’s Supper), which makes it unlikely that Paul intends this as a reflective summary of the gospel; and (2) it seems highly improbable that Paul (or any other Christian of the first century) had either the leisure or the inclination to write a theological essay without a concrete pastoral goal in view. The earlier consensus that Romans is something like Paul’s magnum opus has broken down, replaced by a bewildering array of suggestions about the aims of this letter. The suggestions can be divided into two general categories: (1) those that see in Paul’s own situation a reason to seek the help of believers in Rome, and (2) those that see within the church in Rome a problem that Paul feels compelled to address, making it in fact a pastoral letter like the others. Within the first category, some scholars argue that Paul’s upcoming trip to Jerusalem dominates his thinking. As 15:25–29 indicates, Paul is preparing to go to Jerusalem, where he will present Jewish Christians in that city with money that has been offered for them by Gentile Christians. Although a famine may have created the need for this offering (see Acts 11:27–28), Paul understands its acceptance by Jerusalem Christians as acceptance of his ministry among Gentiles and, more important, as acceptance of the unity of Jew and Gentile. For that reason, he writes to Roman Christians to seek their prayers on behalf of his trip to Jerusalem. A second approach within this same category sees the occasion for the letter in Paul’s mission to Spain. According to 15:22–29, Paul anticipates traveling from Jerusalem to Rome and then to Spain. For this new venture, he seeks the support, presumably material as well as spiritual, of Roman Christians. The letter then functions to introduce Paul and his understanding of the gospel, in the hope that Christians in Rome will be willing to lend their support to Paul’s project. On this reading, the restrained style of Romans reflects the fact that Paul is not involved in polemic, and the content primarily introduces Paul’s thought in an effort

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to secure the needed spiritual and financial support for his work. The second category, those approaches that understand Paul to be addressing some problem within the church in Rome, takes its starting point from an incident related by the Roman historian Suetonius, who writes that the emperor Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome on account of a disturbance caused by a certain “Chrestus” (Claudius 4). Since “Chrestus” is almost certainly to be identified with “Christos,” or Christ, this reference may mean that conflict broke out within the large Jewish population of Rome over the proclamation of Jesus as the Christ. As a result, Claudius probably expelled Jewish Christians in 49 CE, leaving the Christian community in Rome overwhelmingly Gentile. With Claudius’s death in 54 CE, the expulsion was revoked and Jewish Christians returned to Rome. Conflict followed as Jewish Christians expected to resume leadership within the Christian community, while Gentile Christians saw no reason to yield to their returning sisters and brothers. According to this scenario, Paul’s letter addresses a group of Christians whose conflict runs along ethnic lines (although some Jews may well have identified themselves with Gentile points of view and vice versa). The letter sets out to foster the reconciliation of Jewish and Gentile Christians. The content of the letter then is understood to be intimately connected with the situation itself. Paul’s restrained style reflects the fact that he has not yet been to Rome and has no relationship on which to draw. One striking feature of this ongoing debate about the occasion of Romans is the degree to which advocates for various positions build their arguments on different parts of the letter. Those who see the occasion of the letter in Paul’s own situation emphasize his comments about his itinerary in the letter “frame,” the opening and closing remarks (1:1–15; 15:14–33). By contrast, those who see the letter addressing conflict in the church in Rome stress the “body” of the letter, especially the sections that deal with conflict between Jews and Gentiles. Every proposal regarding the purpose of Romans struggles to account for the relationship between the letter frame and the content of the letter. Certainty regarding the purpose of a letter as complex as Romans remains unlikely, but a few conclusions are helpful for readers. Paul

writes to a congregation of strangers. Even if he knows some important individuals within the congregation (16:3–16), he must carefully identify himself and the major contours of the gospel he preaches. As Paul writes, he is planning an immediate visit to Jerusalem, where he intends to present a gift of aid for Christians in that city and for which plan he seeks the prayerful support of Christians in Rome. Following that trip to Jerusalem, he will move on to Rome, where he hopes to “share the gospel,” and then to Spain, where a new stage in his mission will begin (15:22–29). Given the content of the letter, with its emphasis on God’s radical grace for all people, Jew and Gentile (1:16; 3:21–26), Paul may also have in mind a conflict within the church in Rome. Whether he knows that conflict rages at present or whether he anticipates it on the basis of his experience elsewhere is less clear. Based on the itinerary he identifies, the letter was probably written sometime between 55 and 57 CE, and probably from Corinth, since he refers to his host Gaius (16:23; see 1 Cor. 1:14) and also to the deacon and patron Phoebe, who is from the Corinthian port city of Cenchreae (16:1–2).

Theological Significance Although Romans stands first among Paul’s letters because of its length, one might argue that Romans belongs first because of its place in the history of Christian theology. Through the interpretations of such theologians and church leaders as Augustine, Martin Luther, and Karl Barth, Romans has exerted incalculable influence in Western Christian theology. The male dominance of that history of interpretation, taken together with the fact that this letter makes few direct references to women, might prompt the conclusion that Romans has little significance for the lives of women. Such a conclusion would be premature and indeed unfortunate, however, for within Paul’s interpretation of the “righteousness of God” lies a powerful and liberating word for women and for men. When Paul refers to the righteousness of God, he refers both to a characteristic of God (that is, God is righteous) and to the implications of that characteristic for human beings (that is, in Jesus Christ God acts to free them from the death-dealing power of sin and to make them right before God). As Paul works through this notion in Romans, at least four themes emerge that have specific

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implications for women: the “impartiality” of God, sin as rebellion against God, the radical nature of God’s grace, and the solidarity of humankind with the rest of creation. When Paul speaks of God as impartial, as he does in 2:11, he draws on a traditional Jewish conviction. To claim that God is impartial is not to say, as in contemporary American English, that God is merely evenhanded or that God is detached from human affairs, much less that God is indifferent. Instead, God’s “impartiality” refers to the fact that God evaluates without reference to the usual human preoccupations with wealth, power, or religious status. In the Hebrew Bible, the claim that God is impartial forms a basis for admonitions to protect the widow, the orphan, the outsider (see, e.g., Deut. 10:17–19; 2 Chr. 19:7; Ps. 82:1–4). Paul radicalizes those convictions, applying them not only to Gentiles who live within Jewish communities but to all people without exception. If God is not partial to the rich over against the poor, to the child with a family over against the orphan, then God is also not partial to the Jew over against the Gentile. Without reference to any social or economic factor that usually conveys special privilege, God both judges and redeems each human being. In Paul’s argument in Romans, this insistence on God’s impartiality serves to overturn traditional judgments about the greater value of Jews over against Gentiles, but women may find in it a significant way of addressing the value judgments that still elevate men over women or rank women by criteria of appearance, wealth, and status. To understand that God is impartial is to claim that all human beings have the same value in God’s sight and, therefore, that humans are called to view one another in the same way. Having the same value does not imply “sameness,” in the sense that all humanity is now to be one undifferentiated, homogenized “stew.” Paul continues to assert the specific calling and history of Israel (Rom. 4; 9–11); he also insists that Christians of different convictions respect and welcome one another (14:1–15:6). A second theme of Romans is the universality of human sin. In 1:18–3:20 Paul argues explicitly that sin pervades human life. Paul refers to sin entering the world and pervading the world (5:12), treating sin as an actual power set over against God and enslaving humanity. Although sin manifests itself in human lives in a vast number of ways, ranging from the sexual

acts itemized in 1:26–27 to the religious pride of 2:17–24, Paul sees in each of these manifestations a single sin: humanity lives in rebellion against God (they “worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator,” 1:25). What Romans offers women is an opportunity to reflect on the ways in which they participate in the human condition of rebellion against God. In some instances that rebellion may take the form of pride, perhaps a religious pride that presumes to know God’s will and God’s favor. In other instances, rebellion may take the form of low self-esteem, even a selfnegation that implicitly denies that the creature in fact derives from God. Contrasts drawn in very generalized terms about the principal sin of men as pride and the principal sin of women as self-negation fail to perceive the depth of the situation Paul portrays. Such analyses— whether or not they are accurate— limit sin to the sphere of human relations. Paul would insist that whatever form sin takes, it arises from a common human rebellion against God, a desire indeed to replace God with the self. A third theme of Romans is the radical nature of God’s grace, which operates in the face of the universality of human rebellion against God. Again and again the letter drives at this theme. The Christ event reveals that God’s righteousness is for all human beings (1:16–17) and that righteousness works through God’s grace (3:24). God’s grace has proved to be even more powerful than human sin, for the grace inaugurated by Jesus Christ has brought life for all people, releasing them from powers of sin and death (5:12–21). Even where God’s grace at present appears to have failed, as in the case of part of Israel, the future triumph of God will reveal that God’s grace has not failed; indeed, the future will reveal that God’s grace is for all people (11:25–36). This radical understanding of God’s grace means that no human being can achieve God’s favor or pleasure, for that favor is already abundantly granted in Jesus Christ; one need not work for what one already has. Especially for women, all too often socialized to believe that they must serve everyone else’s needs and ignore their own, that they must constantly work to accomplish “enough” for their families or communities or employers or God, this statement comes as an instance of God’s grace, a firm reminder that God’s love is universal, irrevocable, and irresistible.

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A fourth theme of Romans concerns the solidarity of humankind with the remainder of creation. This theme appears in only a small portion of the letter, yet its significance for women, particularly in the context of the current ecological crisis, warrants attention. Already in 1:18–23, Paul presupposes a connection between humanity and the remainder of creation. Because God is visible in the created world, the human race should have acknowledged God and given God thanks. This statement imagines a vital link between humanity, the remainder of creation, and the God who

creates. That link becomes explicit in 8:18–39, where Paul refers to the “eager longing” of “the creation,” as it looks forward to God’s final triumph. Creation “groans” along with human beings, who wait for their redemption. Unlike those dualistic philosophies and religious traditions that understand creation to be essentially evil, Paul here asserts a fundamental continuity between humanity and its earthly home. That continuity can stimulate not only a fresh appreciation of the relationship between humanity and the rest of creation but a commitment to treat creation as itself a gift of God.

Comment Natural and Unnatural Acts (Rom. 1:18–32) Within the context of his initial discussion of humanity’s rebellion against God, Paul refers to the “degrading passions”: “Women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another” (1:26b–27). In order to understand what Paul means by this negative reference to homoerotic or same-sex intercourse, it is necessary to trace the logic of the passage. The passage fundamentally concerns the relationship between God and humanity; it is not primarily a passage intended to teach about sexual relations. It begins with an assertion of God’s wrath against human sin (1:18); despite the clear evidence of creation, in which God is revealed to humanity, humankind has nevertheless refused to honor God (1:19–21). Indeed, human beings persist in making gods of themselves and denying the reality and power of God the creator (1:25). As a result of this rebellion (“therefore,” 1:24; “for this reason,” 1:26; “since they did not see fit to acknowledge God,” 1:28), God handed human beings over to pursue their own desires (“God gave them up,” 1:24, 26, 28). Those specific behaviors identified in 1:26–32, then, are the result of human sin. Rather than identifying same-sex intercourse (or wickedness, evil, deceit, and so forth) as sin, Paul’s analysis is that these actions stem from and are symptomatic of the defining human sin of denying the reality and power of God. That does not mean that same-sex intercourse serves in this passage merely as an example and that

lying or cheating would have suited Paul’s purposes just as well as the example chosen. Since the passage as a whole revolves around the issue of creation (God as creator, humankind as created by God, the ­creature-creator relationship), Paul chooses same-sex intercourse, because, as he sees it, such activity runs counter to the creation of male and female and their roles in the ongoing created order. Since sexual relations between men and women are fundamental to God’s creation, especially as the narratives of Genesis depict that creation, Paul regards sexual relations that contradict that pattern as unacceptable. As contemporary readers grapple with conflicting information and volatile viewpoints regarding homosexuality and with the complicated question of how the Bible plays a role in contemporary decision making, it is important to acknowledge Paul’s criticism forthrightly. That acknowledgment, however, needs to be contextualized in several ways. First, Paul did not have an understanding of homosexuality as a sexual orientation or sexual identity. In his context, it was assumed that sexual intercourse was the product of lust, and that lust run out of control would lead men to turn from women, their natural sexual partners, to men (as in Philo, On Abraham 135–36; Dio Chrysostom, Discourse 7. 151–52). In other words, same-sex intercourse was not understood as an indication of a different sexual identity but as evidence of an intemperate sexual drive. Second, in common with his contemporaries, Paul regarded sexual activity as needing to conform to a “natural” hierarchy of the genders.

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It was simply assumed that sexual penetration reflected and reinforced male superiority over females, so that a male who submitted to being penetrated had compromised his masculinity; female homoeroticism likewise was an assault on the “natural” gender hierarchy. Third, the context here is crucial. Romans 1:18–32 begins an extensive examination of the nature of human sin. Contemporary readers who are heterosexual and conclude from this passage that they are justified in judging or condemning persons who are homosexual will find themselves condemned in turn by Paul’s sharp statement in 2:1: “Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.” If, in Paul’s mind, same-sex relations are a symptom of rebellion against God, so is self-righteousness. To use this passage to justify the exclusion of persons who are homosexual would be the grossest distortion of Romans and its claims about God’s radical and universal grace.

Circumcision and Uncircumcision (Rom. 2:25–29) As elsewhere in his letters, Paul here employs the terms “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” to refer to Jews and Gentiles respectively. The use of these categories raises questions for women, since the categories are limited to males and would appear to exclude women from consideration. The issue that arises is whether Paul writes with only men in mind; that is, does the fact that he uses “circumcision” and “uncircumcision” mean that he thinks only of male experience? In one sense, the answer to that question is probably yes, to the extent that most people think primarily in terms of their own experience. Three factors weigh heavily against concluding that Paul writes only for and about men, however. First, he clearly understands women to be part of the community of faith in general and the Roman community in particular (see below on the significance of the names of women in Rom. 16). Second, for Paul and for many of his contemporaries, circumcision was perhaps the most important distinguishing characteristic of Judaism. Not only was circumcision associated with Abraham (see Gen. 17:9–14; Rom. 4:1–12), but during the Maccabean revolt it had become a significant

symbol of loyalty to the Jewish people, precisely because the Seleucids had forbidden the practice (see, e.g., 1 Macc. 1:41–64; 2 Macc. 6:1–11). Although Jews were not the only peoples who practiced circumcision, it was essential to their ethnic and religious identity. That historical circumstance probably means that the use of these terms is a shorthand way of referring to Jews in general, rather than only to male Jews. Third, in this particular part of the letter, Paul introduces a distinction between external signs and internal observance (2:27–29). The physical language of circumcision and uncircumcision supports this distinction and thus may have been chosen in part because of its utility in the argument rather than because it is gender specific.

Adam and Christ (Rom. 5:12–21) In this passage Paul introduces a convoluted set of comparisons between Adam and Christ. Women may sense their exclusion from this text, first, because of its use of the term “man” (5:12, 15–19) and, second, because of the male characters, Adam and Jesus Christ, through whom all of human history is being interpreted. Regarding the first concern, the Greek word anthrōpos, which refers to a human being or person rather than specifically to a male, appears consistently in this text. Presumably it is for that reason that translators of the NRSV revised some parts of the passage so that, for example, 5:12 reads, “and so death spread to all because all have sinned,” rather than “and so death spread to all men because all men sinned” (RSV). Perhaps “man” was left as the translation of anthrōpos when referring to Adam and to Jesus Christ (5:15, 16, 18, 19) because those two historical figures were men. Unfortunately, that translation decision obscures the important connection Paul is making here between the individual persons (Adam and Jesus Christ) and the collective “person” (all of humanity). Regarding the second concern, it is difficult to imagine that Paul, a product of his age, could have chosen for this argument any representative figures other than two males, Adam and Jesus, or that he could have spoken in general terms, such as “the human.” More important, foundational to Paul’s understanding of the gospel is the conviction that God acted through a very particular human being, a Jewish male, through whose death and resurrection God

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inaugurates a new era. To attempt to obscure any aspect of Christ’s identity would be to undermine what theologians refer to as the “scandal of particularity.”

A Married Woman (Rom. 7:1–6) In the context of a discussion about the way in which the gospel carries with it freedom from sin and from the law, Paul uses an analogy about the marriage relationship. In the analogy, he speaks of a married woman being “bound by the law to her husband as long as he lives” and being freed from the law upon her husband’s death. If she lives with another man while her husband is still alive, she will be called an adulterer. Following her husband’s death, she is able to marry another man without being termed an adulterer (7:2–3). This passage appears to understand a woman solely in terms of her husband, and her freedom simply as a function of his longevity. Nothing is said of the husband’s obligation to faithfulness or the husband’s being termed an adulterer. The passage stands in tension with Paul’s comments about the marriage relationship in 1 Corinthians 7, where he invokes considerable mutuality in marriage relations (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 7:2–4, 10–16, 34). Unlike 1 Corinthians 7, however, where Paul clearly intends to provide instruction about marriage (within a framework of intense expectation about Jesus’ immediate return; see 1 Cor. 7:29–31), in Romans 7 he is not offering a teaching about marriage. He is instead using the law regarding marriage in an analogy. His point appears in 7:4–6, which concludes that believers have died to the law and now belong to Christ. To use this passage to construct an understanding of marriage is to misperceive its function in the letter and to misconstrue Paul’s attitude toward women.

Groaning in Labor Pains (Rom. 8:18–25) This section of the letter portrays the anguish and the confidence with which believers, together with all of creation, await the final triumph of God (8:18–39; see above under “Theological Significance”). Although confident that God will be victorious, believers live in the present age, which is characterized by suffering and decay. As part of his depiction of the expectations of all of creation, Paul writes that “the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains

until now” (8:22). This vivid use of imagery that derives from the experience of giving birth warrants attention. Here Paul draws on a convention of the Hebrew Bible in which birth pains serve as a metaphor for the period of strife and travail that ushers in a new age (see, e.g., Isa. 13:8; Jer. 4:31). Variations on this metaphor appear in other early Christian writers as well (Mark 13:8; John 16:21; Rev. 12:2). This is not the only use of such imagery in Paul’s letters. Paul speaks of himself as being in labor pains with the Galatians, who must come to birth again as Christians (Gal. 4:19). In 1 Thessalonians 2:7 he compares his relationship to the Thessalonians to that of a nurse charged with caring for her own children. In 1 Corinthians 3:2 Paul laments that he must still give the Corinthians milk to drink (i.e., breast milk), because they are not yet able to take solid food. Even if he is employing conventional expressions, the application of it to himself suggests that one way in which Paul thinks of himself is not only as a father to believers (1 Cor. 4:15) but also as their mother. That maternal role is connected with the gospel itself, which ushers in a new age by means of “groaning in labor pains.”

Sarah and Rebecca (Rom. 9:6–13) In Romans 9–11, Paul addresses the complex and painful question of God’s dealings with both Israel and the Gentiles. It may be that some Gentile Christians at Rome have concluded that God has rejected Israel, since most Jews have not recognized Jesus as the promised Messiah (see 11:17–20). By means of a complex argument from Scripture and experience, these chapters insist that God remains faithful to Israel (9:6; 11:1) and that “all Israel” will be saved (11:26). At the outset of this long discussion, Paul offers a brief and peculiar history of Israel. Israel, he writes, is not first of all a “natural” category; it is not composed of all the people who are born to a certain group (ethnicity) but instead it is comprised by God’s creation. God calls Israel into being. In the first case, Israel exists because God calls Isaac into being, creates Isaac, promising Abraham and Sarah will have a son (9:9; see also 4:17–19). Paul repeats the point in 9:10–13 with reference to the birth of Jacob and Esau to Rebecca (the only time in Scripture that Rebecca’s name appears outside of the Genesis account). These passing references are

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frustrating, of course, as we would wish to learn how they were received by women in the Pauline congregations, perhaps especially women who were themselves mothers. But Paul’s point here is not to elevate maternity; neither is he elevating human paternity. Instead, he downplays the human role as he insists that it is God who brought these children into existence and thereby created and sustained Israel. This insistence on God’s role in creating Israel forms the basis for the conclusions he draws later about the salvation of “all Israel” (11:26).

A Living Sacrifice (Rom. 12:1–2) On the basis of the claims that Paul has made in Romans 1–11 about the grace and the righteousness of God, he turns in 12:1 to an explicit discussion of ethical matters. Romans 12:1–2, then, serve as an introduction to and a basis for the ethical instructions that follow. For women who are accustomed to expectations that they submit to the desires of others and that they deny their own worth, the language of this passage seems fraught with difficulty. Many women have seen themselves as “living sacrifices” and have experienced that as profoundly destructive. Such an interpretation of this text constitutes a significant misreading of Paul’s words. Verse 1 anticipates the response of human beings, male and female, to the “mercies of God.” Those mercies demand not a meager offering but a complete response, in which the whole person (the sōma, or “body”) is handed over to God. Verse 2 explicates this offering. Believers are not to be “conformed to this world,” but “transformed by the renewing” of the mind; that is, the thoughts and actions of believers do not simply repeat those of the world at large in this time and place, but they are transformed. By means of the renewal of their minds, itself a gift from God, believers are enabled to discern God’s will and live in conformity with it, despite the pressures to conform with “this age.” This call for transformation understands that transformation to have its origin and its goal in God. To see this passage as reinforcing the submission of any human being to another human being profoundly distorts its importance.

Be Subject (Rom. 13:1–7) Ironically, in chapter 13, Paul does in fact instruct his audience to submit: “Let every

person be subject to the governing authorities.” Given a history in which some Christian traditions have treated this passage as an absolute endorsement requiring citizens to be obedient to their governments in all circumstances, this text is naturally unsettling. Understanding the historical context gives this passage a different perspective, however. Christians after Paul’s time (and especially after Constantine) read it as endorsing the notion that government is divinely established, that is, that government has God on its side. But in Paul’s setting, where even the coins identified Caesar as “divine,” Paul’s comment subtly moves in another direction. He is contending that the governing authorities are ordered by God, that is, God put them in place (and presumably that means God can also remove them).

God Has Welcomed Them (Rom. 14:1–15:13) As the culmination of the ethical exhortation of this letter, Paul writes an extended discussion on the relationship among groups with varying, even conflicting, religious practices. Paul does not identify these groups, but they may coincide more or less with the ethnic divisions referred to earlier (see above under “Occasion and Purpose”). The “weak” are those who believe that they must abstain from certain foods, including especially those that may be unclean according to Jewish dietary law (see also 1 Cor. 8 and 10). Probably many Jewish Christians belonged to this group, along with those Gentiles who agreed with them. Other Christians, by contrast, believe that they may eat anything, since Christ has abrogated the law. This group would consist primarily of Gentile Christians, although some Jewish Christians may have identified with them. (Those who “eat anything” are often referred to as “the strong,” but Paul only introduces that terminology in 15:1.) These specific disagreements pertain to the circumstances of the first Christian generations, but the way in which Paul adjudicates the issues continues to be instructive. The Godcentered (theocentric) character of the letter as a whole obtains here as well. All people belong to God and are accountable only to God for their actions (14:7–12). Though convinced himself that all foods are permitted, Paul insists that believers not behave in ways that will be detrimental to their sisters and brothers. He

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also claims that those who act with the conviction that they are wrong, who act with a bad conscience, are in fact wrong before God (14:13–23). Paul concludes this section with an appeal to the behavior of Christ, who pleased others rather than himself and who welcomed all people, both Jew and Gentile (15:1–13). It is only here, in 15:1, that Paul speaks of “we who are strong,” and the strength he invokes is that of Jesus, whose strength was bent toward the upbuilding of others. What Paul advocates here goes well beyond the flaccid tolerance that merely endures differences as a necessary evil while waiting for the final vindication of one’s own position. To “welcome one another” (15:7; see also 14:1) is to seek actively to know and to understand another’s reasoning and another’s judgments, based on the theological assumption that all people belong to God and that God may be served in a variety of ways. This passage, in its historical context, concerns conflicting religious practices that apparently stemmed from varying ethnic groups. Its significance for women and men today may go well beyond that context, to include the bewildering array of conflicts among women and between women and men. Reconciliation begins when all are able to acknowledge with Paul that “whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord’s” (14:8).

Women in Ministry (Rom. 16:1–16) In form, this part of the conclusion to Romans is largely conventional. Letters of the period typically include a recommendation of the person who would deliver the letter (see, e.g., 1 Cor. 16:15–17) and a set of greetings (as in 1 Cor. 16:19–20; 2 Cor. 13:12; Phil. 4:21–22). As noted above (see “Contents”), one unusual feature of this set of greetings is that Paul includes an extensive list of individual names and sends that list to people in a city he has not yet visited. Probably he hoped that these individuals would pave the way for the reception of his letter and its content, doing what today would be called “networking.” A second unusual feature of this set of greetings is the prominence of women within it. First comes Phoebe, whom Paul recommends and describes as “a deacon of the church at Cenchreae” and a “benefactor of many and of myself as well.” Although Paul writes at a time prior to the establishment of church offices, the fact that Phoebe is a “deacon” (not a “deaconess”

as the RSV erroneously translates) surely means that she serves in some significant leadership role in the congregation at Cenchreae. That she is a “benefactor” (or, better, “a patron”) strongly suggests that Phoebe is a person of some wealth and standing and that she has used those assets on behalf of Paul and other Christians. In addition to being a deacon and a benefactor, Phoebe is almost certainly the person who carries Paul’s letter from Corinth to Rome, since he is introducing her to his audience. She may well have been the one who read the letter aloud among the various house churches in Rome, as no other candidate for that task is named, and it would be most beneficial for Paul to have a reader with whom he could have discussed the letter’s content in advance. It is not at all far-fetched, then, to identify Phoebe as the first interpreter of Romans, both in her informal comments to gathered believers at Rome and in her actual reading of the letter (reading any text aloud invariably interprets it, depending on the pace, stance, tone of voice, and many other factors). Among the persons Paul greets in the Roman congregations, nine women appear: Prisca, Mary, Junia, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, Persis, the mother of Rufus, Julia, and the sister of Nereus. Paul makes revealing comments about several of them. Prisca is mentioned together with her husband Aquila (see also 1 Cor. 16:19; 2 Tim. 4:19; Acts 18). Paul speaks of their having “risked their necks” for him and identifies them as the hosts of a congregation. Importantly, Prisca’s name is mentioned first here (as also in Acts 18:18, 26); since the more customary practice would have been to mention the husband first (as in Luke 1:5; Acts 5:1), this reversal suggests that she was of higher status (possibly she is a freeborn woman married to a former slave) or perhaps that she was the more prominent Christian leader. Junia is identified with her husband Andronicus as an apostle, and both are said to be “prominent” among the apostles. Mary, Tryphaena, Tryphosa, and Persis are singled out for their work on behalf of the gospel, and the language Paul uses for them echoes the language he uses elsewhere for apostolic labor (as in 1 Cor. 15:10; Gal. 4:11; Phil. 2:16). Nothing in Paul’s comments justifies the conclusion that these women worked in ways that differed either in kind or in quality from the ways in which men worked. Indeed, all of the individuals listed appear to be engaged in

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tasks of ministry, a fact that needs to be taken into account in any assessment of the roles of women in early Christianity. Whatever Paul writes or does not write elsewhere, here he simply assumes that women too are God’s agents on behalf of the gospel of Jesus Christ. Bibliography

Epp, Eldon Jay. Junia: The First Woman Apostle. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005.

Furnish, Victor Paul. The Moral Teaching of Paul: Selected Issues. 3rd ed. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2009. Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. Our Mother Saint Paul. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Jewett, Robert. Romans. Hermeneia Commentary. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Keck, Leander E. Romans. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005.

1 Corinthians Jouette M. Bassler

Introduction Paul founded the church in Corinth around 51 CE. First Corinthians—actually the second letter Paul wrote to this church (see 1 Cor. 5:9)— provides an account of this early work (1 Cor. 1–3), but it is highly rhetorical and yields few concrete details beyond the names of the first converts (1:14–16). The dramatic account in Acts 18:1–18 is more detailed, but the historical reliability of that book is uncertain. Nevertheless, there one learns of various individuals who participated in the founding of the church, including Priscilla (Prisca) and Aquila, a missionary couple with whom Paul stayed in Corinth (see also 1 Cor. 16:19). Though Acts suggests an ethnically diverse church of both Jews and Gentiles, Paul addresses the entire congregation as formerly pagans, that is, as Gentiles (1 Cor. 12:2). The social makeup of the church, however, was clearly diverse (1 Cor. 1:26–29), and this was a factor in the disputes there. Between Paul’s departure from the church and the writing of 1 Corinthians, there were a number of important developments and a lively exchange of information. Paul sent Timothy to Corinth to remind them of his teachings (4:17); he wrote the Corinthians a letter with instructions, which they misunderstood (5:9–13); Chloe’s people (the slaves, relatives, or associates of an otherwise unknown, but apparently influential, woman) brought Paul news of divisions within the church (1:11); and a delegation

of three men arrived from Corinth and were with Paul when he wrote this letter (16:17–18). These men were probably the bearers of a letter from the church (7:1) in which the Corinthians raised questions concerning, or challenging, Paul’s earlier instructions. Paul wrote 1 Corinthians from Ephesus (16:8), probably in 54 CE, in order to respond to these developments. The outline of the letter is fairly straightforward. In the opening chapters Paul lays the rhetorical and theological groundwork for his later admonitions. In chapters 5–6 he addresses issues communicated by Chloe’s delegation, while chapters 7–16 are primarily devoted to questions raised in the Corinthians’ letter. Points where Paul explicitly responds to these questions are signaled by the phrase, “Now concerning . . .” (see 7:1, 25; 8:1; 12:1; 16:1, 12). As Paul responds to the Corinthians’ written questions, he frequently quotes from or alludes to their letter to him. This, of course, posed no problem for the Corinthians, who would have immediately recognized Paul’s references to their own words. For the contemporary reader, however, it generates serious problems. Where is Paul quoting the Corinthians’ opinions, and where is he citing his own? Where does his wording of an argument derive from their phrasing of the question, and where does it reflect and accurately convey his own particular emphases? These issues must be constantly kept in mind.

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Comment Status and Authority in God’s Realm (1 Cor. 1–4)

Sexual Immorality and Lawsuits (1 Cor. 5–6)

In the opening section of the letter, Paul addresses the central problem afflicting the church: divisions among its members into competing groups (1:10). Status competition was endemic to the culture, but it was antithetical to the spiritual health of the church, so Paul’s first concern was to eliminate this behavior and promote unity among its members. Ironically, though, in order to do this, Paul had to assert his own status and authority, which had eroded in his absence. It is not surprising, then, that his argument takes a number of somewhat contradictory twists and turns. Paul’s first rhetorical move is to subvert all status markers of the Greco-Roman world (class, wealth, wisdom, rhetorical skill, physical strength and beauty) by invoking the ethic of the cross. That a condemned and crucified man—one of lowest possible status in the world—is God’s vehicle for salvation reveals that the status markers of God’s realm are not those of the world. Indeed, God has chosen, and thus bestowed highest status on, those that the world despises: the weak, the low-born, the foolish (1:18–31). This argument does not eliminate hierarchy, but it does invert it: the last (lowest) are first (highest). Paul uses this new hierarchy first to separate believers from nonbelievers (2:1–16) and then apostles from the Corinthian believers (3:1–4:13). He closes by urging the Corinthians to follow the model of his own Christlike behavior. Like him they are to embrace the logic of the cross, as a community to accept weakness and humility as marks of God’s favor, and thus to eliminate status-seeking behavior among themselves. Then, abruptly abandoning this logic, he threatens them with punishment if they do not comply (4:14–21)! Women are not singled out here as a distinct group, but they are implicitly included among the intended recipients of the message. They may have heard in Paul’s words a rebuke of their status-seeking behavior or an affirmation of their high value in the cross-logic of God’s realm—or, plausibly, both messages.

Paul closes the preceding section by offering the Corinthians a choice: “What would you prefer? Am I to come to you with a stick, or with love in a spirit of gentleness?” (4:21). Underscoring that choice, the next section opens with the verbal equivalent of the stick, pronouncing the extreme judgment of excommunication (“handing over to Satan”) on a man charged with sexual immorality (porneia). Paul’s tone and his emphasis on porneia, which dominates these chapters, are fueled by his conviction that sexual immorality can pollute and thus destroy the body of Christ more readily than other sins. It is not simply that such behavior is inappropriate for those who collectively constitute that body (12:27). In Paul’s view, the mystical union of an individual man with Christ is very real, and that union does not dissolve when the man has sexual intercourse with a prostitute. Paul recoils with horror from the ontological implications of this (6:15). Throughout this urgent discourse, Paul focuses exclusively on the actions of men. Reflecting the prevailing view of his culture, he assumes women are merely passive objects of men’s desires. Moreover, the women in question here—prostitutes—are (presumably) outside the community of faith. Thus Paul does not have—nor does he take—the opportunity to reflect on the implications of a woman’s mystical union with Christ. In 6:1–11 the topic shifts to lawsuits between believers before outside judges. These actions not only erode the boundary between church and world; they also reflect the damaging divisions within the church. Hierarchy and power issues are not explicit here, but in Paul’s world one did not take (or only rarely took) a social equal or superior to court. Higher-class believers were probably bringing lawsuits against lower-class believers. Paul’s response is to invoke again the ethic of the cross: “Why not rather be wronged [than take a believer to court]?” (6:7).

Sex and Spirituality (1 Cor. 7:1–40) Paul begins here to respond to the issues the Corinthians raised in their earlier letter. His



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obvious concern in this chapter, to present arguments that are balanced in their treatment of women and men, is striking. The nature of the issues addressed (sex, marriage, divorce) does not adequately explain this. Women were probably prominently involved in raising questions about these issues, forcing Paul to break out of his normal mode of addressing a community exclusively through its male members. Only in this chapter, for example, are women generically distinguished from men by using separate Christian kinship terms: “the brother or sister” (7:15). Elsewhere in Paul’s letters all members of the community are collectively addressed as “brothers.” Several categories of women are mentioned: “wives” are paired with “husbands” in a natural way (7:2–4), and “the unmarried” are mentioned with “the widows” (7:8). A third group, “the virgins,” is distinguished in a natural way from married women, but they are also distinguished from “unmarried women” as if they were a separate group (7:34). It is possible that Paul and this community had developed a special vocabulary for describing some groups of women, and one cannot assume that all of these terms bore their “natural” meaning.

Sex, Marriage, and Divorce (1 Cor. 7:1– 24). Paul begins his comments with an abrupt statement that defines the primary issue here to be sex and not marriage: “It is well for a man not to touch a woman.” There is a growing consensus that these words do not represent Paul’s own opinion but are a quotation from the Corinthians’ letter. (To indicate this, the NRSV now encloses the words in quotation marks; compare the text of the older RSV.) What gives weight to this conclusion is the way Paul continues the argument, for with a qualifying “but” he introduces instructions that effectively undermine the quoted statement: “But because of cases of sexual immorality, each man should have [sexual relations with] his own wife and each woman her own husband” (7:2; note the similar pattern of quoted statement followed by qualifying argument in 6:12; 8:1; and 10:23). The Corinthians, or some of them, seem to be encouraging a rigorous asceticism even for married couples. The basis for this asceticism is not entirely clear, but it is likely that those who practiced it enjoyed enhanced status. Paul himself was celibate too, but he argues for

flexibility, affirming various choices instead of only one. The quotation cited above (“It is well for a man not to touch a woman”) presents the issue of celibacy solely from the male perspective; but in both the content and balanced format of his response Paul insists on the two-­sidedness, the mutuality, of sexual relations within marriage. One cannot conclude from this that Paul viewed the entire marriage relationship as one of equality (see comments on 11:2–16 and 14:34–35); nevertheless, the sense of mutuality in at least this area of married life is exceptional for a man of his time and culture. On the other hand, Paul’s insistence on sexual relations within marriage, however mutual they might have been, is predicated exclusively on a concern for self-control (7:2, 5; see also 7:9, 36–37), and he seems to view marriage primarily as a means of sexual containment. There are no references to love or procreation, for (in his view) the world already stands in the shadow of the end (7:29–31). Indeed, sex within marriage, for all its mutuality, is defined in rather joyless terms: it is a “debt” or “duty” that must be paid (“conjugal rights” in the RSV and NRSV); each spouse has “authority” (power) over the other’s body; thus to be married is to be “bound” (7:27, 39). He does, however, convey a sense of the pervasive holiness of marriage that embraces children and can somehow touch even unbelieving marriage partners (7:14). He also views marriage as a deep commitment. It involves a concern for the spouse so profound that it competes with the Christian’s devotion to the Lord (7:32–35). It is striking that Paul can say this without any obvious trace of criticism. To be sure, because of this aspect of marriage, he recommends the unmarried life as more suited to the times. The old world, as he thinks, is passing away, and its dissolution will be marked by trauma and crisis. Under these circumstances, undivided devotion to the Lord is advantageous, so Paul recommends unmarried life. But he does not challenge married couples to revise their priorities. Paul recognizes that concern (“anxiety”) for the spouse is part of the fabric of marriage and cannot be overruled. Though Paul insists that consummated marriages are not the place to practice celibacy, his basic conviction is that for those for whom it is an option, the celibate life has concrete,

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practical advantages. Thus in 7:8–9 he affirms that for the unmarried and widows (or perhaps “widowers and widows”) “it is well for them to remain unmarried.” In saying this, he is probably again citing, and this time agreeing with, the Corinthians’ own position on the matter. As before, however, he immediately introduces a qualification, though this one is not as all-inclusive as the one concerning marriage partners: “But if they are not practicing self-control, they should marry.” Once again he promotes marriage solely as a means of sexual containment. The basic premise—that unmarried women can and should remain that way—is, however, strikingly innovative. Marriage in the GrecoRoman culture was prescribed for women and defined by patriarchy, yet Paul not only insists that within a Christian marriage women and men were equal sex partners; he also sanctions for women a life without marriage, and thus a life permanently free from all the hierarchical strictures of that relationship. Paul thus opens wide the door to social independence for those women gifted with celibacy. The desire for the celibate lifestyle seems to have encouraged many of the Corinthians to seek divorce, and Paul addresses this aspect of the issue in 7:10–16. For the first and only time in this chapter, Paul’s response takes the form of a command: Neither wives nor husbands should divorce their spouses. Paul attributes this prohibition directly to the Lord (see Mark 10:2–12 and Matt. 19:3–9), yet even so he permits a partial exception: “But if she does separate [from her husband], let her remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband” (7:11). But even if the spouse is an unbeliever—and the motivation for divorce in this case is even greater (see 2 Cor. 6:14–18)—Paul insists that the preferred course of action is for the married couple to remain as they are. The holiness of the believing spouse will consecrate the marriage and the children and may even effect the salvation of the unbelieving partner (7:16). Remarkably enough, Paul seems to imply that peace is more important than possible conversion. If the unbelieving partner agitates for divorce, the believer is to permit it—for the sake of peace (7:15). Throughout this evenhanded discussion of women and men, Paul mentions the role of the man (husband) first. In the discussion of divorce, however, he mentions the wife first (7:10), and the exception clause is applied only

to the case of the woman (7:11). (In the sayings of Jesus on divorce, the wife is discussed second [Mark 10:11–12] or not at all [Matt. 19:9].) This reversal of emphasis could indicate that the pressure for divorce within the Corinthian community is coming primarily from the women, who, one could surmise, are encouraged to seek freedom on a social level commensurate with their freedom in Christ (Gal. 3:28). Paul does not forbid this (7:11a), but neither does he encourage it. Throughout his advice to this community, Paul proclaims a conservative ethic: Remain as you are. The advantages of the single, celibate state are not so great as to demand universal compliance or social disruption. Paul concludes this section of the letter by discussing this general principle in some detail (7:17–24), and as he does so he reverts to the male perspective that is more characteristic of his letters.

Virgins (1 Cor. 7:25–40). Paul’s use of the phrase “Now concerning . . .” in 7:25 indicates that he is responding to a related but separate question from the Corinthians. It concerns a group called the “virgins,” and because both the Corinthians and Paul treat this group separately, something other than the question of marriage for the “unmarried” (7:8–9) must be at stake. Paul reverses his earlier sequence and here presents the general principles first (7:26–35). He repeats the point mentioned earlier (remain as you are, 7:26) and now buttresses it with comments concerning the passing of the age (7:26, 29, 31). In view of the rapidly approaching end and the divided loyalties that marriage creates for the Christian, it is better for a virgin to remain as she is. Thus far Paul’s advice is not markedly different from that he gave earlier to the unmarried. He even provides a similar exception clause: “But . . . if a virgin marries, she does not sin” (7:28). Nevertheless, his later comments (7:36–38) seem to presuppose a somewhat more complex situation. Most translations obscure the difficulties by translating “virgin” as “fiancée” or “betrothed,” but the strangeness of the situation comes out with a more literal translation of the text. But if anyone thinks he is behaving disgracefully toward his virgin, if his passions are strong and so it has to be, let him do what he wishes, he is not sinning. Let



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them marry. But whoever stands firm in his heart, and has no necessity, but has authority concerning his own will and he has determined in his own heart to keep his virgin, he will do well. So then, the one who marries his virgin does well and the one not marrying will do better. (7:36–38, my trans.)

Several things are striking here. First, the sense of mutuality so prominent in Paul’s earlier discussion is completely absent. The man alone determines whether to marry “his virgin,” and no thought is given to her passions, her wishes, or the determination in her heart. Second, Paul seems concerned to reassure the Corinthians that marrying one’s virgin, though not ideal, is no sin (7:28, 36). This suggests that some in the community are claiming that marrying one’s virgin—not behaving disgracefully toward her, but marrying her—is a sin. Something more is at stake than meets the eye. Finally, the way Paul refers to the men and their virgins is decidedly strange. For some time the prevailing opinion was that Paul is referring to fathers with virgin daughters of marriageable age, but the text does not really support that interpretation. Most translations now reflect the idea that engaged couples, caught up in the Corinthians’ enthusiasm for asceticism, have sworn to remain in this state of celibate engagement but now are having second thoughts. But “his virgin” is a strange way to refer to a man’s fiancée. It suggests at the very least that, for the Corinthians, virginity rather than espousal has become the defining characteristic of the relationship. This suggests a third interpretation of this text. Corinthian men and women have perhaps voluntarily entered special celibate relationships, “spiritual marriages” (the NEB refers to “partners in celibacy”). Perhaps the virgins symbolize the entire community’s relationship to the returning Christ, for Paul speaks later of his desire “to present [the church] as a chaste virgin to Christ” (2 Cor. 11:2). The situation is superficially similar to the celibacy within marriage that Paul rejected earlier (1 Cor. 7:1–7), but in this case the “spiritual marriage” that Paul approves is understood from the beginning to be a special, symbolic relationship. The Corinthians may have considered the symbolism so sacred that it was a sin to break it. Details of the situation are simply not clear.

Paul’s response, however, is clear and clearly one-sided. The man, whether involved in a celibate engagement or spiritual marriage, should not be pressured by the community (or even by his virgin!) into remaining in this perpetually chaste relationship. If he has the gift to sustain it, well and good. If not, marriage is no sin. Paul rounds off his discussion in 7:39–40 by returning to some points he made earlier (cf. 7:8, 9, 13): Married women should not divorce their husbands and while widows may marry, they will be better off (Good News Bible “happier”) if they do not. These somewhat redundant comments about women provide an artificial sense of balance to 7:36–38, which focuses exclusively on men’s behavior. Paul’s concern here for women’s happiness also stands in some tension with his earlier lack of concern for the virgins’ preferences. In the context of Paul’s earlier advice, the final verses also serve as a reminder to the celibate partners that if the relationship is transformed into a normal marriage, the change is permanent. Whereas “real” married partners can engage in temporary periods of celibacy (7:1–7), their mirror opposites, the celibate couples, cannot enjoy temporary periods of “marriage.”

Summary. Some Corinthians, it seems, were placing too much value—and status—on celibacy within marriage or no marriage (and thus no sexual intercourse) at all. Paul argues for options. There is more than one way to live a holy life. A marriage with full and mutual sexual activity is holy (7:14–15), and celibate life is holy too (7:34). Yet even as he argues against excessive zeal for celibacy, Paul cannot deny that, in appropriate circumstances, it is the better way. Nevertheless, he knows that few are gifted for celibacy. For the others, frustrated sexual passion is a more serious threat to one’s spiritual life than the distractions of marriage. So Paul affirms marriage with as much enthusiasm as his own gifts and insights allow, but these gifts do not permit him really to celebrate its possibilities. Idol Meat and Class Conflict (1 Cor. 8–10) The problem Paul addresses in these chapters is that some members of the church feel free to eat meat that has been sacrificed to idols, while for others this creates a crisis of faith. Class issues are implicit in the problem, and the ethic of the

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cross informs Paul’s response. The relatively well-to-do, who can purchase meat at the market, are able to eat with a clear conscience. Those of lower status, whose consumption of meat is limited to public religious festivals, are unable to dismiss so easily the connection of the food with idols. Paul agrees with the position of the first group (“no idol in the world really exists”), but argues that they should give up their freedom to eat for the sake of the others. Women are not explicitly mentioned, but they probably numbered in both groups. Chapter 9 seems to address a different issue, but in actuality Paul is using himself as an example of one who has relinquished his rights for the sake of others. In the course of the argument he reveals that the other apostles, the brothers of the Lord, and Cephas (Peter) were all married. Apparently he alone of this group was not.

Disruptions of Worship (1 Cor. 11) Paul next addresses two issues that, in his view, undermine the congregation’s worship services. The first directly concerns the actions of women; the second reflects class conflicts.

Women, Veils, and Worship (1  Cor. 11:2–16). Paul’s comments in these verses are as obscure as any he makes, though his basic point is clear: women who pray and prophesy during congregational meetings must wear veils. But what did the veils signify? Did they signify the same thing to the women who were removing them as they did to Paul, who would impose them? Paul begins by commending the church for maintaining the traditions he has established, but then he launches immediately into his criticism of the women’s behavior. Paul refers first to the way men pray (11:4), but he mentions this only to provide rhetorical balance to the argument. There is no problem with their behavior; they are, it seems, praying and prophesying with heads properly uncovered. Yet these comments and the comment about cropped hair (11:6) make it clear that by removing their veils the women are dressing—at least in part of their attire—like the men. One can postulate that this came about because the women of this church took seriously the baptismal affirmation used in Paul’s churches: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is

no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Gal. 3:28). The traditional distinctions between women and men are no longer relevant, especially when both are inspired by one and the same Spirit (1 Cor. 12:11), and the women symbolize this by removing a distinctive feature of female dress during the worship service: their veils. Paul’s response is to insist on the traditional gender hierarchy: “But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ” (11:3, my trans.). (Paul speaks here of the relationship between men and women in general [based on the story of the creation of Eve from Adam’s “rib” in Gen. 2], not, as the NRSV presents it, the specific relationship between husband and wife.) This point reappears in 11:7, where Paul asserts that “a man ought not to have his head veiled, since he is the image and reflection [RSV “glory”] of God, but woman is the reflection [RSV “glory”] of man.” This argument is based on a misreading of Genesis 1:27, which actually asserts that all humankind—both women and men—was created in the image of God. Several scholars have noted that Paul does not deny that women are created in God’s image, but Paul also does not affirm it, and this silence is significant. By stating that woman is (only) the reflection of man, Paul implies again her derivative and secondary status, and then he confirms this by insisting with emphatic parallelism that woman was created from and for the sake of man, and not vice versa (11:8–9). This argument is developed with discouraging symmetry, with the man and the woman presented as a contrasting rather than a coordinate pair (cf. 1 Cor. 7!). Since Paul opens this argument by asserting that a man “ought not” to wear a veil, one expects him to complete the contrast by insisting that a woman ought to wear one. That, after all, is the obvious rhetorical goal of this passage. Instead he says (when the Greek is translated in the most reasonable way), “a woman ought to have authority over her head” (11:10, my trans.). One expects insistence on an act that symbolizes derivative status: veiling the head. Instead, Paul asserts the woman’s authority over her head. He seems to be contradicting his own logic—or is he insisting that the women cooperate in their veiling? Paul continues to undo his earlier argument with a statement of mutuality that borders on



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equality: “Nevertheless, in the Lord woman is not independent of [perhaps: “not different from”] man or man independent of [perhaps: “different from”] woman” (11:11). He follows this with a clear rebuttal of the derivation sequence he has just established: “For just as woman came from man, so man comes through woman” (11:12; see 11:8). Finally, he presents a statement that demolishes every argument in which superior status is based on derivation: “All things come from God” (11:12). Without warning Paul has reversed directions in his argument, affirming the mutuality of existence and equality of origin that he earlier denied. And without warning he reverses direction again. Abandoning any attempt to present a reasoned argument for his position, abandoning also the sense of mutuality he has just encouraged, Paul concludes by simply asserting that veiling of women is proper, natural (since women’s long hair is nature’s way of providing a veil), and customary in all the churches of God. It is hard to know what to make of this. Some scholars dismiss the entire argument as a later insertion into the letter, but there is little textual evidence to support this. Paul probably wrote it, but what lies behind his vigorous objection to the women’s unveiling? Verse 10 seems to provide the answer: “because of the angels.” But what does that comment signify? It is likely, but not certain, that Paul has in mind evil angelic beings (see 2 Cor. 12:7) who would be sexually tempted by the women’s self-exposure, and through them gain access to the community. Affirming Pauline authorship does not, however, sanction the use of these chaotic verses to define Paul’s normative view of women. One senses conflicting views within Paul shutting down the rational process, and where reason fails, emotion and tradition take over: “But if anyone is disposed to be contentious—we have no such custom, nor do the churches of God” (11:16). The only thing that remains constant in the argument is the uncontested assumption—shared, apparently, by both sides—that women’s participation in worship is functionally equal to that of men. The issue Paul addresses concerns only the mode of dress (or hairstyle) the women adopt while praying or prophesying in church. The right to pray or prophesy—and this involves a prominent role in the service (see 14:3–5, 24–25, 29–33)—is bestowed by the Spirit and cannot be contested (12:4–11).

It is only veils that are at issue here, but veils were—and are—a highly symbolic article of clothing. They connote inferiority, subordination, even sexuality. All the participants in this ecclesial drama were acutely aware of this, as were later generations. It is perhaps not surprising then that it was not the uncontested assumption of functional equality that prevailed in the later church, but the message of secondary, derivative status conveyed by the firmly reimposed veils (see Eph. 5:22–24; 1 Tim. 2:11–15).

Class and Conflict at the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. 11:17–34). The second problem reflects the persistent class-status issues that threatened the integrity of the congregation. Celebration of the Lord’s Supper, which at that time was incorporated into a community meal, provided a rich opportunity for class distinctions to emerge. In accordance with Greco-Roman social customs, those of higher class at the meal received more and better food than those of lower class, who may also have arrived late because their labor and thus their time were controlled by others. Paul’s response again reflects the statusdestroying ethic of the cross: the congregation must discern the body of Christ, not only in the bread of the Eucharist, but also as the congregation itself (11:29). Within the body of Christ, traditional hierarchy no longer prevails (a point Paul develops in the next chapter). The well-todo must set aside their expectations of privilege at the meal. Status and Spiritual Gifts (1 Cor. 12–14) As in the previous section, the issue here is status divisions, but divisions based on possession of spiritual gifts, not (at least, not directly) on wealth. Paul’s response is to promote those gifts (e.g., prophecy) and actions (e.g., love) that enhance community over those more exotic (and in Corinth, more esteemed) gifts that enhance primarily an individual (e.g., speaking in tongues). To emphasize the point, Paul applies a familiar body metaphor to the community in an unprecedented way. This metaphor was typically used in the Greco-Roman world to support the prevailing hierarchy, but Paul uses it to reverse that hierarchy. Those members of the body/community of apparent lesser honor and value (in this context, a reference to those with mundane spiritual gifts)

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are actually, by God’s arrangement, of greater honor and status. Women clearly participated in these gifts (see comments on 11:2–16), but whether Paul approved of this depends on the significance of 12:13 and the authenticity of 14:33b–36.

No Male and Female? (1 Cor. 12:13). To illustrate the diversity of the body of Christ, Paul asserts that “in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit” (12:13). Behind this verse is a baptismal formula, reproduced more fully in Galatians 3:28, that included “male and female” among the cultural divisions overcome in the body of Christ. Why did Paul omit the male and female pair in his letter to Corinth? Most likely because including it would undermine his already torturous argument in chapter 11 concerning the wearing of status-marking veils. Absence of a specific reference to women in 12:13, however, does not imply that they did not drink of the one Spirit or receive the Spirit’s gifts. The prophesying women of chapter 11 prove that they did. More problematic is the later comment that “women . . . are not permitted to speak” (14:34). Silence! (1  Cor. 14:34–35). These two verses, usually printed as part of a paragraph that extends from 14:33b to 14:36, are strange by any reckoning of the matter. Though Paul responds conservatively and restrictively to the question of veils in chapter 11, one is still unprepared for these verses and their absolute insistence on the silence of women in the church. How can women exercise their acknowledged right to pray and prophesy (1 Cor. 11) if they must keep absolute silence? How can women like Euodia and Syntyche (Phil. 4:2–3), Prisca (Rom. 16:3; 1 Cor. 16:19), Mary (Rom. 16:6), Junia (Rom. 16:7), and Tryphaena and Tryphosa (Rom. 16:12) function as coworkers in the churches if they cannot speak in those churches? How can Phoebe fulfill the role of deacon (Rom. 16:1–2) if she cannot speak out in the assembly? Something is seriously amiss here. Various solutions to this dilemma have been proposed. Some have suggested that the praying and prophesying described in chapter 11 were done in the home, while silence was imposed on women in the church. Nothing, however, in chapter 11 suggests a domestic setting, and chapter 14 rather clearly establishes

worship services as the appropriate setting for prayer and prophecy. Others see a contrast between inspired speech (1 Cor. 11), which Paul permits, and uninspired chatter (1 Cor. 14), which he does not. Yet the language of the injunctions in chapter 14 rather clearly—and emphatically—covers all forms of speaking. Some assume that Paul applies the command of silence to married women, while granting the holy, unmarried women (7:34) the right to participate actively and vocally in worship. But Paul does not signal here, as he does in chapter 7, that different groups of women are being addressed. Some ascribe the differences to a change in Paul’s attitude. In chapter 11, Paul presupposes full participation of women in the worship services, but his growing concern over the chaotic practices in Corinth leads him in 14:34–35 to an unfortunate reversal. In the interest of order, various groups, including the women, are commanded to silence (14:28, 30, 34–35). The words to women, however, have an absolute quality not found in the words to the other groups. Indeed, they are presented as universally valid, which is inconsistent with an ad hoc development in Corinth. Another approach is to assume that these words are not Paul’s. There are two possibilities here. As we have seen, Paul frequently quotes the excessive positions of the Corinthians only to correct them (6:12; 7:1–2; 8:1, 4–6). A rather tenacious line of interpretation thus ascribes 14:34–35 to the Corinthian church, and Paul’s emphatic disagreement with this position is signaled in verse 36. There is much to commend this view. It eliminates the tension between the views expressed here and in chapter 11, and it corresponds to Paul’s established mode of argumentation in this letter. Yet the proposal is not totally convincing. There is, for example, no clear signal here that Paul is quoting the Corinthians (cf. 7:1; 8:1, 4); the other quotes are not as lengthy as this one; and elsewhere Paul’s rebuttal is more clearly marked. A second possibility, though more radical, avoids these problems. In the early New Testament manuscripts, the verses in question do not always appear at the same point in the text. In most manuscripts they are found as traditionally printed: after the assertion that God is a God of peace. In some manuscripts, however, they appear after the final words of this chapter. The most likely explanation for this is that the words on



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women’s silence were originally what is called a marginal gloss—comments added in the margin of a manuscript by a later reader. Following a fairly common practice, copyists of this manuscript, uncertain as to the origin of the gloss, incorporated the words into the text of the letter, some inserting them in one place, others in another. The fact that the attitude expressed in these verses corresponds not to Paul’s expressed views but to the views of the later church (1 Tim. 2:11–12; 1 Pet. 3:1–6) supports this hypothesis of a later addition. The inclusion of these verses in the text of Paul’s letter is particularly unfortunate, for their strong wording affects the way the rest of Paul’s comments on women are read. They reinforce, for example, the conservative tendencies of chapter 11 and obscure the more liberating aspects of Paul’s statements about women. The fact that the verses could be so readily received as Paul’s own words reflects not only the ambiguity of Paul’s position (see esp. 1 Cor. 7:36–38; 11:7–9), but also the impact of the more overt misogyny of the deutero-Pauline letters (those ascribed to Paul, but likely from a later follower of Paul). It is difficult enough to assess Paul’s own words on women. When later views invade the picture, the task becomes hopelessly complex.

Resurrection Issues (1 Cor. 15) Paul closes the body of the letter on a theological topic that seems to be free of status and gender implications: the resurrection. Many think, however, that his strong insistence that the resurrection is of the dead means that some in the community claimed instead a resurrection of the living spirit. Moreover, spiritual resurrection may have been anticipated, if not experienced, in the spiritual gifts celebrated in the community. Since these gifts had strong status implications, claims of spiritual resurrection would have had them as well. Oddly,

Paul’s list of witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection does not include the women mentioned in the Gospels, though whether that is because their names were not included in the tradition Paul received (15:1–3) or because Paul suppressed the names to avoid stoking women’s claims to enhanced status is not clear. He does promise that at the final resurrection all—women as well as men—will share equally in the glorified resurrection body of the man of heaven (15:49), ending finally all gender and status distinctions.

Concluding Remarks (1 Cor. 16) Paul concludes the letter with the usual exhortations, travel plans, and greetings. Included among those sending greetings is Prisca, the female half of a peripatetic couple who was known in Corinth, had a house church in Ephesus (16:19) and later one in Rome (Rom. 16:3), and served as Paul’s coworkers in the mission field (Rom. 16:3). Bibliography

Castelli, Elizabeth A. Imitating Paul: A Discourse of Power. Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991. MacDonald, Margaret Y. “Women Holy in Body and Spirit: The Social Setting of 1 Corinthians 7.” New Testament Studies 36 (1990): 161–81. Martin, Dale B. The Corinthian Body. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Mitchell, Margaret Mary. Paul, the Corinthians, and the Birth of Christian Hermeneutics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Wire, Antoinette Clark. The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction through Paul’s Rhetoric. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

2 Corinthians Jouette M. Bassler

Introduction The second letter in the Christian canon from Paul to the church in Corinth is disjointed, reflecting the unstable relationship between the apostle and this church, and raising as well some questions about the literary integrity of the letter. A number of unsettling events occurred after the writing of 1 Corinthians: Paul visited Corinth to deal with a growing crisis in the church, and the visit—described by Paul as painful—resulted in a traumatic confrontation with at least one member of the church (2:1–11); following this visit he wrote an emotional, “tearful” letter of reproof (2:3–4, 9); he sent Titus to Corinth, perhaps as the bearer of the tearful letter, and Titus returned with comforting news of a reconciliation of the church with Paul (7:5–16); some Christian missionaries—Paul calls them “false apostles” (11:13) and, more ironically, “superapostles” (11:5)—arrived in Corinth and by direct accusation and subtle innuendo turned the church against Paul (11:1–15). Sometime during this growing crisis, Paul suffered some life-threatening experience, perhaps imprisonment, in the province of Asia (1:8–10). Second Corinthians contains a defense against the accusations leveled against Paul and an attack on the perpetrators of these accusations. Paul’s tone is at times magnanimous, confident, and even joyful (7:16); at other times, however, it is bitter, sarcastic, and even threatening (10:1–2; 13:2). Some scholars accept the letter as a single, though disjointed, letter whose disunity results from interrupted dictation, changes in Paul’s mood, or the different rhetorical purposes of various parts of the letter. For others, however, the shifts in tone and content

are too great for a single letter. They disassemble the canonical letter into separate missives and rearrange the parts to make a coherent sequence. Yet there is no agreement among these scholars as to the number or sequence of the letters. It has been proposed, for example, that 2 Corinthians comprises parts of two letters (chaps. 1–9 and chaps. 10–13), three letters (chap. 8; 2:14–7:4 with chaps. 10–13; 1:1–2:13 with 7:5–16 and chap. 9), or even five letters (2:14–7:4; chaps. 10–13; 1:1–2:13 with 7:5–16; chap. 8; chap. 9) that were written and sent at different times and reflect different stages in the tumultuous relationship between Paul and this church. The debate on this continues. Without taking a stand on it, the following comments will simply follow the canonical sequence of the chapters, treating them in sections that approximate some of the proposed divisions. The issue that dominates 2 Corinthians is status, specifically Paul’s status with the church in Corinth relative to that of the interloper itinerant missionaries. His was a status-conscious culture, and the letter is rife with the language of status disputes: boasting, shame, boldness, humility, power, weakness, commendation, confidence. Since with status comes authority—the authority of Paul’s gospel as well as that of the apostle himself—and since the salvation of the church is linked to that gospel, the tone of the correspondence is often intense, impassioned, and uncompromising. Unlike 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians does not mention women anywhere as objects of Paul’s concern or subjects of his admonitions. (The only exception is his presentation of Eve

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as a paradigm of deception; see below.) Paul is focused exclusively on his relationship to the community as a whole and on his status in their eyes relative to the itinerant ministers, who, it seems, were all men. The letter gives no explicit information about its place or places of origin. If the two-letter

hypothesis is correct, chapters 1–9 were probably written from somewhere in Macedonia after Paul’s reunion with Titus (7:5–7). Chapters 10–13 were written either before this reunion (from Ephesus?) or after it (from Macedonia?). The entire correspondence was probably completed between 55 and 56 CE.

Comment Status Negotiations (2 Cor. 1–7) These chapters are exceedingly difficult, with abrupt changes in tone and interrupted trains of thought. Even in sections where the subject matter remains fairly constant, sentences are repetitive, convoluted, at times almost incoherent. Whether this signals the awkward union of several different letters by a later editor or the turmoil in Paul’s mind, the issue of Paul’s struggle with his relationship to this church provides a unifying thread. The letter opens on a note of consolation as Paul looks back on a strained relationship that has been repaired. Here Paul wears his authority as “an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God” (1:1) lightly, praising the Corinthians as partners (1:7), brothers (an inclusive term that would include all, both women and men, in the church; 1:8), and coworkers (1:11, 24), and dealing magnanimously with one member who has humiliated him (2:5–11). He assumes his authority will be acknowledged by the church when he instructs them on how to deal with this person, and flaunts it a bit when he describes an earlier “tearful” letter (2:4) as a test of their obedience (2:9). There are hints here of some of the issues that strained their relationship—questions about Paul’s integrity (1:12) and reliability (1:17)—but Paul’s tone is more benevolent than defensive. Toward the end of chapter 2, however, the defensive tone increases, and with it the level of the status claims Paul makes for himself and his ministry. He is not, he says, a mere peddler of God’s word, concerned only to make money from his ministry. Rather, he is intimately associated with God: he walks “in triumphal procession” with God (2:14), is the very “aroma of Christ” to the world (2:15), and stands in God’s own presence (2:17). Then, with some self-deprecation, he asks, “Are we beginning

to commend ourselves again?” (3:1), for selfcommendation could be injurious to one’s status, while the commendation (praise) of others enhanced it. The Corinthians, however, have failed to commend him (12:11), so he is forced to commend himself and does so again and again, repeatedly asserting his God-given commission, competence, authority, and power (3:5–6; 4:1, 6, 7). Yet at the same time he pre­ sents himself to the Corinthians as their humble “slave” (4:5). Paul’s rhetorical dilemma is that he does not possess the qualities that, in his culture, promote status, while the rival missionaries apparently do. He has no letters of recommendation (save the Corinthians themselves), no impressive physical attributes, no wealth or worldly status. Instead, he has been persecuted, imprisoned, and insulted like one of the lowest status—a common criminal. In a rhetorically powerful and theologically profound move, he turns his liabilities into assets (and his opponents’ assets into liabilities). The life of the true minister of the gospel will reflect, he insists, the ignominy of the cross, for the status standards of the world are not relevant in God’s economy of salvation. To make the point, he uses the indelible image of a plain clay jar, an ignoble object that acquires status only by the treasure within—in Paul’s case, the power of God shining in his heart (4:6–11). Paul’s ultimate selfcommendation and claim to status, then, has been his willingness to accept suffering and hardship, the status of a clay pot, for the sake of the glorious gospel with which he has been entrusted. Thus Paul develops a decisive critique of the structure and foundation of worldly status and power, yet at the same time he uses that critique to establish his own. Much of the remainder of this section expands on this idea. Paul links his ministry so tightly to God’s purposes and presence that his

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cry, “Be reconciled to God,” is at one and the same time a plea to become reconciled to him. Indeed, whether because of a change of mood or of letter, the closing chapter of this section returns to the note of reconciliation, joy, and confidence with which it began. Before this happy ending, however, Paul has used his power and authority to stigmatize his opponents as engaged in a ministry of death (3:7). He expands this attack to encompass Moses and the covenant he mediated, probably because Paul’s opponents claim the authority of Moses and the Mosaic covenant. Though the objects of his rhetorical attack are his rivals in Corinth, the language he uses moves toward the larger notion of supersession: Moses brought the old covenant (3:14), but “what once had glory has lost its glory because of the greater glory [of the new covenant]” (3:10). If Paul’s insight into cross-defined status is the theological apex of this section, surely this argument is its nadir. Yet elsewhere Paul speaks more circumspectly— indeed, more positively—of Israel’s enduring relationship with God (Rom. 9–11), so these words, written in the midst of a struggle for the status of his ministry and gospel, cannot be taken as Paul’s last word on this subject.

Money, Shame, and Authority (2 Cor. 8–9) Because of subtle differences between chapters 8 and 9, many scholars regard them as two separate letters, even though they concern the same topic: instructions regarding a collection of money in Paul’s Gentile congregations to be sent as a gift to the Jerusalem church. Paul writes throughout from a position of assumed authority, yet there are signs that he still feels some status insecurity and fears the Corinthians have lingering suspicions about the collection (8:20–21; 9:5). He therefore presents the offering as a “test” of their obedience and love (8:8, 24; 9:13) that could result in status lowering, for if they fail to give generously, they—and Paul—will be humiliated (9:3–5). In a later letter Paul dismantles the cultural assumption that the giver of a gift attains superior status over the receiver. With the collection, he argues, it is a matter of creating equality, for the Gentile churches have already received an inestimable gift from the Jerusalem church: the gospel itself (Rom. 15:27). Here, however, the argument that the gift will promote equality (NRSV “fair balance”) envisions future responses, both

economic and spiritual (8:13–14; 9:10–15), from the Jerusalem church. In these chapters Paul presents the actions of Christ and God as models for generous giving (8:9; 9:9), but he does not hesitate to raise the specter of shame as a motivating force, and thus he often appears manipulative—as his opponents seem to have alleged (9:5).

Status Crisis and the Cross (2 Cor. 10–13) The status problems hinted at in chapters 1–7 are presented in chapters 10–13 as a full-blown crisis. Paul has been shamed and humiliated by some rivals he calls “super-apostles,” itinerant ministers who have captured the minds and hearts of his Corinthian churches. Paul bitterly cites the charges against him: that he is weak and humble in person and bold only in his letters (10:1, 10; 11:20–21); that his speaking style is contemptible (10:10); that he has not forthrightly accepted money for his work but has used guile to fill his pockets (11:7–11; 12:14–18); that he has not adequately displayed the miracles and wonders that were regarded as signs of a true apostle (12:11–13); and that he is deficient in the area of “visions and revelations” (12:1–10). Hurt and angry, Paul uses a full arsenal of rhetorical weapons against these rivals: irony, sarcasm, abusive language and vicious name-calling, boasting, and threats. Yet out of this bombast and rhetorical chaos emerge two points of enduring theological and moral value. First, in contrast to the rival ministers, who flaunted their status in order to humiliate the Corinthians (11:19–20), Paul insists that his concern (and by implication the concern of any true apostle) has always been to build up the church in faith, that is, to enhance its status before God (10:8; 11:7; 12:19; 13:10). Secondly, instead of refuting the charges of weakness that his rivals have raised against him, he embraces them in the name of Christ, whose victory came through the suffering and weakness of the cross. Viewed from the perspective of the cross, Paul’s weakness and suffering are not shameful or degrading, but the marks of the true apostle, who shares not just the authority of the one who sent him, but his suffering as well. “Therefore I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and calamities for the sake of Christ; for whenever I am weak, then I am strong” (12:10). Such words are rhetorically powerful, but they must be guarded



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against misuse. One way to do this is by contextualizing them. Paul presents his theology of the cross partly to defend himself against charges and partly to undermine the position of his rivals in Corinth, who understand their Christian mission in terms of personal aggressiveness, rhetorical grandeur, and spiritual superiority. His statements about suffering must be heard in this polemical context. The Corinthians are offered a choice, and the way Paul presents this choice—“super-apostles” or the apostle of the cross—is determined in large measure by the way his opponents have defined the issue. Setting Paul’s words in this context is helpful, but it is not enough. What can prevent later readers, for whom the context is obscure or irrelevant, from hearing in these words a call to passivity in the face of meaningless suffering or meekness in the face of oppression? Few women would find in this a redemptive message! Paul’s argument, however, is infused with irony that transforms the message of the cross into a protest against those who reject him as weak and who find God always and only on the side of aggression and power: “You put up with it when someone . . . gives you a slap in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that” (11:20–21). Moreover, the cross is inherently paradoxical, a symbol of the God who acts in ways that the world cannot comprehend. It locates God on the side of the weak, the foolish, the have-nots (1 Cor. 1:18– 31), but it affirms that God is powerfully present on this side, and that through such weak agents God’s power is revealed most clearly for what it is. When Paul identifies his own sufferings and afflictions as a reflection of the cross, he is claiming for his life all the paradoxes of that symbol. Thus he accepts his rivals’ charges of weakness, because they reveal a truth about God. But he accepts these charges with scathing irony and stern severity, and that too reveals a truth about God. The cross may reflect weakness, but not passive weakness. It reflects power in weakness, the power of the God who chooses the weak “to shame the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27).

A Pure Bride or Deceived Eve? (2 Cor. 11:2–3). Paul’s obvious concern throughout this letter is that false apostles have undermined the Corinthians’ loyalty to him and have drawn them away from the gospel that he preached

and thus (in Paul’s view) from Christ. He expresses his concern here through the familiar metaphor of marriage. Just as the prophets often portrayed Israel as the bride of YHWH (Isa. 54:4–6; Jer. 2:2; Hos. 2:19–20), so Paul describes the church as betrothed to Christ. He himself is the “father” of the bride, charged to keep her pure and undefiled until the day that the groom returns to claim his bride. (This may have been symbolized in the community by its “virgins”; see the comments on 1 Cor. 7.) The prophets often denounced Israel’s infidelity to God with graphic descriptions of the lewd behavior of the adulterous wife (Hos. 2:2–3; Jer. 3:1–5; 13:25–27; Ezek. 23:1–21). Paul’s approach is to introduce the figure of Eve. In Genesis both Adam and Eve are culpable in the tragic events of the garden, but only Eve admits to having been “deceived” (Gen. 3:13). This word has sexual overtones that Paul uses to tar his rivals as seducers and to depict the church as seduced. Unlike the author of the Pastoral Epistles, however, who equates only women with Eve’s deception/seduction (1 Tim. 2:11–15), Paul sees the issue in broader terms. The whole church is being exposed to “deceitful workers” (11:13), and Paul fears that the whole church, like Eve, may succumb. When Paul focuses in other letters on Adam’s role, the emphasis is quite different: the universal consequences of the fall are described, not the moral flaw that permitted it (Rom. 5:12–21; 1 Cor. 15:42–49). In using the figures of Adam and Eve in these different ways, Paul follows—and perpetuates—sexual stereotypes. Clearly the whole church, comprising both men and women, is in danger of being deceived, but it is Eve who is for Paul the paradigm of gullibility. Bibliography

Glancy, Jennifer A. “Boasting of Beatings (2 Corinthians 11:23–25).” Journal of Biblical Literature 123 (2004): 99–135. Roetzel, Calvin J. 2 Corinthians. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2007. Thrall, Margaret E. A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Second Epistle to the Corinthians. 2 vols. ICC. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 2000.

Galatians Carolyn Osiek

Introduction Galatians is universally recognized as an authentic letter of Paul. It contains some of the ideas considered most central to Paul’s theology, namely, salvation through faith in Christ and the Gentile Christian’s freedom from the Mosaic law. Galatians differs from the other authentic Pauline letters, though, in being addressed not to the cluster of house churches in one urban area but to a group of churches in a larger geographical region, as a circular letter destined to be passed around among them. We do not know if these communities were in cities or villages. The churches were located either in the Roman province of Galatia (according to the “south Galatian” theory) or in the larger, more northerly region that traditionally bore the name (according to the “north Galatian” theory). Though there are good arguments on both sides, the south Galatian destination is more likely the correct one, because Paul usually uses Roman political names for places. Furthermore, Acts depicts Paul as having been active in the Roman province of Galatia (at Pisidian Antioch,

Iconium, Lystra, and Derbe). The churches addressed were perhaps in these cities. The occasion of the letter, probably written in the mid-50s, seems to have been that, after Paul’s evangelization of the area, other Christian missionaries threatened to replace Paul’s gospel with their own. Their version of the gospel assumed that people’s access to Christ required that they obey the Mosaic law, or at least some of its major requirements, including circumcision. We know that Paul wrote in a state of agitation, because his usual thanksgiving after the greeting is missing (cf. Rom. 1:8–12; 1 Cor. 1:4–9; 2 Cor. 1:3–7; Phil. 1:3–11). He writes forcefully to reaffirm his own way of preaching the gospel. Chapters 1 and 2 rehearse events that establish Paul’s authority as an apostle and some of the difficulties he encountered. Chapters 3 and 4 set forth the biblical and theological underpinning of the gospel as he preaches it. In chapters 5 and 6 he develops the ethical and communitarian implications of the life in the Spirit that flows from his gospel of freedom in Christ.

Comment Male-Centered Language and Worldview (Gal. 1:1–3) The address of the letter provides a good illustration of the male-centered worldview of the New

Testament writers, which is often compounded by noninclusive translations. For example, in 1:1, Paul identifies himself as an apostle called by God first and foremost and not by human authorities. The RSV translates the source of

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Paul’s call as “not from men nor through man.” In the NRSV the wording has been improved and clarified to “neither by human commission nor from human authorities.” The same point is made again in 1:10–12. In this case, it is a question of translation. The problem is different when Paul includes with himself as senders of the letter “all the brothers with me” (1:2). This terminology is pervasive in Acts and in the Pauline letters, including Galatians (e.g., Gal. 1:11; 2:4; 4:12, 31; 5:11, 13; 6:1, where it refers to the addressees of the letter). It could be assumed that the masculine language is meant to be generic, as the translators of the NRSV do in using “friends” to translate the plural of the word for “brother,” though “brothers and sisters” would be more accurate. The more astute interpretation, however, is that, in the minds of the male writers and readers, including Paul, women are simply marginal to social communication and interaction and therefore need not be specifically addressed. The grammatical practice was that masculine language applied to women as well as to men because most women belonged to the social group solely as extensions of their male protective figures (e.g., fathers or husbands). Including women on such terms was generally the practice in the New Testament world and continues to be so in more traditional societies. Although in other settings Paul demonstrates awareness and even appreciation of individual women (e.g., Phil. 4:2–3; Rom. 16:1–7, 12, 15), this does not change his habitual language or his habitual social perceptions.

The Rite of Initiation (Gal. 2:3–9) Paul’s terms for Jews and Gentiles, generally translated “the circumcised” and “the uncircumcised,” are literally “the circumcision” and “the uncircumcision.” These categories, which symbolize people’s relationship to the whole law of God, express from the Jewish point of view the essential difference between people. In Judaism, however, circumcision is a wholly male ritual, which incorporates the male child (or adult in the case of “proselytes” or converts) into the community of the law. At about the time this letter was written, another rite—ritual immersion, or baptism—was also coming into favor for initiation of proselytes of both sexes. This practice probably grew out of the Jewish custom of purification by periodic ritual

washing by immersion in a miqveh, or ritual pool. As far as we know, baptism was always a ritual for both women and men. The practice known as “female circumcision” was, as far as we can judge, unknown in Mediterranean cultures. It is difficult to know what the ritual of circumcision may have meant for the women of the family. One suggestion from a contemporary Jewish woman is that women do not need to be circumcised because they are born kosher! When it began, baptism probably symbolized cleansing from the total impurity of being a Gentile. As baptism came to be interpreted in Gentile Christian communities, more attention could be given to the idea of cleansing from the impurity of sin (see Rom. 6:1–8). This was especially true as Paul’s version of the gospel, which did not require Gentile Christians to keep the law of Moses, came to represent the dominant theology of the church. The disappearance of circumcision in favor of baptism meant a wider ritual inclusion for women, even if that was not its purpose.

The Social Meaning of Sonship (Gal. 3:23–26; 4:4–7) In chapter 3, Paul has ingeniously used examples from Scripture and from life to illustrate his argument that observance of the law of Moses is no longer necessary for Gentile converts to Jesus. He maintains that his argument is valid in spite of the fact that other Christian missionaries have made a good case to the contrary and have presented the practice of Jewish custom in an appealing way (3:1–2; 4:10). In one of those examples, Paul speaks of the law as a “custodian” (RSV) or “disciplinarian” (NRSV). The reference is to a slave assigned as tutor and guardian of the son of a well-to-do Greco-Roman family (3:23–25; 4:1–3). Paul says that we are like that son, heir to the estate but, as a minor, subjected to a mere slave of the household until we attain maturity. The coming of Christ marks that change in status that frees us from the authority of our guardian (the law) in order to enjoy our inheritance as adults. In this context, Paul proclaims that we are “all sons of God through faith” (3:26, my trans.). Again the question of inclusive language versus social interpretation is important. The easy interpretation would be that the intention of the text is that all are sons and

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daughters—children—of God. But in the culture in which Paul wrote, a daughter did not have the same status as a son, especially the oldest son and heir referred to here. While daughters could also inherit property, their property was at least nominally always under the control of a male relative or patron who administered it. Even an oldest daughter could never be heir to the authority of the paterfamilias, the male head of the household. Though we know of households headed by women (e.g., Lydia in Acts 16:15; Mary in Acts 12:12; Nympha in Col. 4:15), such women were probably widows and still operating under the legal fiction of a male authority. Therefore, the best interpretation of 3:26 is most likely that all, both male and female, have the equivalent of the legal status of son before God—that is, all stand with Christ as heirs of eternal life. In a society in which no one would have thought of women and men of the same social status as equal, this is a surprisingly egalitarian statement. Continuing the analogy of our coming to maturity with the arrival of Christ, in 4:4–7 Paul speaks of Christ’s divine and human origins: God sent the son, who was also “born of woman.” The semidivine, semihuman son of a god and a human mother is a familiar motif in Greco-Roman religion: Dionysus, for instance, the god of vegetation, ecstatic sylvan worship, and sometimes of drama, was said to have been born of the human woman Semele, whom the high god Zeus courted and seduced behind his wife Hera’s back. The phrase “born of woman” does not, however, witness to the virginal conception of Jesus! The same expression is used in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke to refer to John the Baptist as one among many who are “born of woman” (Matt. 11:11//Luke 7:28). In fact, it simply emphasizes Jesus’ human origins and parallels the following statement about his religious origins, that he was “born under the law.” He is fully human and fully Jewish. Christ redeems or ransoms those who, like himself, are under the law (the Jews) and bestows on all believers the status not just of children of the household, in status no better than slaves, but of “sons” and heirs.

“No Male and Female” (Gal. 3:28) Galatians 3:28 has long been a center of controversy, more so in recent years with the rise of feminist readings of the Bible. Two of the three

pairs, Jew-Greek and slave-free, occur also in similar statements in 1 Corinthians 12:13 and Colossians 3:11. The third, male-female, occurs only here, and it will be the focus of comment. Whereas the other two pairs are connected by correlative conjunctions (“There is no Jew or Greek, slave or free”), the male-female pair is connected by the coordinating conjunction (“there is no male and female”). This difference is seldom noted in translations, though it is in the NRSV. There are at least five possible interpretations of this difficult passage.

1. Emancipation Proclamation Ahead of Its Time. Some interpreters suggest that the statement endorses an end to sexism and discrimination of every kind. At face value, this may be a bit naive, since it would seem that elsewhere in Paul’s writing (1 Cor. 11:2–16; 14:34–35), he certainly did not understand it that way. Yet, if we believe that biblical texts can be prophetic beyond the vision of author, time, and place, there is some validity to this approach. 2. A Formula Used in the Baptism of New Christians. According to this more recent interpretation, in the background of Paul’s words lies a baptismal ritual of the early church. The language of this ritual echoes the statement from the first creation narrative in Genesis 1:27–28. There God is said to have fashioned humankind after God’s own image and likeness: “male and female” God created them. The words in quotation marks are exactly the same in the Greek translation (the Septuagint) of Genesis 1:28 and in Galatians 3:28, where they break the parallel structure, as noted above. In some Hellenistic Jewish exegesis of Genesis, notably that done by the great theologian Philo of Alexandria, a contemporary of Paul, the creation narrative is a metaphor for the makeup of the person. In that metaphor, the division of the original human being into two genders was the beginning of the internal division of the person into rationality (symbolized by the male principle) and sensation (symbolized by the female principle). Conflict is soon to follow and indeed does in the story. Against the background of such an understanding of the human condition, the baptismal proclamation quoted by Paul implies that the division and conflict in human nature, the source of sin, can be overcome in the saving grace of baptism.

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3. Reference to the Order of Creation but Not to the Order of the Fall. In this view, the text refers to a fundamental equality of male and female as created by God, alluded to in Genesis 1:27–28. However, with the fall, that equality was broken, as evidenced in Genesis 3:16: “Your [the woman’s] desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.” Galatians 3:28 therefore has nothing to say about contemporary relationships, but looks back nostalgically to the good old days before equality was lost by sin. 4. The Time of Salvation Anticipated in the Present. Related to the first interpretation but with a different view of human nature, this view suggests that in God’s future the tension between human opposites—Jew and Gentile, slave and free, male and female—will disappear. Because life in the grace of Christ anticipates in part what the future can be like, it is possible to live without these unhealthy tensions even now. 5. A Glimpse of the Still-Distant Future. Contrary to the previous two interpretations, this reading suggests that Galatians 3:28 speaks of the heavenly realm of relationships in Christ, possible only in a new and transformed creation, like that envisioned in Revelation 21:1–4; 22:1–5. Like the third interpretation, this one would assert that the text has nothing to say to the present time—Paul’s or ours. God as “Father” (Gal. 4:4–7) In addition to bringing about people’s transformation from the status of minor children under guardianship of the law to that of mature heirs able to enjoy their inheritance (see above on 3:23–26), the coming of Christ has other consequences as well. One of those consequences is that the Spirit of God, the sign for Paul of the presence of God’s action, is sent into our hearts and enables believers to address God as Abba, Father (see also Rom. 8:14–17). Surely this characteristically Christian way of calling on and speaking about God goes back to Jesus himself, since it is so well attested of him in the Gospel tradition. Contrary to what is sometimes thought, he was not the first or only one to use it in such a personal way. The important thing is that, in memory of Jesus, Christians felt empowered to use this title

when calling upon God. In its day, this was a new understanding in Jewish and then Christian spirituality. The use of kinship language for God opens possibilities for relationship based on the experience of the family. Addressing God as Mother today is a contemporary cultural analogy: that is, the feelings it evokes, both positive and negative, are probably quite similar to those evoked by the use of “Abba” for God in the first century.

Paul as Mother to the Galatian Christians (Gal. 4:19) In a very unusual way, Paul here draws upon the metaphor of giving birth to speak of his own relationship to the Galatian communities. Elsewhere he freely uses paternal expressions (1 Cor. 4:14–15; 1 Thess. 2:11; Philm. 10). In 1 Thessalonians 2:7, he compares his ministry style to the tenderness of a nurse with her children, but here Paul speaks of his own birth pangs in the process of giving birth to Christ in them—a somewhat complicated metaphor. The language of birth pain is a common way to speak about the approaching end time (e.g., Mark 13:8; Matt. 24:8; John 16:21–22; 1 Thess. 5:3; Rom. 8:22; Rev. 12:2). Such language may also imply the mystery of rebirth as spoken of in Hellenistic mysticism and mystery religions. However, the difference here is that it is not the apostle alone who suffers the pain of giving birth, nor the believer alone who is to be reborn through the initiation process, but Christ who is being born and formed within believers. Paul’s vivid sense of living in a time when the end of history is near means that this birth process of which he speaks is not limited to the individual apostle and community but is part of the grand scale of suffering and tribulation (see Rom. 8:22). But what does the use of maternal imagery imply about Paul himself? Perhaps a man willing to use such an image is not as alienated from women’s experience as Paul is often made out to be.

The Allegory of Sarah and Hagar (Gal. 4:21–31) The great allegory of the two Jerusalems is founded in Jewish imagery in use at the time, but not with such a negative shadow cast on the earthly city. The heavenly Jerusalem and the heavenly temple were used by other New

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Testament writers as well (e.g., Rev. 21:2; Heb. 9) to symbolize eternal transformation. Paul begins his allegory with the story of Abraham’s two wives: the first wife, Sarah (never named but clearly intended), and the slave, Hagar, who becomes Abraham’s concubine, since her servile status makes it impossible for her to be wife in the full sense (Gen. 16; 21). The use of the two women illustrates the importance of the matriarchs in what we call the patriarchal narratives. They are bearers of the lines descending from Abraham, the common ancestor in faith for Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Jews claim both ethnic and spiritual descent through Sarah. Christians, Paul suggests, can trace their spiritual roots back to her. Muslims, in an interpretation attributed to Muhammad himself, claim Hagar and her son, Ishmael, as their spiritual ancestors. There is no denying that for both Genesis and Paul, Hagar is rejected. But precisely because of this interpretation, she becomes the symbol and heroine for all those women who feel rejected or less desired because of personal, economic, ethnic, or racist practices. While Paul’s allegory, for his own purposes, ends with Hagar still rejected, the reader of the Bible cannot forget Jesus’ outreach to just such oppressed and forgotten ones.

Freedom in Christ (Gal. 5:1, 13) In the last part of the letter, after giving his theological exposition, Paul appeals to the Galatians to live in the true freedom for which they have been freed by Christ. Apparently Paul did not mean by this that they were also to consider themselves free from the restrictions imposed on them by social customs. In this letter, written to people who, Paul thinks, need to be liberated, Paul speaks forcefully about freedom. In 1 Corinthians, on the other hand, where the problem seems to be just the opposite, he does not mention it! It has been suggested that perhaps Paul began preaching freedom in Christ among the Corinthians as well (or that they obtained a copy of the Galatian letter) but that they then went on to take him more literally than he intended. Read in that light, Paul’s restrictive measures in 1 Corinthians fall into place. In questions of dress, hairstyles, and public conduct socially appropriate to each gender, for instance (1 Cor. 11:2–16; 14:34–35), Paul sounds quite conservative. Where has his openmindedness about freedom gone?

Galatians 5:13 gives us a clue: Paul understands freedom not as the opportunity to pursue one’s own interests but to be even more at the service of others. That this is costly service can be seen in the fact that in this charter of Christian freedom he also refers frequently to the cross (2:19–20; 3:1; 5:11, 24; 6:12, 14, and perhaps 17). This ideal of service and even selfsacrifice poses definite problems for women of all generations and nearly all cultures who are socially educated to expect that their true happiness lies in service to others, while men are brought up to pursue their own goals. But Paul may be doing something quite radical here: he is holding up traditionally feminine values as ideals for everyone, male and female, and perhaps especially for the Christian men who are his principal addressees (see above on 1:1–5). Women too need to appropriate these values, but they need also to balance this ideal carefully against their legitimate psychological needs. Bearing the cross in freedom does not mean enduring abuse and victimhood, but living genuinely for others out of one’s own inner freedom by claiming the inheritance of the “sons of God.”

Living by the Spirit The most exciting outcome of Paul’s letter to the Galatians is his lyric description of life in the Spirit (5:22–23), with the conclusion: “Against such there is no law.” Nothing constrains the Pauline believer from living according to the Spirit, except “the flesh.” It is important to note in the following verse 24 and elsewhere in Paul that what he means by “flesh” is not the human body or materiality. A quick perusal of the “works of the flesh” in verses 19–21 makes that obvious, for many of them originate in the mind. What Paul means by “flesh” is the human ability to put self in place of God, to resist God’s Spirit. These root tendencies are equally strong in women and men, even if their manifestation may take different forms. What Paul asks is discernment. Bibliography

Esler, Philip F. Galatians. NT Readings. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Gaventa, Beverly R. “The Maternity of Paul: An Exegetical Study of Galatians 4:19.” In The Conversation Continues: Studies in Paul and

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John in Honor of J. Louis Martyn, edited by Robert Fortna and Beverly Gaventa, 189–201. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990. Jervis, L. Ann. Galatians. New International Bible Commentary 9. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1992.

Matera, Frank. Galatians. Sacra Pagina 9. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1992. Wiley, Tatha. Paul and the Gentile Women: Reframing Galatians. New York: Continuum, 2005.

Ephesians E. Elizabeth Johnson

Introduction The Problem of Pseudonymity Although Ephesians and Colossians are letters that purport to come from the same Paul who wrote Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon, several of their literary and theological characteristics lead scholars to conclude that Ephesians and Colossians were written by later authors. At best, their authorship is disputed. It is more helpful to speak of “disputed” and “undisputed” Pauline letters than “authentic” and “inauthentic” ones, because what is at issue is authorship rather than authority. Whether or not Paul wrote Ephesians and Colossians (or 2 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Timothy, and Titus) determines whether or not we can legitimately use the undisputed letters to interpret them and vice versa. If Paul did not write them, they do not cease to be the church’s Scripture. They must, however, be understood in a religious and historical context different from Paul’s. The practice of a later author’s writing under a pseudonym, particularly the name of an honored predecessor or teacher, was common in the first century. It reflected a desire to interpret that predecessor’s thought in a new context. One characteristic of Ephesians and Colossians that leads a majority of interpreters to conclude they are pseudonymous is that they treat very differently themes and issues that are found also in the undisputed letters of Paul. Although Paul speaks sometimes of the principalities and powers that are hostile to God, for instance, those cosmic forces loom far larger and more prominently in Ephesians and

Colossians. Similarly, for Paul, God’s wisdom is disclosed in the Christian message of God’s redemption of Jew and Gentile alike through the death and resurrection of Christ; in Ephesians and Colossians, Christ himself becomes the incarnation of God’s wisdom. These two letters express greatly reduced expectation of the imminent return of the risen Christ, and they employ vocabulary and stylistic features different from Paul’s. Ephesians, in particular, uses much longer and more complex sentences than Paul typically does. Finally, both letters presuppose church situations that are more understandable in congregations one or two generations removed from Paul’s ministry. The earliest Pauline churches are small charismatic groups without much discernible institutional structure, while the communities addressed by the Deutero-Pauline epistles appear to be established congregations with specific leadership roles and organization. In general, Ephesians and Colossians seem to come from a time in the last third of the first century, when Gentile Christianity seeks to define itself against both Jewish Christianity and Greco-Roman paganism. The marked similarities between the two suggest that the author of Ephesians relies heavily on the letter to the Colossians and, to a lesser degree, on some of the undisputed letters of Paul. Colossians itself is greatly influenced by Paul’s letters, particularly 1 Corinthians.

The Situation of Ephesians The letter’s very general quality, the remarkable lack of reference to individuals or circumstances

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in the church, and the absence of a specific addressee (the best manuscripts of 1:1 do not name where the “saints who are faithful” live) lead some interpreters to suspect that Ephesians is not really a letter at all but instead a theological treatise intended to serve as an encyclical or cover letter for an early collection of Paul’s letters, a sort of summary of his thought. There is enough specificity, however, to say that Ephesians is addressed to a real contingent situation in a Christian community—or group of communities—in Asia Minor near the end of the first century. These communities were apparently founded within the Pauline mission and are now jeopardized, in the author’s judgment, by variant teachings of unknown origin and content (see “tossed to and fro and blown about by every wind of doctrine,” 4:14). Whatever these novel teachings are, they apparently threaten to divide the church or distance it from its heritage, because the author’s greatest concern is to maintain the unity of the church (see particularly the exhortations in 4:1–6). Although the nature of the danger is by no means clear, the church’s enemies include not only the devil (2:2; 4:27; 6:11, 16) and cosmic “principalities and powers” (6:12–17) but also deceitful teachers (4:14; 5:6). The language of hostility and reconciliation (e.g., 2:14, 17) and of continuing conflict (see the divine armor in 6:10–17) implies that all is not well with these Christians and that some threat from outside demands the protection afforded by an apostolic letter.

Contents of the Letter After a familiar “Pauline” greeting and an extended thanksgiving (1:1–22; cf. Rom. 1:1–15; 1 Cor. 1:1–9) that sets the tone and agenda for what follows in the letter, the author embarks on an exalted description of the new life in Christ (2:1–22). The language of the thanksgiving is the language of worship, a blessing of God and praise for God’s redemptive work in Christ. It draws the listeners of the letter up into the very presence of God and bids them understand the church as a heavenly as well as earthly reality devoted to the worship and service of God and reflecting God’s glory. The author employs what sound like Pauline slogans (e.g., 2:5b, 8–9) to ground both his own authority and his vision of Christian life in Paul’s teaching. Relying heavily on Hellenistic Jewish traditions about

the accessibility of God’s wisdom, he describes Christian life as sharing through baptism Christ’s heavenly status with God. References to heaven and the “heavenly places” abound in Ephesians (1:3, 10, 20; 2:6; 3:10, 15; 4:6, 8, 10; 6:9, 12), which suggests that the temporal dualism between this age and the age to come so prominent in Paul’s letters has given way to a spatial dualism between earth and heaven. Christians no longer live between Jesus’ death and resurrection, on the one hand, and his coming in glory, on the other, but between their own earthly (that is, pre-Christian) and heavenly (Christian) identities. This contrast between earth and heaven is reflected in the baptismal language the author borrows from Paul to make a distinctly new point. In Romans 6:1–12 Paul talks about Christian baptism as death and resurrection with Christ. Although he is careful to locate believers’ resurrection with Christ in the eschatological future (6:5), the author of Ephesians (here relying on Col. 2:20–3:4) says that Christians have already been raised with Christ and therefore currently share his heavenly home (2:1–10). The Pauline slogan in 2:5, 8 (“by grace you have been saved”) is thus a development beyond Paul, for whom salvation is always a future reality that confirms what has been inaugurated in the justification of sinners and the gift of the Spirit to the church (see Rom. 5:9; 1 Thess. 1:10). This description of Christian life leads the author into a discussion of God’s bringing together of Jew and Gentile into the church, what he calls the “mystery” of God’s plan (2:11–3:21). Paul too speaks of God’s dealings with Israel and the Gentiles as a “mystery” (Rom. 11:25). Ephesians, though, merges the two ethnic groups into “one new humanity” (2:15), whereas Paul steadfastly maintains their separate identities before God and God’s abiding faithfulness to ethnic Israel. Ephesians employs Paul’s concept of the “body of Christ” (see Rom. 12:3–8; 1 Cor. 12:12–31) to describe not the local congregations to which Paul refers but the universal—even cosmic—reality of the one church (2:16). This universalizing of the concept of the church is yet another result of the author’s earthly/heavenly dichotomy. If all believers share the same heavenly identity, there should be no discernible distinctions among individual Christian communities. Whereas Paul describes the church as the body of Christ,

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with feet, ears, eyes, noses, hands, heads, and even “dishonorable parts” (1 Cor. 12:15–25), Ephesians specifies that Christ alone is the head of his ecclesiastical body (1:22; 4:15; 5:23). Such a picture of the church universal as a reflection of God’s “fullness” (3:19), harmonious in all its parts and heavenly in its identity, prepares for the second half of the letter, a series of ethical exhortations (4:1–6:20). The author grounds his call for church unity in the universal confession and baptism of all believers and the shared teaching of all church leaders whose authority goes back to the apostles (4:1–16).

The bad behavior characteristic of the old, preChristian, earthly life is no longer appropriate to the new, Christian, heavenly life (4:17–5:20); here again the image of baptism surfaces in the language of “putting off ” and “putting on” in 4:22, 24 (compare “put away” in 4:25). Whereas Paul calls for Christians to imitate him even as he imitates Christ (1 Cor. 4:6; 11:1; 1 Thess. 1:6; cf. 2:14), the author of Ephesians exhorts the church to become imitators of God (5:1), dissociating themselves from nonbelievers (5:3–14) and making their Christian fellowship distinctive in the world (5:15–20).

Comment The Household Code (Eph. 5:21–6:9) Household Duties in Greco-Roman Culture and Early Judaism As long ago as the fourth century BCE, philosophers considered the household a microcosm, the basic social unit whose structure ought to reflect the pyramidal structure of the whole society and even nature itself. Aristotle said, Now that it is clear what are the component parts of the state, we have first of all to discuss household management; for every state is composed of households. Household management falls into departments corresponding to the parts of which the household in its turn is composed; and the household in its perfect form consists of slaves and freemen. The investigation of everything should begin with its smallest parts, and the smallest and principal parts of the household are master and slave, husband and wife, father and children. (Politics I.1253b)

By the first century, many ethicists, both Greco-Roman and Jewish, discussed this domestic structure by including prescribed duties for each member of the household. The head of the household, the paterfamilias, held all three superior roles—master, husband, and father—and his slaves, wife, and children were expected to serve him and the interests of the family. A typical upper-class household contained more people than a man, his

relatives, and his slaves; it also often included his extended family, former slaves, and business associates. In a culture that placed family identity above individual identity, it was crucial that everyone live so as to further the honor of the household, just as it was imperative that citizens of the empire seek its honor above all else. It was assumed that, if the paterfamilias properly ruled his family as the emperor ruled the nation and the gods ruled the world, human life would be as it was intended. The subject of household management was so important that scarcely a philosopher worth reading neglects to discuss it. So also several important Jewish writers of the period consider family relationships and obligations, particularly in the context of interpreting the Bible’s command to honor one’s parents (Exod. 20:12; Lev. 19:3; etc.), and their reflections are clearly influenced by GrecoRoman moralism. Christian Household Codes We do not see much concern in the first generation of Pauline Christianity to endorse or maintain traditional hierarchical household order, and it is denied rather emphatically in the baptismal formula of Galatians 3:28: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Women serve alongside men in the Pauline mission (e.g., Rom. 16:1–16; Phil. 4:2–3), Paul prefers celibacy to marriage for Christians (1 Cor. 7:1, 8–9, 25–40; 1 Thess. 4:1–8), and his attitude toward relations between slaves and their masters is anything but conventional (1 Cor.

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7:20–24; Philemon). This is apparently due to the apostle’s conviction that the revelation of Jesus Christ, crucified and raised, discloses God’s new creation that is invading and displacing the old creation and its binary assignments of identity as Jew and non-Jew, slave and free, male and female. Several Christian writers from the second and later generations, however, pick up traditional family values and reinterpret the hierarchical duties of household members from their own Christian perspectives. It is curious to note that the Christian household codes we have (in Ephesians, Colossians, 1 Peter, and the Pastoral Epistles) all come from the Pauline circle. This is likely because Paul’s proclamation of freedom to women and slaves, combined with his concern to maintain house churches, created significant friction for succeeding generations. Paul himself apparently found the gospel’s release of women from social conventions problematic at Corinth, because 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 contains the only assertion of gender hierarchy found in his letters. Furthermore, in 1 Corinthians 12:13, when he alludes to the traditional baptismal formula, he omits reference to the reunification of women and men in Christ (see Jouette M. Bassler’s essay on 1 Corinthians). The household code in Ephesians, although it addresses all three conventional pairs of relationships, dwells at greatest length on marriage, comparing it to the relationship between Christ and the church. That comparison is one of the most remarkable features of this table of domestic responsibilities. The familiar prophetic metaphor of Israel as God’s wife (e.g., in Hosea) uses human marriage to illustrate or explain God’s faithfulness to Israel despite Israel’s faithlessness. The writer of Ephesians, however, reverses the direction of the comparison by using Christ’s relationship to the church to illustrate how men ought to relate to their wives and women to their husbands. The issue of faithfulness, so prominent in the prophetic metaphor, is left behind; instead, issues of love, nurture, submission, and respect predominate. These are far more familiar from pagan and Jewish philosophical reflections on good domestic order than they are from Israel’s religious experience of God. Furthermore, the metaphor of Christ and the church gives the paterfamilias absolute authority over his household, which has often resulted in enormous abuse of women, children, and people in bondage.

To use human marriage as an image of God’s faithfulness implies that God behaves more faithfully than human beings do. Even Hosea’s much-lauded (although sometimes violent) patience with Gomer is only a human reflection of divine love, which is even more long-­ suffering and ultimately transformative than is the prophet’s. Conversely, to say that Christ’s relationship with the church represents the ideal of human marriage presents a problem. It holds up a divine standard for human behavior and thus sets up an unavoidable contradiction when human beings do not—because they cannot—live up to the divine standard. The writer himself seems to recognize the limitations of his language when he says, “as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her . . . so husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies” (5:25, 28). The logic of the analogy falters because husbands are not asked to die for their wives as Christ did for the church, and Christ did not love his own body, as husbands are urged to do, but rather gave himself up for the church. The metaphor presumes a prior image, that of the church as Christ’s body, and allows that image to modify the current one. This results in something like a disembodied Jesus whose love for the church/ body is disconnected from his willing sacrifice of his physical body. Men are given an alarmingly self-serving motivation to love their wives (5:28), even though Christ’s love for the church is described as self-giving rather than self-­loving (5:25). The parallel between Christ’s being head of the church and a husband’s being head of his wife is disrupted in the very same sentence, when Christ is identified as the “savior” of his body, a role human husbands can scarcely assume on their wives’ behalf. In 5:32, the author introduces another comparison whose logic limps, although for different reasons. He calls marriage a “mystery,” which elsewhere in Ephesians refers to the inclusion of Gentiles into the church (see 3:4). This might suggest that he thinks the relationship between husband and wife ought somehow to mirror the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in the Christian community. Once again, though, the analogy breaks down in practice. In Ephesians the Jew/Gentile distinction is obliterated in the “new humanity” of the church (2:11–22), over which Christ is the head (1:22; 4:15). In marriage, however, although a man and woman become “one flesh” (5:31, quoting Gen.

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2:24), the distinction between them regarding roles is strictly reinforced. While it is true that the Ephesian household code begins with the exhortation to “be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21), there does not seem to be much mutual submission in view when women are told they must be subject “in everything” to their husbands (5:24). The comparison of the unity of the church to the unity of a human marriage is yet another metaphor that collapses under the weight of social inequality. Despite concrete religious equality between Christian Jews and Gentiles—Christ has put an end to the “hostility” between them (2:14)—any parallel equality between Christian husbands and wives remains a religious vision rather than a mark of everyday life in the home. The writer of Ephesians finds in conventional patriarchal household order a reflection of the unity and harmony of the universe effected by God in Christ and calls his listeners to live accordingly. This can be seen most clearly in the fact that, by quoting Genesis 2:24 in Ephesians 5:31, he grounds the institution of marriage not in social order but in creation. So, apparently, did Paul. Galatians 3:28 quotes Genesis 1:27 (“male and female he created them”) for the purpose of saying that the new creation in Christ sets aside the old one (cf. also 2 Cor. 5:17; Gal. 6:15). Ephesians, though, is concerned that the church faithfully mirror the creation and that the household mirror the church. The result for women is thus a retreat from the initial freedom promised them in Paul’s preaching and a reassertion of the rightness of patriarchal morality. The reason the images of unity in creation and church in Ephesians are distorted by the imposition of hierarchy in marriage is itself something of a mystery. Although in other early Christian household codes, particularly that in 1 Peter, the motivation offered for maintaining traditional family order is preservation of the church’s reputation among nonbelievers, there is scant evidence in Ephesians of concern for ecclesiastical public relations. The author’s exhortation to “make the most of the time” in “evil days” (5:16) may hint at such a situation (see Col. 4:5, where a nearly identical phrase

occurs). If this is the case, then the author’s willingness to contradict—not simply reinterpret— Paul’s understanding of relations between the sexes must derive from a sense of great peril. The awkwardness of the comparison of Christ and human husbands betrays a deliberate alteration of the received tradition. By subordinating the interests of the women in the congregation to the interests of the church’s public image, the author apparently operates more from fear than from faith. By relinquishing Paul’s claim that the new creation in Christ judges and reorients human social structures—including particularly marriage and slavery—and instead perceiving the church as an institution within human society, the author of Ephesians has moved a significant step away from his honored predecessor. The challenge for contemporary Christians, for whom the letter to the Ephesians continues to be Scripture, is (1) to understand the historical circumstances that seem to have driven the author to move beyond Paul in this respect, (2) to recognize the tension within the letter itself between the author’s sense of the gospel’s liberating power and the community’s social conservatism, and (3) to appreciate the letter’s many significant contributions to Christian theology aside from its rather unfortunate view of marriage. Bibliography

Balch, David L. “Household Codes.” In GrecoRoman Literature and the New Testament: Selected Forms and Genres, edited by David E. Aune, 25–50. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988. Dahl, Nils A., and Donald H. Juel. “Ephesians.” In Harper’s Bible Commentary, edited by James L. Mays, 1113–20. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 2000. Polaski, Sandra Hack. A Feminist Introduction to Paul. St. Louis: Chalice, 2005. Tanzer, Sarah J. “Ephesians.” In Searching the Scriptures, vol. 2, A Feminist Commentary, edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 325–48. New York: Crossroad, 1994.

Philippians Carla Swafford Works

Introduction Paul’s letter to the Philippians is the most joyful epistle of the Pauline corpus. In this short letter, the apostle mentions some form of rejoicing or joy at least sixteen times. The apostle’s joy, however, comes in the midst of opposition, as he pens this letter under the threat of execution in a Roman prison. In light of his certainty that the church will also face affliction in the days ahead, Paul calls his beloved partners in the ministry to rejoice in the gospel and to stand united as they follow in his Christlike footsteps. In the beginning of the epistle, Paul voices his adoration for the Philippians and his thankfulness for their partnership (koinōnia) in his ministry (1:5, 7; 4:15). The term koinōnia, often translated as “fellowship,” is certainly not uncommon in Paul’s letters. Paul uses the term in reference to the Jerusalem collection (Rom. 15:26; 2 Cor. 8:4; 9:13) as well as the church’s communion in Christ (1 Cor. 1:9; 10:16). In Roman commerce, koinōnia bears connotations of a legal arrangement between business partners, an arrangement that would be terminated if one partner should die. The Philippians may be influenced by this meaning of the term. After all, they have invested in Paul’s ministry. Though impoverished (2 Cor. 8:1–5), they have supported his ministry through their finances (4:14–20; 2 Cor. 8:1–5; Rom. 15:26), through the service of Epaphroditus (2:25–30; 4:18), and through their faithfulness to the gospel (1:7). Should Paul die as a result of his current imprisonment, some may wonder what would become of this partnership. Paul’s letter serves to remind them that, for this God, death is not the end. Instead, it is through Christ’s

scandalous death on a cross that God displays God’s ultimate victory (2:6–11). The counterintuitive gospel serves as the basis for Paul’s joy and exhortation. In 1:12–26, he rejoices in the power of the good news to be spread—regardless of the ill will of some of its witnesses—and acknowledges his own precarious situation as an advantage for the gospel’s proclamation. Although the letter’s message is joyful, the threat of suffering is never far from the surface of this text. Not only has Paul endured hardships for the defense of the gospel (1:7, 29–30), but he is certain that the faith of the Philippians will result in their affliction as well (1:27–30; cf. 2 Cor. 8:1–2). In the face of opposition, Paul encourages the community to stand firm (1:27–28; 4:1), to remain united (1:27; 2:1– 5), and to follow the example of Christ (2:6–11). The hymn in 2:6–11 is the heart of this letter. Paul exhorts the Philippians to have the same mind-set as Christ—a mind-set that willingly relinquishes a position of power to assume the humility of a slave for the sake of God’s work in the world (2:6–7). This mind of Christ is not consumed with its own advantage, but willingly sets aside equality with God to stand alongside those who are powerless (2:8). Since Christ humbled himself for the salvation of all, God superexalted him (2:9). None in heaven, or on earth, or under the earth will be able to look upon the lordship of Jesus and deny God’s power (2:9–11). The Philippians may face hardships, but they can rest assured that they are in partnership with a powerful God. The God who worked through the scandal of the cross is the same God who is at work in 581

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this congregation (2:12–13). No matter what trials may come—even the potential loss of Paul—the believers must hold fast to the “word of life” and continue to shine as lights in their world (2:14–18). To encourage faithfulness, Paul lifts up examples of those who have exhibited the mind of Christ (3:17; 4:9–13). The first example is Timothy, whom Paul hopes to send to them (2:21–24). Timothy, a slave of Christ (1:1), is a leader who seeks to follow Jesus rather than secure personal gain. Likewise, Epaphroditus, the church’s emissary, has risked his life for the gospel (2:25–30). Finally, Paul himself serves as an example of one who, though having status, has counted all as loss for the sake of knowing Christ and the power of the resurrection (3:4–4:1). It is Paul’s hope in the resurrection that enables him to call the church to be unified in the face of affliction. The apostle characterizes the opponents as enemies of the cross of Christ (3:18), dogs (3:2), evildoers (3:2), mutilators of the flesh (3:2), and earthly-minded (3:19). In stark contrast to Christ, who emptied himself, the opponents are those who labor for their own benefit and who thrive on partisanship (eritheia, 1:17). Contra the self-seeking opponents (2:4, 21), Paul exhorts the believers to live by the example of Christ (3:17–4:1). By focusing their attention on whatever is pure, just, and honorable, the Philippians can follow the Christlike example of Paul, who has learned to be content under any circumstance, even imprisonment (4:8–13).

Occasion and Purpose Determining the occasion and purpose of Philippians rests on the issue of the letter’s integrity. Though scholarship has been divided over this issue, recent work on friendship letters has revealed that the apparent disjointedness of the letter (e.g., 1:1–3:1; 3:2–4:7; and 4:10–20) is rather common among contemporary friendship letters. Thus phrases that seem to indicate a premature conclusion (e.g., “finally,” 3:1 and 4:8) may have been exaggerated in their importance by previous scholarship. Furthermore, themes of concord, joy, and Christlikeness course throughout the letter and hold the pieces together. For this reason, this article has treated the letter as a single composition. The letter’s recipients live in the thriving Macedonian city of Philippi. Archaeological

evidence suggests that this city was adorned with imperial images and was proud of Roman citizenship. A Roman citizen himself, Paul pens this epistle from a Roman prison and awaits a trial that may result in his execution (1:19–26; 2:17, 23). Though the apostle mentions the praetorian guard (1:13) and the household of Caesar (4:22), these references do not necessitate a provenance from the city of Rome. The guard was stationed in multiple places throughout the empire. Some of the other top contenders for Paul’s imprisonment include Ephesus (1 Cor. 15:32; 2 Cor. 11:23) and Caesarea (Acts 23:33–35). Though the location is undetermined, Paul’s imprisonment is critical to the occasion of the letter. The apostle is uncertain as to whether he will ever see the beloved Philippians again. Since there is no evidence that Paul sent them another letter, this epistle could very well contain Paul’s last words to this church. The letter also gives us a glimpse, through Paul’s eyes, of the anxiety of the Philippians regarding his imprisonment. They have sent Epaphroditus with gifts and have partnered with Paul in his suffering (4:14–19), as they did in his ministry (1:5). In this intimate letter, the apostle expresses his assurance that God will provide all that they need, even if Paul can no longer be with them (1:8; 4:19–20). Paul’s circumstances illustrate the twopronged purpose of this letter. First, the apostle offers the believers words of comfort regarding his imprisonment, news of Epaphroditus’s wellbeing, and thanksgiving for the church’s partnership. Second, Paul uses his own situation to illustrate the opposition that awaits those who remain faithful. In consideration of this resistance, Paul urges the Philippians to stand united in the gospel against any trials that may come or opponents they may face (1:27–30; 2:12–18; 3:15–16; 4:1, 4–9).

Theological Significance In this relatively short letter, Paul says very little about women explicitly. Save for the closing remarks to Euodia and Syntyche (4:2–3), women receive no special attention in the body of the letter. In fact, as is customary for Paul, this letter contains some decidedly masculine imagery: athletic contests (1:27; 3:12–16; cf. 1 Cor. 9:24–27), the expression of fatherly affection for Timothy (2:22; cf. 1 Cor. 4:14–17), military

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imagery (“fellow soldier,” 2:25), and the reference to “the true circumcision” (3:3). This letter, however, conveys a number of theological issues that concern women. There are at least three theological matters that have implications for both male and female: the call to rejoice in the gospel, the call to be a unified community, and the call to imitate Christ. First, it is hard to ignore Paul’s exhortation to the Philippians to rejoice (2:17–18; 4:4). Rejoicing in the midst of suffering or hardship may not be a welcome message for women or for any people who have ever been the target of violence and oppression. To read Paul’s letter as the exaltation of suffering, however, would be a gross misinterpretation indeed. Paul’s ultimate goal is not martyrdom, but witness to the work of God. The apostle is in prison due to his defense of the gospel. The act of rejoicing is an act of testimony to the hope Paul has in Christ. The apostle is able to rejoice under any circumstance because of his hope of salvation (1:10, 2:16; 3:12–21) and his confidence that God will destroy the enemies of the cross (1:28; 3:18–19). Paul is writing to believers who have much to gain by keeping their faith quiet, clinging to their Roman citizenship, and demonstrating their loyalty to Rome. Those who dare to proclaim a Lord other than Caesar can expect to face opposition (1:29). The letter reminds the church that, even under the threat of death, the faithful can rest assured in God’s rectitude. Paul envisions a polis (city-state or kingdom) where God’s justice reigns (3:20–21) and the believers partner together in the work of God’s righteousness (1:11). In this partnership, those of higher status bear witness to the heavenly kingdom by serving others—especially those who are powerless. For people who have experienced abuse or oppression, the ultimate hope in this text lies in the assurance that God’s righteous kingdom has invaded the world and will come to fruition (2:6–11). The church is called to bear witness to this hope through its action. Paul expresses faith that the God who worked definitively through the cross will equip the believers to produce a “harvest of justice” (1:11). A second theological theme that is significant for women is Paul’s insistence that the Philippians have been called into a new identity—a new community with an exalted Lord. To be sure, there is nothing in Philippians like the erasure of gender boundaries found in Galatians 3:28. Instead, Paul refers to all the

Philippians—women and men—as saints in Christ Jesus (1:1), children of God (2:15), and citizens of the heavenly commonwealth (3:20). The political language in this letter demonstrates that all believers are called to live under a new lordship. In 1:27, Paul urges them to behave in a manner worthy of the gospel. The verb often translated here as “behave” or “conduct one’s life” (politeuesthe, 1:27) bears the connotation of conducting oneself as a citizen. In 3:20, Paul revisits this citizenship theme by reminding the Philippians that their citizenship (politeuma) is a heavenly one. Male and female are part of a Godcreated reality, a kingdom that is greater than the rule of Rome. Paul insists that all the believers are already harbingers of a polis that recognizes Jesus’ lordship (2:9–11). As part of this kingdom Paul urges them to stand firm. Far from separating themselves from their environment, they are called to be a unified witness (1:27) and to be lights in their world (2:15). As indicated in Paul’s mention of Euodia and Syntyche (4:2–3) and the story of Lydia in Acts 16:11–15, women are a significant piece of the community and an essential part of God’s mission. Being part of this heavenly kingdom has implications for how the Philippians should live. The third theological theme that directly impacts women is Paul’s call to imitate Christ. Throughout this letter, Paul urges the Philippians to be Christ-minded (1:27; 2:1–5; 3:15, 19; 4:2, 7–9). Christ’s mind is made manifest in the actions of the hymn in 2:6–11. Unfortunately, this hymn has been employed to abuse people who are not in positions of authority by demanding servitude and prescribing selfdenial. This reading runs against the grain of the text. The pattern of the Philippian hymn should not be read prescriptively for those who are already powerless. Instead, Paul charges those in authority— those with status to lose—to humble themselves and exhibit the good news of the gospel to those who are most vulnerable. Unlike Adam, who desired to be like God, Christ emptied himself of his divine status to stand in solidarity with those who have nothing. Christ’s act of humility led to salvation and freedom for all. The exhortation to follow the example of Christ is a call to seek the salvation of others. This call is especially pertinent to believers who have status or possessions, who benefit from easy access to life’s basic necessities, or who enjoy privileges unknown to most of the world. Neglecting

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to serve the needy or to hear the cries of the oppressed is a failure to exhibit the very good news that Christ embodies. By standing with

the powerless and testifying to the hope of the gospel, the church exhibits the mind-set of Christ and bears witness to God’s kingdom.

Comment “The True Circumcision” (Phil. 3:3) In his passionate plea to watch out for opponents of the gospel (3:2–3), particularly any possible opponents who preach the necessity of circumcision, Paul prepares the Philippians to counter false teaching (literally, “the mutilation,” 3:2) by declaring, “We are the circumcision” (3:3a, my trans.). Although the image employed here is a masculine one, Paul’s reference to the “circumcision” should not be read in a way that excludes women from the fellowship. The text is reminiscent of the metaphorical image of a circumcised heart in Deuteronomy 30:6: “Moreover, the Lord your God will circumcise your heart and the heart of your descendants, so that you will love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul, in order that you may live” (cf. Deut. 10:16). In Philippians, Paul includes within “the circumcision” all “who worship God in spirit and glory in Christ” (3:3). Given the context of the letter, this qualifier would certainly include women (4:2–3).

Euodia and Syntyche (Phil. 4:2–3) In the closing exhortations of the letter, Paul uncharacteristically reprimands particular individuals by name. Since these individuals happen also to be women (4:2), it is unfortunate that some readers of this letter might be offended by Paul’s admonition to the bickering Euodia and Syntyche and, as a result, neglect to read what Paul says about these influential women. They have labored side by side with the apostle and the rest of the Pauline band in the work of the gospel, and their names are in the “book of life” (4:3). There is no indication

here that their gender is an issue. The issue is their disunity. Paul encourages them to be of the same mind in the Lord because their disagreement threatens the well-being of a church that needs to remain unified in the face of opposition (1:29–30). Bibliography

Fowl, Stephen. Philippians. The Two Horizons New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2005. Halstead, Elizabeth Steele, Paul Detterman, Joyce Borger, and John D. Witvliet. Dwelling with Philippians: A Conversation with Scripture through Image and Word. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2010. Ringe, Sharon. “An Approach to a Critical, Feminist, Theological Reading of the Bible.” In A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods, and Strategies, edited by Athalya Brenner and Carole Fontaine, 156–63. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997. Stubbs, Monya A. “Philippians.” In True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian K. Blount, 363–79. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Wagner, J. Ross. “Philippians.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible One Volume Commentary, edited by Beverly Roberts Gaventa and David Petersen, 842–50. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2010. Williams, Demetrius K. “Philippians.” In The Global Bible Commentary, edited by Daniel Patte, 482–89. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004.

Colossians E. Elizabeth Johnson

Introduction Authorship The author of this letter is aware that the Colossian church was neither founded nor visited by Paul (“you . . . and all who have not seen me face to face,” 2:1) but has no reticence about writing in Paul’s name, even though the apostle was himself quite clear about his own policy of nonintervention in churches he did not establish (see Rom. 1:11–13; 15:20; 1 Cor. 3:10; 2 Cor. 10:15–16). The author of Colossians is a second- or third-generation leader of a Pauline community seeking to interpret Paul’s preaching for the new day and situation in which the church finds itself. (See also “Ephesians,” Introduction.)

The Situation of Colossians The Colossian Christians, originally part of the Pauline circle, have since come under the influence of Jewish mystical Christians who believe that a system or hierarchy of angels, powers, and spiritual rulers stands between them and God. They understand the work of Christ to be the guidance of individual believers through that cosmic hierarchy (back) to God. Christian life for these teachers therefore includes winning the approval of the cosmic powers by worship practices and ascetic disciplines, probably specifically including circumcision and Sabbath observance. In response, the author writes in Paul’s name and invokes his authority to restore the community to traditional Pauline doctrine and life. He portrays the other teachers as “captors” (2:8, my trans.) or religious terrorists who

delude the Colossian Christians with mere “philosophy, empty deceit, and human tradition” and lure them away from Christ rather than enhancing their life and worship.

Contents of the Letter After a traditional Pauline greeting (1:1–2), the author engages in a long thanksgiving (1:3–2:7) that, as in Paul’s letters, alerts the reader to much of what is to follow. Support for the ministry of a local church leader named Epaphras (1:7; cf. 4:12; Phlm. 23) is paramount as the author seeks to ground both his own authority and that of Epaphras in the apostle’s (see the reminder about Paul’s ministry in Col. 1:24–2:7). The purpose of the thanksgiving is to assert the completed act of redemption by God in Christ, so as to undercut the claims of the rival teachers who say that the Colossians must yet perform prescribed religious rituals in order to be saved. The author refutes this competing theology in 2:8–3:4. Since the death and resurrection of Christ have defeated the cosmic powers about which the Colossians are so anxious, they who share Christ’s death and resurrection by baptism have similarly triumphed. The concrete result of this victory is that such practices as ascetic disciplines, observance of festivals, and worship according to angelic instructions are unnecessary. As is true in the letter to the Ephesians, dying and rising with Christ in baptism locate believers’ identity in the heavenly rather than the earthly sphere, and the author assures his readers that their lives are “hidden with Christ in God” (3:3). This spatial dualism 585

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(contrast between earth and heaven) is different from the temporal dualism (contrast between this age and the age to come) evidenced in Paul’s sense that believers already participate in Christ’s death but still await their own resurrections (see Rom. 6:1–14). In Colossians 3:5 the argument shifts from a description of Christian reality to exhortations regarding Christian behavior, grounding ethics in theology. The meaning of baptism is not only spiritual but decidedly social. Just as early Christians who were baptized removed their clothing before entering the water and were subsequently reclothed in new garments, so the Colossians are urged to “put on” (3:12; cf. 3:10) the behavior appropriate to their new life and identity. In 3:11 the author describes the new, universal human condition in Christ: “In that renewal there is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian,

Scythian, slave and free; but Christ is all and in all!” Paul makes a very similar assertion in Galatians 3:28, also in the context of a discussion of the effects of baptism: “There is no longer Jew or Greek . . . slave or free . . . male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.” Similarly, in 1 Corinthians 12:13, baptism unites Jews and Greeks, slaves and free. This has suggested to many that a traditional baptismal formula stands behind all three texts. The fact that the reuniting of women and men, or the dissolution of distinctions between them, is not mentioned in 1 Corinthians 12 may be because of Paul’s concern about some Corinthian worship practices (see 1 Cor. 11:2–16). Why this pair of opposites is left out of Col. 3:11 and replaced by an expansion of the Jew/Greek dichotomy with the mention of circumcised/uncircumcised and barbarian/Scythian apparently has to do with the household code offered in 3:18–4:1.

Comment The Household Code (Col. 3:18–4:1) The author believes that behavior appropriate to the new life is communal in nature (3:12–15), constituted by Christian worship (3:16–17), and marked by the peace and harmony of the reconciled creation (3:14). (For a discussion of the social and philosophical background of the household codes, see the commentary on Eph. 5:21–6:9.) The household code in Colossians moves attention from congregational life to the household, maintaining the same emphasis on harmony. The household is to reflect the church. In many respects this is a traditional form of the household code—each pair of related persons is addressed in order, the subordinate member first. Wives are told to be subject to their husbands for the simple reason that such behavior “is fitting in the Lord” (3:18). In Philemon 8, Paul calls Philemon’s responsibility to take the runaway slave Onesimus back “fitting,” and in Ephesians 5:4, coarse or frivolous talk is said to be not “fitting” for Christian conversation. Fittingness is thus apparently determined not merely by social convention (the “silly talk” mentioned in Eph. 5:4 is not condemned by pagan ethicists) but by proper reflection of Christian community standards.

The alleged appropriateness of the submissive behavior of women in Colossians seems to be a function of the author’s concern that believers “conduct [themselves] wisely toward outsiders, making the most of the time” (4:5; cf. Eph. 5:16). If non-Christians are already watching the church with suspicion about its confession of faith, the reasoning goes, then believers ought not to provoke further hostility toward themselves by disrupting traditional social structures. They will already encounter sufficient trouble on account of their Christian faith (as seen in the reference to Paul’s imprisonment, 4:3) without further incurring the culture’s wrath because of nontraditional household relationships. The social as well as spiritual equality in the earlier church between women and men, slaves and free persons, is now a cultural liability, as a later generation learns to live as one of several competing religious groups in society rather than as the beachhead of the advancing reign of God. As expectation of the end time wanes in Colossians and Ephesians, the challenges to prevailing social structures that marked the earliest Pauline communities become increasingly problematic. The greatest attention in the Colossian household code is devoted to slaves, who are

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told to obey their masters “in everything” (3:22), despite the preceding assurance that “there is no longer . . . slave and free” (3:11) and the following reminder that with God “there is no partiality” (3:25; cf. Rom. 2:11). The net effect of the exhortations to women and slaves is a vision of the household, and therefore of the church, as harmonious and in keeping with the order of the creation as redeemed by Christ (1:15–20). Such household order, however, is not particularly different from the prevailing values of the culture in which the letter was written. Although these Colossian Christians have heard Paul’s word of freedom to women and slaves, and despite their “heavenly” status as participants in Christ’s victory over the cosmic powers, they must nevertheless live in a world where nonbelievers are watching (4:5–6). In this respect, perhaps the author of Colossians is in a situation similar to that of 1 Peter: Christian slaves are owned by nonChristians. Because both wives and husbands are addressed proportionally in Colossians, it is difficult to know whether Christian women are also married to non-Christian men, as seems to be the case in 1 Peter. But in either case, under the pressure of public opinion, the author of Colossians has retreated from the concrete freedom of the gospel once offered to women and slaves, in order to insulate the church from

its neighbors’ charges that it is socially disruptive. There is no question that the author of Colossians Christianizes the pagan domestic morality he endorses. The exhortation to husbands to love their wives (3:19), the advice that fathers not embitter their children (3:21), and the reminder to masters that they too have a master in heaven (4:1) put some restraints on the absolute power the paterfamilias has over his household in Roman society. Nevertheless, even in the Christian community, the consequence for women, children, and people in bondage is that they remain under the domination of powerful men. Bibliography

D’Angelo, Mary Rose. “Colossians.” In Searching the Scriptures, vol. 2, A Feminist Commentary, edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, 313–24. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Hay, David M. Colossians. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2000. Johnson, E. Elizabeth. “Colossians.” In Harper’s Bible Commentary, edited by James L. Mays, 1126–30. Rev. ed. San Francisco: Harper & Row, 2000. See also bibliography for Ephesians.

1 Thessalonians Monya A. Stubbs

Introduction Turning the World Upside Down After being expelled from Philippi, Paul travels to Thessalonica, the capital city of the Roman province of Macedonia, and establishes a church. The persecutions that characterized his ministry in Philippi continue in Thessalonica. Acts 17:1–7 describes an episode in Thessalonica where the followers of Paul, based on the apostle’s teachings, are accused of anastatōsantes tēn oikoumenēn (turning the world upside down, 17:6). Oikoumenē can be understood to represent the world as an administrative unit, that is, the Roman Empire. Furthermore, anastatoō, understood as upsetting the stability of a person or group, simply means, within the context of the passage, that Paul, Silas, and the other believers through their actions and teachings have been disturbing the ideological stability of the Pax Romana and its ordering of society. According to their accusers, Paul and his followers are acting against the decrees of the emperor and promoting Jesus as another king. Instead of the welfare of the city and the safety of its citizens being solely dependent on the emperor’s beneficence, Paul pre­ sents an alternative: The people will flourish and value their lives in accordance with the grace of the “living and true God” (1:9) and through the power of the Lord Jesus. Paul is forced to flee Thessalonica, but the turmoil of the persecution remains for the community. Concerned about the strength and stability of the new converts’ faith under the pressure of persecution, Paul sends Timothy to reinforce the believers’ faith. Paul is well aware

that, unchecked, persecution has the power to detract from the appeal of the gospel and that suffering can lead to despair and grief. Therefore, around 49 CE, some twenty years after the death of Jesus and shortly after the founding of the church, Paul writes 1 Thessalonians to address the power of persecution and to encourage the Thessalonians to continue their faithful commitment to the message of the gospel. Paul seeks to assuage his own as well as the Thessalonians’ anxiety around the effectiveness of his absent leadership in the midst of the community’s suffering. This necessitates his use of persecution as an umbrella theme that helps him to address the apostolic function, to convey how the Thessalonians should be in relationship to God, one another, and the larger social world, and to distinguish between the apocalyptic expectation of the fulfillment of God’s salvific action through Jesus Christ and the Satanic “darkness” that often prevented Paul from serving in his apostolic role as a loving nurse (2:18; 2:7; 5:6–10). The letter can be divided into six interrelated units that help develop Paul’s argument. In 1:1 Paul identifies the Thessalonian church as a community whose origin stems from God and whose existence depends on God. Paul picks up the imitation theme in 1:2–10 as a way to address the unsettling experiences of persecution that the believers are enduring. He addresses his own identity in 2:1–12, comparing himself and his apostolic role to that of a nurse attending to the needs of those under her care. Persecution and imitation are again featured as the primary themes in 2:13–3:13,

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where Paul encourages the new converts to remain strong in their faith. In 4:1–12 the apostle advises on issues of sexual behavior and social morality. He also offers general guidelines to aid the community in its call to

express love to all humanity through its everyday practices. Finally, 4:13–5:28 recognizes the pain of those who eagerly await the Lord’s return and simultaneously promises them hope and new life.

Comment Grace to You and Peace in God and Christ (1 Thess. 1:1) Paul’s usual claim of apostolic authority (1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Gal. 1:1) and his less acclaimed self-designation “slave of Christ” (Phil. 1:1; Rom. 1:1) are absent from his introduction. Instead, Paul simply names himself and his companions. He does, however, clarify the identity and status of the Thessalonian believers. With the use of the instrumental preposition en, Paul makes clear that the Thessalonian church is “brought into being by” and “lives through” God’s parental love and the security of Jesus’ saving power (1:10). To this ekklēsia, the ones who have been called out from among the Gentiles of Thessalonica, Paul commends grace and peace. It is God’s grace, not the emperor’s beneficence, that secures a life people have reason to value. It is the peace of God made possible through Jesus Christ, not the Pax Romana, that shows them how they ought to imagine themselves in relation with one another and enables them to live a life that is pleasing to God (4:1).

Disarming the Power of Persecution: Imitators of Jesus and Paul (1 Thess. 1:2–10) The Thessalonians’ faith and love for God and one another are manifest in their labor. Their endurance, in the midst of great affliction, is a testament to their hope in the Lord Jesus Christ. Still, Paul is concerned. He is absent from this burgeoning congregation at a time of great crisis. Perhaps the Thessalonians began to think, or Paul feared they thought, that their persecution signified God’s wrath against their own misdeeds and misconceptions about their faith (see Rom. 1:18; 13:4). Paul employs the imitation theme to ease their conscience and further establish the Thessalonians’ identity in God and Christ. The Thessalonians are imitators or “like”

Jesus and Paul (and Paul’s companions). Why? Because, empowered by the Holy Spirit, even in the midst of much persecution, they received the gospel with joy and were chosen by God. Jesus, empowered by the Holy Spirit, received the word of God, experienced persecution, and was chosen by God. Paul, empowered by the Holy Spirit, received the word of God, experienced persecution, and was chosen by God as an apostle to the Gentiles. Just as Jesus became an example or a “type” for Paul and Paul became an example or “type” for the Thessalonians, the Thessalonians are to be one for all the believers in Macedonia, in Achaia, and throughout the region. Thus, turning away from idols and to worship the true and living God and to wait for (and thus serve) Jesus is not a reflection of God’s wrath, but the assurance that they will be spared the eschatological wrath that awaits those who continue to worship idols and fail to acknowledge Jesus Christ as Lord (1:9–10).

The Apostle as Nurse (1 Thess. 2:1–12) In chapter 2, Paul again ties the experience of persecution to believers’ identity in God and Christ. Paul recounts his and his companions’ struggles in Philippi and quickly asserts that it did not hinder their mission to the Thessalonians. In spite of great opposition, they were emboldened to speak openly and declared the gospel to the Thessalonians (2:1–2). Paul contrasts his motives and practices with that of the popular philosophers and rhetoricians of the era who sought to manipulate and exploit others for their own personal benefit. He is without guile and cares for the community like a nurse (trophos) nurturing her own children. The trophos metaphor is an effective image for a group of people meeting in the family atmosphere of house churches. House churches were not sterile civic buildings or common spaces of worship. Instead, they were private homes where nursing and infant care were a

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common reality and the precarious work of keeping a baby alive from the first fragile days into the first few years would have been central to the environment. Scholars estimate that in the first-century biblical world about 30 percent of infants died in their first year. Considering the fragility of infant life, the care provided by a nurse was essential to its existence. But in the ancient world the nurse was identified not only with the nurture of infants but also with the continued affection for her charges well into adulthood. The work of Paul and his companions among the Thessalonians reflects the loving and nurturing care of a nurse in that the survival and maturity of infants required the attentiveness of those who act in the courage of God. They share not only the gospel, but also the emotional joys and pains of communal life. They work not to burden the community, but rather to contribute in those daily activities that provide the basic necessities of life. Surprisingly, Paul applies the image of infants and nurses to adult men as markers of apostolic distinction. In disposition, apostles are frank and humble. In purpose, apostles assist people in living lives worthy of God, who calls them into God’s kinship and glory (2:12).

other coworkers. But we also learn in 3:7–8 that Paul deploys Timothy to the Thessalonians not only because of his concern for them, but also because he is moved by the weight of his own insecurity and his own experiences with persecution. Paul needs the Thessalonians to reinforce his faith: “For this reason, brothers and sisters, during all of our distress and persecution, we have been encouraged about you through your faith. For we now live if you continue to stand firm in the Lord.” The imitation theme comes full circle. The Lord, even in the midst of trials and persecution, offered new life to the world. Paul, through suffering and persecution, offers new life to his converts. The Thessalonian converts, in turn, in spite of distress and affliction, inspire new life in Paul. But the power of suffering or persecution is not taken lightly. Paul qualifies verse 8 with a conditional clause: “if you continue to stand firm.” The clause implies that it is possible that they might not stand firm, and so there is a hortatory character to such a phrase. Just as the act of birth does not constitute a fulfilled life, but requires the guidance and nurturance of a nurse, neither does one’s faith come mature and complete at the point of conversion. Rather, it is a living faith that can be enhanced or diminished.

Disarming the Power of Persecution: Imitators of the Churches in Judea (1 Thess. 2:13–3:13)

Love More and More: Sexual Behavior and Social Morality (1 Thess. 4:1–12)

The Thessalonians are not simply imitators of Paul; they are also imitators of the churches of God in Christ that are in Judea. The Thessalonians’ suffering at the hands of their fellow citizens mirrors that of the churches in Judea. Paul denies his opponents the tool of persecution and suffering to separate him from the Thessalonians and make him feel like a childless parent (2:17). Instead, persecution, both his and that of the new converts, renews his commitment to the mission of sharing the gospel with those he considers the fruit of his labor, even in the midst of eschatological opposition (2:18). Paul’s separation from those he has nurtured as his own children becomes unbearable. He fears that the Thessalonians might be dissuaded from their new commitments because of alienation from neighbors and friends or the experience of actual physical persecution. Timothy brings Paul a favorable report. The Thessalonians remain committed to the gospel and long to share more with Paul and the

Paul reiterates earlier instructions given to the Thessalonians that distinguish Christian behavior from normative Greco-Roman sexual behavior and acts of injustice towards others. He advocates monogamy in marriage. Considering that Greco-Roman male privilege allowed sexual freedom for a married man that was out of the question for married women, it is reasonable to assume that this exhortation is primarily aimed at male converts. Paul also calls for a social morality. He advises against the love of greed and excess that leads to dishonoring oneself and also the dishonoring and exploitation of others in any type of deception or fraud (4:6, pragmati). Paul naturally transitions then into verses 9–12 to speak about the qualities of love. He encourages the Thessalonians to increase their missionary vision and generosity and offers practical ways that will help accommodate their expression of love. They are to fulfill the responsibilities placed under their charge, and work as productive members of society who contribute



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to the well-being of the community. Paul broadens the Thessalonians’ question about love of the brothers and sisters to include an accountability to live honestly and honorably among all humanity. The Thessalonians are to love more and more—to live in the power of God and Jesus, and to witness to as many people as possible about the love of God, as understood through the message and lordship of Jesus. But to accomplish this missionary goal, the Thessalonians must not be distracted by the power of persecution, but live in a way that ensures their spiritual, social, and economic vitality.

Apocalyptic Expectations: The Afterlife, Labor Pain, and New Birth (1 Thess. 4:13–5:28) The recent death of believers in the community prompts Paul to expound on the afterlife. Again he employs the issue of suffering as a marker to distinguish between the Thessalonian converts and their non-Christian neighbors, for whom the afterlife was often understood negatively. Grief at a loved one’s death is normal, but it must not lead to a paralyzing despair or a denial of hope in the divinely assured future, even after death, which affects one’s present belief and actions. The community is not to worry about their loved ones who have “fallen asleep,” for they too will experience the returning glory of the Lord Jesus. Paul compares the coming divine judgment to the suddenness of labor pains that come upon a woman (5:3). Ōdin (“labor/birth pain”) is often used in biblical and extrabiblical literature to connote anxiety and distress associated with a divine situation. Here it references a sign of the inescapable destruction that will befall those who are not in Christ and therefore live in a false security and self-deception. But birth pain also signifies the possibility of new life. The Thessalonians are reminded and encouraged to remind one

another that they are not destined for death and destruction but for new life “through our Lord Jesus Christ” (5:9). Through the death and resurrection of Jesus, God makes a claim on reconciling humanity unto Godself. Jesus not only delivers from the coming wrath, but God enables believers, in their present lives, to be faithful to the holiness into which God calls them (5:12–24), which includes showing respect and affection for those exercising leadership among them. Although no women are mentioned, we cannot assume that the Thessalonian leadership is all male. Paul does not list any particular male leaders either. In fact, it might be more accurate to imagine female leadership in the congregation, since Acts suggests that a number of Thessalonica’s “prominent women” were among the converts (Acts 17:4). Paul does not distinguish the persecutions the community is called to endure according to gender. While endurance of suffering is often later imputed or expected of women in dangerous ways, Paul’s summons in Thessalonica is for a community’s collective endurance and mutual sustenance in order to testify to a new life in Christ. Bibliography

Gaventa, Beverly Roberts. Our Mother Saint Paul. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007. Osiek, Carolyn, and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet H. Tulloch. A Woman’s Place. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006. Patte, Daniel. Paul’s Faith and the Power of the Gospel: A Structural Introduction to the Pauline Letters. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2004. Witherington, Ben, III. 1 and 2 Thessalonians: A Socio-Rhetorical Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006.

2 Thessalonians Mary Ann Beavis

Introduction Second Thessalonians is traditionally regarded as the second earliest Pauline letter, written shortly after 1 Thessalonians to the members of one of the earliest European churches. Acts relates that after Paul and Silas left Lydia’s household in Philippi (Acts 16:40), they proceeded to the nearby Macedonian city of Thessalonica, where Paul tried to persuade the local Jews that the Scriptures foretold a suffering and resurrected messiah (Acts 17:1–3). According to Acts, some Jews, God-fearing Gentiles, and “not a few of the leading women” (Acts 17:4) believed, but “other Jews” stirred up opposition to the missionaries, who were arrested, bailed out, and fled the city (Acts 17:5–10, 13). First Thessalonians would have been written soon afterward from Corinth, where Paul met Priscilla and Aquila (Acts 18:1–4); subsequently, Silas and Timothy rejoined him from Macedonia (Acts 18:5). Scholars disagree whether 2 Thessalonians was written by Paul or by an imitator. The letter’s supposed departures from Pauline style are explicable by its early dating; if the letter was written about 50 CE, it makes little sense to posit deviations from stylistic and theological conventions that were to develop over the next decade. However, the detailed timetable of endtime events that must ensue before the return of Christ (2:1–11) is so different from anything found in the authentic Pauline letters that it is unlikely to have been written by the apostle. The main difference between the two letters is their eschatological teaching. The recipients of 1 Thessalonians are anxious because some of the faithful have died, but Jesus has not yet

returned (1 Thess. 4:13–18). In 2 Thessalonians, however, the issue is a claim that the day of the Lord has already arrived (2 Thess. 2:1–2). The discrepancy is lessened if the usual chronology of the two letters is reversed, making 2 Thessalonians the first Pauline letter, written in response to an allegation of a realized Parousia. After reassuring the congregation that certain events must transpire before the Lord’s coming (2 Thess. 2:1–11), the missionaries hear that their teaching has been effective, and write a second letter complimenting the Thessalonians on their progress (1 Thess. 1:9–10). Nonetheless, some members, upset by deaths among them, continue to speculate about the timing of the Lord’s return (1 Thess. 5:1), and the missionaries reassure them that the date of the Parousia cannot be determined (1 Thess. 5:4–5; cf. Mark 13:32–37). Whatever its chronology and authorship, 2 Thessalonians offers little obvious inspiration to feminist readers. Throughout, the audience is addressed as “brothers” (adelphoi) (1:3; 2:1, 13, 15; 3:1, 6, 13). Although there is no reason to doubt that, as in other Pauline congregations, women were members of the church in Thessalonica (cf. Acts 17:4), the sisters are embedded in the identity of the brothers, whose interests are assumed to determine those of the women. Possibly, the women were considered to be “honorary males,” like Mary in the Gospel of Thomas (114). More likely, they conformed to conventional gender expectations. Their silent presence justifies the contemporary practice of translating adelphoi as “brothers and sisters”; indeed, the text’s androcentrism demands that

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they be acknowledged by the inclusive translation. Although the letter provides ample material for feminist critique, as Scripture sacred to

women and men, it can be mined for material conducive to human liberation, even if this entails reading against the text.

Comment Greeting (2 Thess. 1:1–2) The coauthors self-identify as Paul, Sylvanus (Silas), and Timothy. Coauthorship is typical of Pauline letters (1 Thess. 1:1; Phil. 1:1; 1 Cor. 1:1; 2 Cor. 1:1; Phlm. 1; cf. Col. 1:1), implying a collaborative ethos often overlooked by biblical scholarship with its emphasis on the personality of Paul. Throughout, the authors mostly selfidentify as “we.” Here they situate the church “in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (1:1; cf. 1:2), metaphorically within a kyriarchal household.

Introduction (2 Thess. 1:3–12) Rhetorically, this section is an exordium or introduction designed to gain the sympathy of the audience. The authors state their approval of the community in a thanksgiving for their mutual faith and love in the face of persecution (1:3–4). Acts 17:5–9, 13 recalls opposition to the missionaries stirred up by Jews unconvinced by the missionary preaching, suggesting the nature of this turmoil. Apparently, at this point, neither the proto-Christians nor their opponents are open to dialogue (cf. Acts 17:2–4). Paradoxically, the authors argue, the affliction being experienced by the audience is preparation for the reign of God, which, consistently with Pauline teaching, is yet to come (1:5).When it arrives, the community will be vindicated by the righteous judgment of God, and their persecutors will be grievously afflicted. The horrific consequences of opposition to the missionary preaching are luridly detailed: the Lord Jesus will arrive from heaven with powerful angels “in flaming fire,” wreaking vengeance on those who neither know God nor obey the gospel, who will suffer eternal separation from God (1:7–9). The authors place the audience among “holy people” who will glorify the Lord at his coming (1:10), but imply that this sanctified status can be lost, since the authors’ constant prayer is that the community will remain worthy of the divine call (1:11–12). The “us-against-them”

mentality of this section falls short of the love of “enemies” that constitutes the best of early Christian paraenesis (Matt. 5:44; Luke 6:27, 35); the faith and love cited in the thanksgiving (1:3) are for believers only.

Reason for the Letter (2 Thess. 2:1–12) This section begins with a statement of the motivation for the letter: the community has been shaken by a rumor that Christ has returned and the day of the Lord has arrived (2:1–2). The source of this teaching is not specified, but it has been spread “by word . . . letter . . . or spirit” as if from the authors, possibly by their opponents. An argument to the contrary follows (2:3–12). Certain end-time events have not yet occurred, notably, the appearance of “the man of lawlessness, the son of destruction” (2:3, my trans.), whose rebellion against God will culminate in his claiming divine status and occupying the temple (2:4). This figure has often been identified as “the antichrist” by Christian interpreters, although the term is never used this way in the NT (cf. 1 John 2:18, 22; 4:3; 2 John 1:7). Similar teaching, originating in Daniel (9:27; 11:31; 12:11; cf. 1 Macc. 1:54), characterizes the Synoptic eschatological discourses (Mark 13:14; Matt. 24:15; cf. Luke 21:20). The remainder of the section uses the first person singular—“Do you not remember that I told you these things when I was still with you?” (2:5)—invoking Paul’s prestige to reinforce the cryptic teaching that follows; the Thessalonians already “know” what (or who) restrains the lawless one (2:6–7). When he finally appears, the Lord will destroy him “by the breath of his mouth” (2:8)—a frightening portrait of warring male powers augmented by the evocation of Satan, who collaborates in deceiving unbelievers (2:9–12).

Summation (2 Thess. 2:13–3:5) The authors revert to the third-person plural, concluding the previous argument. As God’s chosen saints, the community must adhere to

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“our gospel” and pray for its dissemination. The Lord will enable the community, unlike those destined for destruction, to resist evil and justify the authors’ confidence that their commands are being obeyed (3:4). Although the recipients are addressed as siblings, implying equality, the coercive rhetoric of the letter places them in the position of needy children seeking approval from stern parents.

Moral Exhortation (2 Thess. 3:6–15) Typically of Pauline letters, moral exhortation (paraenesis) follows theology. The authors have heard that some members are “idle/ disorderly” (ataktōs), not “busy” (ergazomenous), but “busybodies” (periergazomenous) (3:11). These “idlers” are not following the missionaries’ example of self-support (3:7–9; cf. 1 Cor. 4:12; 1 Thess. 2:9; Acts 18:3; 20:34), or their command: “Anyone unwilling to work should not eat” (3:10b). Often taken to advocate the Protestant work ethic, more likely this teaching is a rejection of Roman patronage, where the ambitious sought wealthy patrons to provide for their needs. Such persons would regard manual labor as demeaning. Alternatively, the ataktoi may be claiming support in recognition of their ministry or leadership (cf. 1 Tim. 5:13); labeling them “busybodies” and silencing them (2 Thess. 3:12) may indicate the presence of women or simply denote womanish/shameful behavior (cf. 1 Cor. 14:34–35; 1 Tim. 2:11–12; 2 Tim. 3:6–7; 1 Pet. 3:4). The community is advised to shame the disobedient

by warning—and, if necessary, shunning— them. However, they are to be treated not as enemies, but as “brothers and sisters” (3:15), that is, as readmissible on repentance. As early as the fourth century, John Chrysostom warned against using this passage as an excuse for heartlessness toward the needy (On Repentance and Almsgiving 10.6.23–24).

Epistolary Closing (2 Thess. 3:16–18) The benediction (3:16, 18) is interrupted by a reference to Paul’s authentication of the letter by writing a few lines himself (3:17; cf. 1 Cor. 16:21; Gal. 6:11; Col. 4:18), reminding the contemporary reader of the contribution of the anonymous scribe to whom the authors dictated their message (cf. Rom. 16:22). Bibliography

Beavis, Mary Ann. “‘If Anyone Will Not Work, Let Them Not Eat’: 2 Thessalonians 3.10 and the Social Support of Women.” A Feminist Companion to the DeuteroPauline Epistles, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, 29–36. London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2003. Wilson, Megan T., and Sheila E. McGinn. “Welfare Wastrels or Swanky Socialites: 2 Thess. 3:12 and the Problem of the Ataktoi.” Conference Paper, Feminist Hermeneutics Task Force, Catholic Biblical Association, August 2009.

1 Timothy Joanna Dewey

Introduction to the Pastoral Epistles First and Second Timothy and Titus are called the Pastoral Epistles because they contain instructions for pastors of congregations. They claim to be letters from Paul to two of his younger colleagues, Timothy and Titus respectively, who are now pastors of congregations. However, they are neither actual letters nor by Paul. Paul’s authentic letters (Romans, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, and Philemon) were written in the middle of the first century. The Pastoral Epistles represent one voice in the early-second-century debate over Paul’s memory. The canonical book of Acts pictures Paul as a culture hero, a lawabiding, miracle-working founder of churches; the apocryphal Acts of Paul views Paul as an antistate, antimarriage, wandering charismatic ascetic. The Pastorals present Paul as the authority on church administration; they represent perhaps the most total capitulation of Christianity to the patriarchal (hierarchical and male-dominated) social structure of the Roman Empire to be found in the New Testament. Because of the similarity and overlap in the three writings, the commentary on 1 Timothy is more extensive, and the commentary on the others highlights issues involving women.

Author, Audience, and Date These three short writings are similar in style and content and most likely by the same author. That author, however, is not Paul. The writings are pseudonymous, that is, written in the name of Paul by someone else. Pseudonymity was relatively common in antiquity among

both pagans and Christians. It was a way to claim the authority of the supposed writer (now dead) for the contents of the document. Sometimes the practice was considered a legitimate way to extend the authority of the supposed author into a new time, place, and situation. Sometimes it was rejected as deceptive. Ancient evaluations of the Pastorals would have hinged on whether or not the evaluator agreed with the author’s understanding of the church as a patriarchal household. The evidence that Paul did not write the Pastorals is overwhelming. There are no references to these “letters” in any other documents until the late second century, considerably later than references to the other Pauline writings. The style is not typical of the authentic letters of Paul but rather of a more general Hellenistic literary Greek. The theological concerns and vocabulary differ substantially from Paul’s and are similar to vocabulary found in other early-­second-century Christian writings such as 1 Clement and the letters of Ignatius. For example, the Pastorals use the term “savior” frequently, but Paul uses it only once. The Pastorals speak of Christ “appearing,” but Paul never does. The Pastorals are concerned with church offices that did not yet exist in Paul’s time. Finally, it is exceedingly difficult to fit these letters into any biography of Paul. The evidence suggests a date in the first decades of the second century, perhaps around 125 CE. Since the writings are not by Paul, neither are they to the Timothy and Titus of Paul’s letters. It is doubtful that they were written to specific church leaders at all. Their late date, 595

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their similarity of style and content, and their reference to “books” (2 Tim. 4:13) suggest that they may originally have been written on a codex along with other texts, rather than on a scroll, as was customary earlier. The Pastoral Epistles are an attempt to use the authority of Paul to influence or control church order in the ­second-century churches.

Major Concerns of These Writings The Congregation as the Patriarchal Household of God Household codes are formulations of duties of husbands and wives, parents and children, and masters and slaves. The codes are normally reciprocal, spelling out the duties of each, but they are not mutual. The male master of the household is over the women, children, and slaves, who are to obey in fearful submission. These codes developed in Greek thought and came into New Testament writings relatively late, in the 80s and 90s (Col. 3:23–4:1; Eph. 5:22–6:9). They are prescriptive statements (see below) for how Christian families ought to behave. The author of the Pastorals applies the household code to the church as a whole, as a model for proper congregational behavior as the patriarchal household of God. “Timothy” and “Titus” are to be the patriarchal heads of congregations. The Pastorals are concerned with regulating the conduct of the congregation, specifying the duties for congregational leaders (bishops, deacons, elders) and the duties for congregational members (young men, women, and slaves). Unlike the genuine letters of Paul, these writings separate the congregation into groups according to age, gender, and free or slave status, prescribing different behaviors for each. The bishops, deacons, and elders should be upstanding citizens, heads of households keeping control of their own households; the congregational members should be obedient, submissive, and often silent. The author seems particularly concerned to limit and control the behavior of women (see further discussion below). The author is socially conservative, wanting the church to be obedient to the state and to conform to the ideal of a patriarchal household that imitates the values of the Roman imperial authorities. He—it seems safe to assume it is a he—cares greatly about the

reputation of the community (a small minority) in the larger culture. The Church as Guardian of Doctrine The Pastorals are also concerned with preserving the faith against what the author considers false teachings. Christians are to hold to “sound teaching” (1 Tim. 1:10; Titus 1:9), to “guard what has been entrusted to you” (1 Tim. 6:20; 2 Tim. 1:14), and to do good works. It is not clear who the author’s opponents are, since the author does not debate them but simply labels them as wrong and exhorts people to avoid them. The author is against “myths and endless genealogies that promote speculations” (1 Tim. 1:4), “profane chatter and contradictions of what is falsely called knowledge” (1  Tim. 6:20), “stupid controversies, genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels” (Titus 3:9). These instructions suggest that the author is against gnostic Christian groups. The author is also against “godless tales of old women” (1 Tim. 4:7, my trans.), “liars . . . [who] forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods” (1 Tim. 4:2–3). These commands suggest that the author is also against the ascetic but theologically orthodox groups attested in the Apocryphal Acts. He may well be against any Christian group that does not conform to the pattern of the patriarchal household, regardless of their theology. The Pastorals Are Prescriptive, Not Descriptive The author does not describe actual situations in the congregation as Paul does, for instance, in First Corinthians or Galatians. Rather, here are general instructions telling particular groups of people how they ought to behave. They are prescriptive texts. Prescriptive instructions suggest that congregational behavior may well not be conforming to the recommended behavior. It is not necessary to instruct women and slaves to be submissive if that is their usual behavior. Commands for women to keep silent in church occur precisely when women are acting as equals within the church. That is why those who disapprove issue such commands. So the Pastorals provide evidence (1) that there were indeed Christian groups who did not define appropriate behavior according to the model of the patriarchal household, groups in which women and both



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female and male slaves had leadership roles, and (2) that Christian groups held a wide variety of beliefs and practices to be acceptable. The author is presenting what he believes a Christian congregation should be like, not what congregations actually were like. Indeed, the author’s vision of the congregation as a well-regulated patriarchal household was probably not descriptive of most Christian groups in the second century. Other groups advocating different social relations, patterns of leadership, and belief also traced their authority back to Paul. As noted earlier, it is likely that the author was countering other traditions about Paul, in particular the traditions and legends found in the apocryphal Acts of Paul. In it Paul appears as a wandering charismatic preacher and miracle worker who is always in conflict with political authorities. He is an ascetic who teaches chastity as the Christian requirement. The Acts contains stories of women who hear an apostle preaching and leave their husbands and households to follow Paul in a life of celibacy. Some, such as Thecla, become wandering teachers and miracle workers themselves, heroines of the early church. The use of Paul’s name as the author of the Pastoral Epistles seems to have been an attempt to use the authority of Paul against the ascetic, socially and politically radical Christian groups who claimed Paul as their hero.

Impact of the Pastoral Epistles The Pastorals represent only one voice in the debate among Christians about the legacy of

Paul. Paul’s authentic letters present a more radical and diverse message, affirming the equality in the church of all regardless of race, class, or gender (Gal. 3:28). Living in the middle of the first century, Paul recognized women leaders, established no set leadership offices, and preferred celibacy to marriage for Christians. On the one hand, the apocryphal Acts continues the tradition of women’s leadership, celibacy, and greater social equality among Christians found in Paul’s own letters. On the other, the Pastorals continue Paul’s concern for unity and order. In the ancient church, both traditions (and others) were known and influential. The Pastorals, however, eventually became part of the New Testament canon—a canon selected by literate male bishops—and thus obtained authoritative status as Scripture. In the early centuries, the Pastorals probably had little impact on congregational behavior. They do not appear to be widely known, and likely they were not viewed as authoritative documents until the fourth century. But their inclusion in the New Testament has meant that they have continued to impact church life. The household codes were used extensively in the nineteenth century to argue for slavery as divinely ordained; the picture of the ideal congregation as a patriarchal household in which women are silent was used in the twentieth century and is still used in some denominations to exclude women from church leadership. The Pastoral Epistles, an early-second-century attempt to control the behavior of Christians, have continued to impact and limit the religious lives of women to this day.

Introduction to First Timothy First Timothy is the longest of the Pastoral Epistles and sets the agenda for church order to imitate the patriarchal household. After a typical letter opening, the author (speaking as “Paul”) instructs “Timothy” to remain in Ephesus in order to command persons not to teach false doctrine (1:1–11). The author then recalls his (“Paul’s) appointment by Christ, and commits this charge to the “Timothy” (1:12–20). Men in the church are instructed to pray, and women are instructed to keep silent (2:1–15). The qualifications for bishops and deacons are then

specified (3:1–13). “Paul” then reminds “Timothy” that these are instructions in case their projected meeting is delayed (3:14–16). Heresy is identified as a sign of the end, and there are warnings against asceticism and exhortations to follow the author’s commands (4:1–16). The document continues with separate instructions for the behavior of older and younger free women and men and of slaves (5:1–6:2). Within this section there is a somewhat confusing series of instructions concerning widows (5:3–16), attempting to drastically

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limit their role. This is one of the longest passages specifically about women in the entire New Testament. Further warnings against false teachers and exhortations to good behavior follow (6:3–21). The document contains no

development of teaching about Christian faith or beliefs and no refuting of the false teachers, but it does include several short creedal statements (1:15; 2:5–6; 3:16; 6:14–16).

Comment Instructions on Public Prayer (1 Tim. 2:1–7) There are two Greek words for “man”: anthrōpos is an inclusive term, referring to both males and females, whereas anēr is a limited term referring only to males. Anthrōpos is the term used throughout these verses, as the translation of the NRSV reflects, but most older translations do not. Prayers are to be made for everyone (2:1), and God desires everyone to be saved (2:4). There is only one mediator between God and humankind, the anthrōpos Jesus (2:5). The stress is on Jesus’ humanity, not his maleness. Prayer is to be offered for the Roman emperor and other non-Christians in authority, in order that Christians may lead “quiet,” “peaceful,” “pious,” and “respectful” lives. These words are common in the Pastorals and rare elsewhere in the New Testament. In Paul’s authentic letters, becoming a Christian often brings one into tension or conflict with society (see 2 Cor. 11:23–33). Paul presents a countercultural understanding of Christian life. In the Pastorals, however, the author advocates good Christian citizenship in the Roman Empire, that is, accommodation to the dominant patriarchal values of the culture and avoidance of any behavior that might create any tension with the larger culture (see also Titus 3:1–2). The very need for the author of the Pastorals to instruct “Timothy” in these matters suggests that some people in congregations continued to practice countercultural behavior that could cause conflict with the larger society.

Instructions on Christian Behavior for Women and Men (1 Tim. 2:8–15) Introduction. Instructions concerning public prayer are given separately for men and women. The word used for “men” (2:8) is anēr, the term restricted to males. Actually, only verse 8 refers to men, who are instructed to pray

with arms uplifted, the standard posture for prayer. The remaining verses focus on women’s behavior, commanding silence. Furthermore, the passage concludes with a theological argument justifying the author’s instructions, one of the very few theological discussions in the Pastorals. The fact that the author spends so much time and effort to enjoin silence on Christian women suggests that the actual and accepted practice of women was active and vocal and that the author was attempting to change this behavior.

Verses 8–10. Since the instructions for women directly follow those for men, they should apply to women praying publicly during worship (see 1 Cor. 11:2–16). Verses 8–10, however, prescribe general rules for women’s behavior. Women are exhorted to be modest and decent, that is, chaste. They are to dress simply, without fancy hairstyles and jewels. Such descriptions of the ideal woman are a common part of Greco-Roman elite men’s rhetoric describing their ideal of a virtuous woman (see 1 Pet. 3:3–5). The description does suggest that there may be some well-off women in the congregation. Thus the author is asking women to behave in such a way as to give no offense to men in power, to conform to the values of the dominant pagan culture. That the issue is not just dress but behavior can be seen in the command to do “good deeds.” Verses 11–12. The author explicitly prohibits women from leading public prayer and teaching. Women are to be subordinate to men; they are not to have authority over men; they are to remain silent. The author’s injunction is likely evidence that women were publicly praying and teaching. By claiming to speak as Paul and saying, “I permit no woman . . . ,” the author is attempting to use Paul’s authority to control the women’s behavior. These verses are similar in vocabulary and content



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to 1 Corinthians 14:34–35, which is probably a later addition (an interpolation) into the text of 1 Corinthians. It is possible that the interpolation was made by the author of the Pastorals as a means to strengthen his case for restricting women’s leadership. The historical practices of early Christian women, confirmed by other New Testament and noncanonical texts, suggest different and more active roles for women (see 1 Cor. 11 and Rom. 16).

Verses 13–14. The author appeals to the creation stories (Gen. 1–3) as justification for women’s subordination. Adam was created first, then Eve; furthermore, it was Eve, not Adam, who “was deceived and became a transgressor.” The Greek wording suggests that the author may be appealing to a tradition in which the serpent seduces (not simply “deceives”) Eve. If so, her sin is sexual. Paul himself also uses Adam’s prior creation to argue for women’s partial subordination (1 Cor. 11:8–9). However, according to Paul, it was Adam, the first human, who committed the first sin, the sin of disobedience, not Eve (Rom. 5:12–21). In Paul’s view, Christians are a new creation in which sin is overcome, and there is no “male and female” (Gal. 3:28). Verse 15. According to this verse, women are to achieve salvation by childbearing, through motherhood. In ancient culture, a woman obtained honor through being a mother. Here normal cultural values are applied as the means of salvation for women. A few scholars have interpreted this passage as a reference to Mary, the mother of Jesus, as the new Eve, similar to the way Christ is interpreted as the new Adam. In this view, Mary undoes the sin of Eve. Yet the verse continues, “provided they continue in faith . . .” The plural “they” suggests that the passage is not about Eve but rather about all women: they are to be saved through bearing children, through becoming mothers. This passage is unique in the New Testament. The rest of the New Testament is unanimous in making no distinction by gender for salvation, for men and women “are also heirs of the gracious gift of life” (1 Pet. 3:7). The author’s view of the necessity for Christian women to bear children also contrasts with Paul’s own preference for celibacy (for both men and women), although he does considers marriage fully legitimate (1 Cor. 7:1–40).

Qualifications for Bishops and Deacons (1 Tim. 3:1–16) The very existence of the offices of bishop and deacon indicates a second-century date, since the offices did not yet exist at the time of Paul. The same virtues are listed as qualifications for bishops and deacons; they are the typical virtues prescribed for pagan leaders. The church is to mirror the values of the world. Bishops and deacons are to manage their households well, “keeping [their] children submissive and respectful in every way” (3:4). They are to be married, but only once. The women referred to in 3:11 in the midst of the discussion of deacons may be women deacons, or they might be wives of male deacons. We know that there were women deacons in the early churches (possibly ministering particularly to women), but we cannot determine what the author intended in this instance. Being male is not listed as a qualification for either bishop or deacon, although the author of the Pastorals may simply assume it.

Against Asceticism and “Old Wives’ Tales” (1 Tim. 4:1–7) In 4:3 the author speaks against those “who forbid marriage.” In 4:7 he admonishes “Timothy” to “have nothing to do with godless tales of old women” (my trans.), and to value godliness over bodily training. In the social context in which the Pastorals were written, these injunctions fit together. The author is warning against independent ascetic women who preach and work miracles, such as those whose stories are found in the apocryphal Acts. Celibacy for women as for men was an ascetic practice, but for women it was also a way out of the patriarchal household in which a woman is under the authority of a male. As the apocryphal Acts makes abundantly clear, women understood celibacy as freedom from male control. A celibate, independent life was an option for Christian women in the first centuries of the church; Christians in general would know stories of such women and quite likely would have known celibate, independent women.

Gender and Age (1 Tim. 5:1–2) The author of 1  Timothy envisages “Timothy” as a young man; he instructs him to treat older men as fathers, younger men as brothers, older women as mothers, and younger women

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as sisters. Thus, in attempting to conform the church to the pattern of the patriarchal household code, the author divides the congregation on both gender and age lines, something not found in earlier New Testament writings.

Widows: An Early Christian Office (1 Tim. 5:3–16) Introduction. The author discusses a separate office for women, one with its own title: widow. The office of widow is found in other writings and inscriptions of the second and following centuries. In some parts of the church, “widow” was an early title for a woman devoted to Christian ministry, a woman who was not dependent on a man (her husband, her father, or another male relative). Since women in those times were generally married in their teens to older men, most of those who held the office of widow were probably women who had been widowed, whose husbands had died. But the office of widow was more encompassing: it could be held by women divorced or separated from still-living husbands and by women who had never been married. The common features were celibacy and independence of male control. These widows, including women of all ages, were celibate Christians who often lived in communities of women and engaged in teaching, prayer, and ministry. They were sometimes supported by the church. The office of widow provided for Christian women an alternative lifestyle to the patriarchal household. Verses 3–8. The author of the Pastoral Epistles apparently wishes to reduce the existing communities of widows to include only elderly destitute women. He wants to restrict the office of widow to a charity for those without any other resources. Families should support their older relatives, and if they do not, they are “worse than unbelievers.” Besides saving the church’s funds, this would return “widows” to male control in the hierarchical household. For the author, a “real widow” is a woman who has no family, who prays constantly (but does not do active ministry), and who is not self-­ indulgent. Thus, for the author, the woman’s ministry is secondary to her lack of family in earning her the title of widow. Verses 9–11. Apparently, the office of widow as a form of ministry for women could not be

suppressed altogether. The author of 1 Timothy proposes additional requirements to limit the group. Widows are to be women over sixty who have been married only once. There is thus confusion in the Pastorals between “widow” as a Christian minister and “widow” as a welfare recipient. Many women in antiquity were married more than once, and many indeed needed financial assistance in old age. Yet he restricts the group of widows to those who have married once, just as he restricts bishops and deacons. Insofar as “widow” is a church office, the author considers a single marriage a requirement.

Verses 11–15. These verses provide additional instructions for widows. In principle, the author of 1 Timothy disapproves of young women holding the office of widow because they may later want to marry and thus break their vow of celibacy to God and incur God’s judgment. The term used is simply “marry,” not marry again or remarry, suggesting that there are indeed some virgins among the widows. The author also disapproves of the widows’ behavior in general: “Besides that, they learn to be idle, gadding about from house to house; and they are not merely idle, but also gossips and busybodies, saying what they should not say” (5:13). To the author, “idle” seems to mean not bearing children and managing households. From the widows’ perspective, however, they probably understand themselves as going about teaching, proclaiming the faith, and giving pastoral care (see 4:1–7 above). Instead, the author wants these women to marry and fulfill their proper and salvific role of bearing children. Verse 16. This verse is further evidence of independent communities of women. It reads, “If a believing woman has widows, let her . . .” This verse seems to imply that there are (wealthy?) women who maintain households for other Christian women, providing communal homes apart from patriarchal households. In this case, the author wants the woman to support her widows as members of her own family and not take funds from the church. Conclusion. The instructions for widows, like these writings as a whole, are prescriptive texts. The instructions suggest that, in the churches the author knows, there are groups of celibate women living together and engaged in



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ministry. The author wishes to eliminate these groups of women as far as possible, incorporating them back into patriarchal households under the authority of men, at least restricting their financial drain on the church. The general culture of antiquity envisioned women either as independent and celibate (usually widowed) or as submissive members of a patriarchal household. The author of the Pastorals approves only of the option of submission to male authority. However, the reality of celibate women living in community and doing ministry has flourished throughout Christian history. The long discussion of widows in 1 Timothy suggests that within the Christian communities the author knows there are independent communities of women with their own discourses, understandings, and practices of Christianity that they are engaged in teaching to other women and perhaps to some men. These alternative communities are perceived as a threat by the author of the Pastorals, and he gives instructions to dismantle them to the extent that he can.

Obligations of Slaves (1 Tim. 6:1–2) Up to this point in the writing, the author has apparently restricted his discussion to free men and women. The author now inserts a typical feature of household codes: the duties of slaves. The author commands obedience of slaves (male and female) to their pagan or Christian owners, in order that the church will appear respectable to the world. Unlike most lists of household duties (Col. 3:22–4:1; Eph. 5:22–6:9), this section omits any corresponding command for Christian masters. The emphasis throughout the Pastorals is on the duties of the subordinate members of the household—slaves both male and female, and women, whether they are slaves or free.

Concluding Remarks (1 Tim. 6:3–20) The author concludes with general admonitions to avoid false teachings, discussion, slander,

and so forth, and to pursue righteousness. This section includes some instructions on the dangers of riches, and instructions to the rich not to be proud and to be generous and ready to share. These instructions enable us to infer that the congregation includes some people who are well-to-do. Bibliography for 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus

Bassler, Jouette M. 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1996. ———. “Limits and Differentiation: The Calculus of Widows in 1 Timothy 5:3–16.” In Amy-Jill Levine, with Marianne Blickenstaff, A Feminist Companion to the D ­ euteroPauline Epistles. Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings 7. New York: Continuum, 2003. Kartzow, Marianne Bjellan. Gossip and Gender: Othering of Speech in the Pastoral Epistles. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 164. New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. MacDonald, Dennis Ronald. The Legend and the Apostle: The Battle for Paul in Story and Canon. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1983. Maloney, Linda M. “The Pastoral Epistles.” In Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, ed., Searching the Scriptures: A Feminist Commentary, 2:361–80. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Early Christian Beginnings. New York: Crossroad, 1983. Thurston, Bonnie. “1 Timothy 5:3–16 and Leadership of Women in the Early Church.” In Amy-Jill Levine, with Marianne Blickenstaff, A Feminist Companion to the Deutero-Pauline Epistles. Feminist Companion to the New Testament and Early Christian Writings 7. New York: Continuum, 2003.

2 Timothy Joanna Dewey

Introduction to 2 Timothy The same unknown author of 1 Timothy and Titus wrote 2 Timothy also sometime around 125 CE. Second Timothy shares with 1 Timothy and Titus the concerns for patriarchal church order and sound teaching that pervade those writings. The form of this writing, however, is different. While those “letters” consist of instructions on managing the church as the patriarchal household of God, 2 Timothy is in the form of a “last testament,” or collection of final words. The testament claims to be by Paul, but like the genre of last testaments in general, it is pseudonymous, written some seventy years after Paul’s death. As is common in such last testaments, the writing warns against false teachers who will arise in the last days and exhorts steadfastness during persecution. The writing makes repeated references to Paul as a martyr facing death. It is possible but unlikely that some of the personal comments in the writing are from fragments of authentic Pauline letters. It is more likely the details are included to strengthen the illusion that the

writing is in fact from Paul. The use of the testament form by the unknown author was probably an attempt to enhance the authority of all three Pastoral Epistles as the final word of “Paul” to the churches. (See “1 Timothy, Introduction to the Pastoral Epistles”). The typical letter opening and thanksgiving (1:1–7) are followed by instructions to guard the faith, even enduring persecution (1:8–14); details about “Paul’s” situation (1:15–18); more instructions to guard the faith (2:1–10); and a hymn (2:11–13). Following these are exhortations to avoid controversy, to understand that false teachers are a sign of the end, to expect persecution, and to read Scripture (2:14–3:17). (If “sacred writings” in 3:15–16 is indeed referring to Christian writings, it is our first reference to such writings as Scripture, and confirms the late date of the writing.) Then the addressee is given a formal charge to preach, as “Paul’s” death is at hand (4:1–8). The document concludes with comments claiming to refer to Paul’s situation and with final greetings (4:9–22).

Comment Lois and Eunice (2 Tim. 1:5) Lois and Eunice are named as “Timothy’s” grandmother and mother, who were Christians before “Timothy” and good examples of faith. No male forebears are mentioned, which suggests that

these men were probably not believers. Whether or not the women’s names are historically accurate, they do attest to the important role women played in the early spread of Christianity. They also suggest the passage of time—generations— since Paul’s own time.

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False Teachers and “Silly Women” (2 Tim. 3:6–7) In his warning against false teachers of the last days, the author mentions specifically those “who make their way into households and captivate silly women.” The word translated “silly women” is the diminutive of “women,” literally “little women.” This term can be used neutrally, but it is often used derogatively, which seems to be the sense here. The “little women” are further described as “overwhelmed by their sins and swayed by all kinds of desires.” The description of captivating women corresponds with the portrayal of “Paul” in the apocryphal Acts of Paul: “Paul” preaches to women who abandon their households, follow him, and become heroines among some early Christian groups opposed by this author. It is also likely that there were women among those the author considers “false teachers” who go into households

(see 1 Tim. 5:13), although the author does not raise that issue here.

Women Leaders (2 Tim. 4:19–21) The writing closes with greetings to Prisca and Aquila, a missionary couple known from Paul and Acts (1 Cor. 16:19; Rom. 16:3; Acts 18:2, 18, 26). Prisca is mentioned first, which may indicate her greater importance among Christians, since normally in antiquity the person with greater status—normally the man—would be named first. Finally, a woman named Claudia is said to send greetings. Her name is otherwise unknown to us, but its inclusion again indicates the importance of women in early Christianity. Bibliography

See bibliography for 1 Timothy.

Titus Joanna Dewey

Introduction to Titus Titus is by the same unknown author who wrote 1 and 2 Timothy (see “1 Timothy, Introduction to the Pastoral Epistles”). The writing is very similar to the much longer writing, 1  Timothy, in its concern for church officers, patriarchal household structure, obedience to the state, and warnings about those the author considers false teachers. The letter opening is followed by an exhortation to appoint elders

in the towns of Crete, a list of qualifications for elders and bishops, and a warning against those the author considers false teachers who upset households (1:1–16). Then the duties for various members in the household of the church are prescribed (2:1–10). After summaries of the history of salvation (2:11–3:8), there are further warnings, personal instructions, and a closing greeting (3:9–15).

Comment Household Duties (Titus 2:1–10) The author spells out his idea of desirable behavior for older and younger women. Older women are to behave respectably and to teach young women to love their husbands and children, to fulfill their household duties, and to submit to their husbands (2:3–5). That is, older women are to teach young women to embrace their subordinate status in the household. The author wants to employ women to teach other women to internalize their inferior status and their proper function as limited to the household. He does not want widows empowering younger women to live their own lives in the direct service of God (see 1  Tim. 5:3–16). Duties for older and younger men are stated (2:2–6), but their duties are not connected to the household; their behavior to their wives and children is not mentioned. Slaves are exhorted to be obedient to their masters, but no duties are specified for masters (2:9–10). Following

the model of the patriarchal household, the author is concerned to control the behavior of the subordinate party in the congregation, so that the church “may not be discredited” in the public eye (2:5). These are prescriptive texts, instructing people on how they ought to behave. This suggests that some women and slaves in the community may well not have shared the author’s views on their proper behavior. Such prescriptive statements tend to arise when the opposite behavior is occurring; otherwise there would be no need for such commands. The author is quite willing to sacrifice the fuller life that women and slaves have found in the Christian communities, in order to maintain or seek respectability among pagans. Bibliography

See bibliography for 1 Timothy.

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Philemon Mitzi J. Smith

Introduction Philemon is a brief contractual letter pregnant with hermeneutical possibilities. Nineteenthcentury proslavery advocates interpreted and used Philemon as an amicus curiae (friend of the court) brief supporting the slavocracy and the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act (Missouri Compromise). That compromise between the North and the South allowed for the kidnapping and reenslavement of fugitive slaves who fled north to freedom. Later antislavery proponents enlisted Philemon as a friendly witness for the abolition of slavery. In Philemon, Paul arguably attempts to orchestrate the reconciliation between a master and his fugitive slave. Or does the brief letter concern the reuniting of two estranged brothers, or the successful apprenticeship of Onesimus by Paul, as recently argued?

Ostensibly written when Paul was imprisoned, Philemon is one of four Pauline letters designated a prison epistle (see Phil. 1:13; Col. 4:10, 18; Eph. 3:1). It constitutes one of the seven letters that most scholars believe were undisputedly written by Paul (with Timothy as coauthor). The date of writing ranges from 55 to 62 CE, during Paul’s imprisonment in Ephesus, Caesarea Maritima, or Rome. The addressees are Philemon, Apphia, Archippus, and the ekklēsia (“assembly”) that meets in Philemon’s house (vv. 1b–2). The structure of the letter resembles other Pauline correspondence: (1) opening formalities (vv. 1–7); (2) the body, including proposed ethical basis for the requested reconciliation, description of Onesimus, the request, and an offer of good faith (vv. 8–22); and (2) the closing benediction (vv. 23–25).

Comment Opening Formalities (vv. 1–7) Although he is imprisoned under the authority of the Roman Empire, whose appointed officers are his wardens, Paul rhetorically attributes his confinement to Jesus Christ (vv. 1, 9). Oppressed persons can exercise some power or agency over/in their circumstances by, for example, resisting, (re)naming, subverting, and self-identifying. While Martin Luther King Jr. languished in a Birmingham jail, he wrote a Letter from a Birmingham Jail, answering his critics and insisting on the interconnectedness

of all humanity. Nelson Mandela refused to surrender to hate and revenge despite his twentyseven years of unjust confinement on Robben Island for opposing South African’s apartheid. Aung San Suu Kyi, a nonviolent prodemocracy leader in her native Burma/Myanmar, has refused to be silenced but has continued the struggle despite her house arrests. Conversely, the naming of Jesus as his captor, despite the overarching reality of empire, can be seen as a spiritualizing of Paul’s circumstances. Paul applies the same rhetorical spiritualizing salve to the potential Philemon-Onesimus 605

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reconciliation, beginning with a heightened use of kinship language. Fraternal rhetoric extends throughout the letter and constructs a fictive family among the letter’s senders, receivers, and object. Philemon is more than a dear friend and coworker; he too is a “brother,” and Apphia is “[our] sister” (vv. 1b, 2a, 7). The placement of Apphia’s name second may signify her importance in Philemon’s house church as second in command. Archippus and Apphia may function as two witnesses (as freed or freeborn persons) to the reconciliation that Paul proposes and signs (v. 19). Slaves could function as witnesses only under torture.

The Body (vv. 8–22) Presuming arguably that Onesimus was Philemon’s slave, Onesimus, like most ancient slaves, would have been enslaved through military conquest, being born to an enslaved mother, piracy, kidnapping, or infant exposure. Some persons could also sell themselves or be sold by their families to fulfill a debt or because of greed or cruelty. If we understand Onesimus as a runaway slave, how did he end up staying with Paul for an extended period of time? Under Roman law Paul was obligated to notify Philemon of Onesimus’s whereabouts and immediately return him to his owner. Otherwise, Paul could be found guilty of harboring a fugitive slave. Designated places of refuge existed for runaway slaves who fled for just cause shown (e.g., extreme cruelty). Slave owners exhausted all measures for retrieving fugitives, including assistance from friends and associates, public notices, public officials, diviners, and professional slave catchers (fugitivarii). Because ancient slavery was not based on skin color, runaway slaves could attempt to pass as freeborn persons. Some slaves successfully created new lives for themselves by locating a safe refuge, eluding detection and capture, or moving quickly into safe geographical terrain. If caught, Onesimus could be severely punished, branded like cattle, or fitted with an iron collar. It would have been risky for Paul to harbor a runaway slave for any length of time. And it would have been radical for Paul to encourage Philemon to manumit or legally free him, since manumission was withheld from runaway slaves, but at best reserved for the well-behaved good slave. This leaves open the possibility that Onesimus was sent to Paul in the hope that he

would prove more useful to Paul than he had been to Philemon. Most slaves were manumitted by last will and testament after the master’s death. Since the promise of manumission primarily served as a benefit (beneficium), like marriage, dangled before slaves to encourage good servile behavior, relatively few received the reward.

The Ethical Grounds. Since the wider culture preferred that slave owners deal kindly with slaves rather than harshly, Paul’s appeal to voluntary brotherly love rather than force (vv. 8, 9, 10, 14) is not extraordinary. Paul has not relinquished his authority; he has rhetorically conceptualized it as the demand of a spiritualized love ethic. The power differentials among all parties remain unchanged. It is insufficient to name or rename oppressions, without changing the nature of the social relationships and oppressive systems. Description of Onesimus. Onesimus is Paul’s “child” (teknon), and Paul is his “father” by “birth,” which possibly refers to baptism (v. 10; cf. 1 Tim 1:2). As Philemon’s slave, Onesimus would have been baptized when Philemon’s household converted (Acts 10:27, 48; 16:15, 33). Slaves were integrated into the social structure of the family hierarchy with father/master at the top and slaves at the bottom. The father of the household (the paterfamilias) commanded complete submission of all other members of the household. Paul’s description of Onesimus as once “useless” (achrēston) but now returned as “useful” (euchrēston, v. 11) belies typical slave-owner expectations of slaves. Onesimus also served (diakoneō) as a surrogate for Philemon (v. 14). Slaves were expected to be useful and productive. In terms of the tasks performed, slaves fell into one of two categories: (1) agricultural slaves (rustici) who resided in rural districts of the city (polis) and performed duties associated with the maintenance of the land, and (2) domestic slaves (urbani) who lived in households of the city districts and performed tasks necessary for sustenance of families and households. Onesimus was likely one of the urbani. Slaves could perform precise and diversified tasks, including overseer, maidservant, doorkeeper, gardener, secretary, cook, waiter, food taster, tailor, singer, surrogate, and agent. Generally, the most skilled and fit human booty derived from military

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conquest was preserved for slave labor. The more productive or useful slaves were more valued. The more valued the slave, the greater the lengths to which a master would go to maintain and keep his human property (cf. Luke 19:11– 27//Matt. 25:14–30). Of course, a person’s worth should not be predicated on their usefulness or ability to service the selfish and perverted needs of other human beings.

Paul’s Reconciliation Request. Paul’s request that Philemon reconcile himself to Onesimus combines the love and familial language rhetorically transforming Onesimus into a “beloved brother” and “no longer as a slave” (v. 16). This request constitutes a polite referral from one master to another about human property. Slavery is the implicit context that the rhetorical framework does not eradicate. In reality, even rhetoric about love and fictive kinship does not cover a multitude of oppressions. How does a slave become “more than a slave”? One becomes a good and useful slave. Fictive kinship language functioned metaphorically for the quality of service masters expected their slaves to render and as an expression of some intimacy achieved between slave and master. But terms of endearment did not mitigate the slave-master relationship (see Eph. 5:21–6:9; Col. 3:1–4:1; 1 Tim. 6:1, 2; Titus 2:1–10; 1 Pet. 2:18–3:7). In Heliodorus’s fourth-century-CE Hellenistic novel An Ethiopian Romance, the master instructs his daughter and all the female domestic slaves to treat a guest “like a father” in their master’s absence (2.22). In the same novel, the noble woman Arsake refers to her elderly slave Kybele as “mother” (7.10–13). But Arsake will not let “Mother” forget that she is her mistress’s slave. In fact, when “Mother” fails to accomplish what her mistress commands in regard to a certain young man named Theagnes, Arsake has “Mother” poisoned to death (7.2-8.5-9). Good-Faith Offer. Paul’s offer to pay any debt related to Philemon’s acceptance of Onesimus may be explained in two ways. First, slave masters could permit their slaves to have access to certain property or assets (cash, land, clothing, other slaves) they acquired while they were slaves, which was known as peculium. By law, masters could always revoke this privilege,

and that may be implied by the debt to which Paul refers. A few slaves were known to have amassed wealth that surpassed that of their former masters. Second, Paul’s offer to pay any debt associated with their reconciliation may suggest that Onesimus was a debt slave and a balance remained on his ledger. If a slave fled because of cruel treatment and he found a place of refuge so that his case could eventually be heard by a magistrate, the magistrates would decide if the master had wronged his slave. If the master was found innocent, then the master could recover the slave after swearing that he would not bear a grudge (see Tacitus, Clitophon and Lueucippe, 7:13-3-4). Paul may have offered Onesimus sanctuary, and thus he evokes the language of a magistrate upon returning him to his master: “if he has wronged you [adikeō] anything or he owes you a debt, charge it to me” (vv. 18–19, my trans.).

Closing (vv. 23–25) The greetings from Paul’s fellow prisoners that are directed to Philemon may function to signify that they witnessed the letter’s contents. Ultimately, it is always the grace of Jesus Christ that empowers individuals to engender love and justice (v. 25; cf. vv. 3, 20). God desires to use human beings who will act voluntarily and through love to eradicate inhumane and oppressive social systems. Bibliography

Punt, Jeremy. “Paul, Power and Philemon: ‘Knowing your Place’: A Postcolonial Reading.” In Philemon in Perspective. Interpreting a Pauline Letter, edited by D. Francois Tolmie, 223–50. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 2010. Smith, Mitzi. “Slavery and the Early Church.” In True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, 11–22. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. ———. “Roman Slavery in Antiquity.” In Holy Bible. The African American Jubilee Edition. Contemporary English Version, 157–85. New York: American Bible Society, 1999.

Hebrews Mary Rose D’Angelo

Introduction The work traditionally entitled the Epistle of St. Paul to the Hebrews presents readers, especially feminist readers, with multiple problems. Most scholars now share Origen’s view that Hebrews was not written by Paul. Its intended audience was not Hebrew-speaking but Greek-speaking, and it is far from certain that they were “Hebrews” (Jews). The work is not formally a letter, but a “word/discourse of exhortation” or hortatory discourse (13:22) with a conventional letter closing appended (13:18–25). Its Greek style is sophisticated, and its thought shows some acquaintance with ancient philosophy. The imagery and language are nearly exclusively masculine; its major metaphor for salvation presents Jesus as high priest and claims that his once-for-all obedience has abolished sacrifice (9:9). A feminist reading of Hebrews is a challenge made more difficult by the long history of Christian patriarchy and supersessionism.

Author, Destination, and Date Because Hebrews lacks the signature and address that normally open a Greek letter, there have been many attempts to identify its author and destination. In 1900, Adolf von Harnack proposed the hypothesis that Hebrews was written by Prisca, in conjunction with her husband Aquila (Rom. 16:3–5; 1 Cor. 16:19; Acts 18:2–4, 18, 26; 2 Tim. 4:19). Suggesting that Hebrews was written to a house church in Rome after the death of Paul, he concluded that the writer was a member of that house church and was closely associated with Timothy (13:23).

Harnack also deduced that the author had to be closely enough associated with another member of the group to be able to speak as “I” or “we” interchangeably. This writer was learned and a teacher but was apologetic about using this authority to exhort others. Assuming that the name of the author was found in Acts or the Pauline corpus, Harnack concluded that this description best suits Prisca. Since she worked with her husband and missionary partner, she was likely to speak as both “I” and “we.” In Harnack’s view, the best explanation for the loss of the author’s name was that the author was a woman. There is evidence that women’s names were suppressed in texts of the New Testament, and Prisca herself was significantly demoted in some manuscripts of Acts. In a study defending and extending Harnack’s suggestion, Ruth Hoppin created a detailed biography for Prisca based on the New Testament texts, tradition, and Roman archaeology. She argued that Prisca was a Roman from a patrician family who became a proselyte (convert to Judaism) and married Aquila, a Jewish freedman. In her view Prisca wrote Hebrews to Ephesus, using works of interpretation of Scripture from an Essene community like the covenanters at Qumran. Hoppin’s 1969 article was a laudable attempt to refute assertions that only a “masculine mind” could have produced Hebrews. Her suggestion that a “strong identification” with women is evidence of a woman author and that Hebrews manifests that identification finds less agreement among women scholars. The article is of particular interest as a relatively

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early attempt to argue for a broader picture of the participation of women in the early Christian mission. She readdressed the question in a monograph (2000) and an article (2004; see this article, listed in the bibliography, for references to her other work and to Harnack). One problem with Prisca’s authorship is that in Hebrews 11:32 the masculine form of a Greek participle refers to the author and thus indicates that the author either was a man or else had chosen to use a male persona. Hoppin responds to this objection by raising the possibility of either scribal error or editorial revision like the ones that produced a sex-change on Junia the apostle (Rom. 16:7) and Nympha (Col. 4:15). The manuscript evidence that supports the feminine in those cases is lacking in Hebrews 11:32. The reference to Timothy in the letter closing (13:23) may mean that the author is from the circle of Paul, that the letter closing is a pseudepigraphical attempt to claim Paul or someone in his circle as author, or that there was more than one Timothy. That “anonymous was a woman” has been proved true in some cases in the past, and it is certainly possible that some Christian texts were authored by women. But it is extremely difficult to establish a woman author for any specific text. Hebrews’ author remains unknown.

The destination and the ethnic identity of the audience are also uncertain; the greeting from “those from Italy” (13:24) may mean that the Roman churches were the first intended audience. The exhortation to “draw near” evokes the word “proselyte,” the usual term for Gentiles who become Jews (Philo, Special Laws 1.51–52; Questions on Exodus 2.1). The addressees are reminded “you have drawn near” (proselēluthate) not to Sinai but to the heavenly Zion (12:18, 22). But this reminder would apply equally to Gentiles and to Jews. The date is likewise difficult to establish. Hebrews says that there are priests who offer sacrifices (apparently in the present; 8:4), and the discourse never mentions the destruction of Jerusalem and of the temple by the Romans in the war of 66–73, an omission that appears strange, given the focus on the sacrificial cult. Some scholars have seen these factors indicating a date before 70 (the year of the destruction); others point out that Hebrews speaks only of the tent in the desert (Exod. 24–40), and suggest that Hebrews was late enough to make the fall of the temple irrelevant. More recently, Hebrews has been interpreted as a direct response to the devastation wrought by the Romans in response to the revolts of 66–73, 115–117, and 132–135 (e.g., Eisenbaum 2005).

Comment The Word of Exhortation As a “word of exhortation,” Hebrews’ main purpose is to encourage its readers. Two elaborate exhortations organize the discourse into three parts. These exhortations urge the readers, “let us approach” or “draw near” (4:16; 10:22), and each closes one argument while introducing the next. The three parts are carefully integrated; each is dominated by a major image of Jesus that appears as a subordinate motif throughout the work. Partners in a Heavenly Calling (Heb. 1:1–4:16) The first part, 1:1–4:16, focused on Jesus as Son of God and apostle, speaker from God to human beings, uses Scripture to compare “the son” to both the angels (1:1–2:4) and Moses (3:1–6). Hebrews 1:3 explains “son” in

philosophical terms that were used in descriptions of Wisdom/Sophia as a philosophical creator goddess, a “reflection of eternal light” and the “image of [God’s] goodness” (Wisd. Sol. 7:22–27, esp. 26). The priestly Christology may draw on the image of Wisdom as priest in Sirach 24:9. But in Hebrews the female imagery associated with Wisdom disappears behind the language of sonship. “Son” expresses Jesus’ relation not only to God but also to the congregation, who are also God’s sons (2:10) and siblings to each other (2:11; NRSV “brothers and sisters”), as well as the children God committed to Jesus (2:13, 14). Jesus fully shares their “flesh and blood” (humanity), including death. This solidarity in human sufferings/experience makes him “the pioneer of their salvation” who must undergo perfection (or consecration; Lev. 4:5) and shows that he is capable of the role of high priest (2:10, 17). Psalm 95, read as a reminder of

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the way that the generation of the desert failed to heed the divine word, locates the Christian life as a new exodus, a journey in response to the call to enter into God’s rest. The exhortation (4:14–16) forms a bridge to the second section, which focuses on Jesus as the high priest who speaks to God on behalf of believers. The Main Point (Heb. 4:14–10:39) The central section consists in large part of a series of technically sophisticated allegorical arguments from Scripture arguing that Jesus is a suitable and effective high priest, indeed, the great high priest of “the true tent that the Lord, and not any mortal, has set up” (8:2). Lacking a priestly genealogy, Jesus is a priest only, but supremely, according to the order of Melchizedek (5:1–10; 6:13–7:28; Ps. 110:4; Gen. 14:17–20). Even more, Hebrews claims that the whole liturgical law in Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers was really written as an allegory of Jesus’ ascension to God, his journey through “the curtain,” that is, his flesh/the heavens (4:14; 6:19–20; 10:20). When Hebrews exhorts the reader to “press on” from “the beginning of the word of Christ . . . toward its perfection” (6:1, my trans.), this allegorical reading of the Scripture emerges as that perfected word. The “main point” of Hebrews’ comparison between Christ and the high priest (8:1) is that Jesus’ once-only death and entry into the divine presence was both the goal and the end of the sacrificial priesthood. This once-for-allness both reassures and warns: there is no more need for sacrifice for sin, nor is there any possible second repentance. Those who have begun to follow Jesus “into God’s rest,” “beyond the curtain,” will have no recourse if they turn back (10:18, 26–31; 6:4–8). The use of the liturgy for the Day of Atonement as the metaphor for salvation raises multiple problems. The allegory focuses on a rite reserved not only to men but to one man only. The metaphor of sacrifice and priesthood has been and continues to be used to bar women from ministry in some Christian communities. Further dangers lurk in the method of allegory itself, which has been used to eradicate the historical reality of those who are defined as “other.” Throughout Christian history allegory and typology not only appropriated the Hebrew Bible for Christians, but also denied both the interpretation of the Hebrew Bible and the status of “chosen people” to the Jews. Hebrews

claims that worship based on priesthood and sacrifice have been abolished (10:9) and interprets Jeremiah’s “new covenant” (31:31) as Jesus’ commitment to God’s will (10:1–8), making the covenant that established the cult “old and near disappearance” (8:13). The lengthy and complex exhortation in 10:19–39 expands the invitation “let us draw near”: drawing near means not only going forward in understanding the Scripture and the message of Christ, but also enduring and resisting the persecution that the author foresees, so as to enter into God’s presence with Christ. This exhortation not only brings the preceding section to its climax, but also leads into the procession of saints that opens the third section. A Cloud of Witnesses (Heb. 11:1–13:25) The final section of the letter focuses on Jesus as pioneer of salvation. Beginning with a series of examples of those whose faith is attested by Scripture, it is almost entirely an exhortation to go forward on “the new and living way opened” up by Christ. First comes a celebration of the elders attested by Scriptures as examples of faith (11:1–40). A few women appear among these heroic “strangers and foreigners,” whose journeying summarizes the history of Israel. Only two, Sarah (11:11–12) and Rahab the harlot (11:31), are remembered by name. Sarah’s role has been further diminished in some modern translations. The Greek says, “By faith, Sarah received the power to deposit seed” (11:11, my trans.). “Deposit seed” often describes the male part in procreation. The NRSV has resolved this problem by making Abraham the subject of 11:11–12 and treating the reference to Sarah as an aside, while providing the unrevised version in a footnote. But this revision is unnecessary. The author of Hebrews could have understood this language in either of two ways. First, it is far from clear that this language could only apply to a man. The Hippocratics, later theorists, and popular understanding held that women as well as men contributed seed to conception. In fact, the Greek translation (Septuagint) of Numbers 5:28 says explicitly that woman produces seed. Second, male language used about a woman had implied moral and spiritual perfection in antiquity, an idea that was applied to Sarah and other biblical figures (Philo, On the Posterity and Exile of Cain 134; Questions and Answers on Genesis 4.15, 66; 2 Macc. 7:21; 4

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Macc. 15:30; Gospel of Thomas 114), and that became increasingly important in the first four centuries. Rahab was popular in early Christian and Jewish example lists (1 Clem. 12.1–8; Jas. 2:25; Sifre on Numbers 78; see also Matt. 1:5), apparently representing proselytes (Gentile converts to Judaism) who “drew near” and had “to believe that [God] exists, and rewards those who seek [God]” (11:6, my trans.). Sarah, like her husband/kin Abraham (see Gen. 11:27–29; 12:10–19; 20:1–17), would also have been seen as a proselyte. Some women seem to have been erased from the scriptural traditions. The Hebrew text of Exodus 2:2 reports that the mother of Moses hid him for three months, and the Septuagint uses “they.” But for Hebrews it was “his fathers” (11:23) who preserved him by faith; the inclusive NRSV translation “parents” accommodates pastoral concerns. The daughter of Pharaoh is named only in reference to Moses’ refusal to be called her son (11:24). Miriam appears neither as a participant in the birth and salvation of Moses nor at the crossing of the sea (11:24–26, 29). In the summary lists of 11:32–40, Barak is memorialized among the judges with Gideon, Samson, and the infamous Jephthah, but Deborah and Jael are forgotten. Hebrews 11:35 refers to women who received back their dead through resurrection (the women whose sons were resuscitated by Elijah and Elisha; 1 Kgs. 17:23; 2 Kgs. 4:36). The author finds a better example in “others” (masculine plural in Greek) who “were tortured, refusing to accept release, in order to obtain a better resurrection.” The “others” are almost certainly the martyrs of 2 Maccabees 6:12–7:42, including the mother of seven sons, praised by 4 Maccabees 15:30 as “more noble than males in steadfastness and more manly than men in endurance” (my trans.). But she is not explicitly mentioned by Hebrews. Both Rahab and Sarah appear to represent Gentiles as well as (or rather than) women. Rahab’s dubious sexual status renders her problematic as an example to women who also heard, “Let marriage be held in honor by all and let the marriage bed be kept undefiled, for God will judge fornicators and adulterers” (13:4). Thus Hebrews seems to neglect women examples, even to avoid them. Does the author then seek to exclude women, to discourage the women of the community from “drawing near”? If Sarah is presented as a woman who

has attained the perfection of maleness, then perhaps the women of the community are included but invited to look only to the “manly” heroes of the past. Christ as son and pioneer is perfected by suffering (2:10; 5:8–9; 12:2), and the persecution in the community’s past and future is seen as discipline (upbringing or education) for them. As “sons” they are distinguished from “bastards” who get no upbringing (12:4–11). The comparison reinforces the patriarchal valuing of “legitimate” over “illegitimate” children, which treats women’s sexuality as a commodity. Here too the NRSV uses language that is falsely inclusive; the Greek text uses “father” and “son,” not “child” and “parent.” The father’s concern for his sons’ education and discipline was only sometimes extended to daughters. The abusive connection of punishment and love has endured as a commonplace of patriarchal education and childrearing from antiquity to today. Hebrews’ counsel puts a divine sanction behind the abuse of women and abusive childrearing, and its focus on obedience can encourage resignation and passivity. Pamela Eisenbaum has pointed out that father-son relationships, priesthoods, and blood sacrifice were connected in ancient Mediterranean religious practice. Israelites, Greeks, and Romans all used blood sacrifice to create a lineage from real or fictive father to son. In Hebrews, Jesus’ death and ascension become blood sacrifice creating a “new, superior, divinely sanctioned lineage, with new terms for membership” (Eisenbaum 2004, 146).

Hearing the Word into Speech Is it possible to read Hebrews as call to redefine the “terms of membership” so as to reject supersessionism and patriarchal order? To enable Hebrews to speak to feminist theology, it is essential to hear the “once-for-all” that characterizes the sacrifice by which Jesus crossed the curtain and sat down at God’s right hand forever (1:3; 8:1; 9:23–28; 10:12; 12:2), “living always to intercede for those who draw near” (7:25, my trans.) on the new and living way he has opened for them. The full impact of the image of Jesus as high priest emerges when Hebrews is seen as post-70, that is, after the temple was destroyed, and while the Romans were devastating Jewish communities in response to the revolts of 66–73, 115–17, and 132–35 CE.

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By choosing the high priest’s entry into the sanctuary on Yom Kippur as the high point of the liturgy, the author found a single image that could provide an explanation for the two great traumas that form so many New Testament texts: the death of Jesus and the destruction of the temple, “the place where the sins of Israel were atoned” (The Fathers according to Rabbi Nathan A, 4). This image absorbed catastrophe into divine providence. For Hebrews the Pentateuchal prescriptions for the sanctuary and the prophetic promises were proven true by Jesus’ once-for-all sacrifice, rather than invalidated by the Roman destruction of the temple. If that once-for-all sacrifice has created a new “lineage with new terms for membership” (Eisenbaum 2004, 146), those new terms must be defined only by the call to draw near and be faithful. Melchizedek is the pattern of Jesus’ priesthood precisely because Jesus does not fit the criteria for legitimate priesthood in the line of Levi and Aaron (7:11–19; 8:3–5). Hebrews’ arguments for Christ’s priesthood preclude demands to “image” that priesthood in the Christian ministry that are based on criteria of flesh and blood like race, gender, and class. Practice is defined only in the most limited and conventional terms (13:1–7). The minimal inclusion of women in Hebrews 11 can become a starting point rather than a limitation. These exemplars extend beyond the praise of famous men (Sir. 44:1) to include a few women, and they are treated, to borrow Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza’s terms, not as archetypes but as prototypes. The saints are exemplary not so much for what they have done as for what they have not done. Despite their great faith and the divine testimony they receive, “they are not perfected without us” (11:40, my trans.). As a “cloud of witnesses” encouraging the readers to “run . . . the race that is set before us” (12:1–2), they invite feminist readers to build on their examples, and to expand them with women witnesses in and beyond the Scriptures. Feminist readers of the twenty-first century should also draw a reverse imperative from the list: we are not perfected without these saints—or without their other descendants, the Jews who for nearly two thousand years have also offered only a “sacrifice of praise” (13:15;

Ps. 50:14, 23). So many centuries later the covenant’s antiquity has not meant its disappearance (8:13), but rather calls Christians to join the Jewish communities in their commitment to repair the world. Hebrews’ vision of Christian life is as journey of transformation toward a communal completion (perfection), a “household of freedom” built on the “authority of the future,” calling believers to act now for the common good (Russell). To do so is to see obedience to the will of God not as resignation to “the way things are” but as commitment to justice and radical change. Feminist readers must reject the interpretation of suffering as divine discipline, but can see Jesus’ pioneering passage and the “cloud of witnesses” (12:1) as an invitation to revere and remember the suffering of the oppressed who died without having received the promise and as a call to open for all the oppressed a new and living way. Bibliography

Eisenbaum, Pamela. “Father and Son: The Christology of Hebrews in Patrilineal Perspective.” In A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, with Maria Mayo Robbins, 127–46. London and New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2004. ———. “Locating Hebrews within the Literary Landscape of Christian Origins.” In Hebrews: Contemporary Methods, New Insights, edited by Gabriella Gelardini, 213–37. Leiden and New York: Brill, 2005. Hoppin, Ruth. “The Epistle to the Hebrews Is Priscilla’s Letter.” In A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews, edited by Amy-Jill Levine, with Maria Mayo Robbins, 147–70. London and New York: T. & T. Clark International, 2004. Kittredge, Cynthia Briggs. “Hebrews.” In Searching the Scriptures 2: A Feminist Commentary, edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, with Shelly Matthews, 428–52. New York: Crossroad, 1994. Russell, Letty. Household of Freedom: Authority in Feminist Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

James Gay L. Byron

Introduction James is the first of several writings in the New Testament known as General or Catholic Epistles. These documents (James; 1 and 2 Peter; 1, 2, and 3 John; Jude) are not directed to particular communities but rather reflect the names of the presumed authors. Although considered a letter, the only standard epistolary feature of James is the greeting addressed to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion who are considered the wandering people of God. Much debate surrounds the authorship, provenance, and date of James. Although some interpreters have argued for an earlier date (before 70 CE), based on the references to James “the brother of the Lord” (Gal. 1:19) who became the leader of the church in Jerusalem (Acts 15:13; 21:18), the letter was most likely written around the end of the first century or early in the second century by a pseudonymous author who lived in either Syria, Egypt, or Rome. James offers a blend of ethical advice, moral reasoning, practical mandates, and socioeconomic commentary. It is difficult to isolate one coherent theme in the letter due to its fragmented literary character and the multiplicity of genres utilized by the author. The letter includes Wisdom literature (1:5–8; 3:13–18), prophetic oracle (5:1–6), judgment speech (1:19–21, 26–27; 3:13–16; 4:11–12; 5:12), diatribe (2:14–17; 4:1), apocalyptic discourse (5:7–11), warnings (4:13–5:6), and a variety of

ethical teachings dispersed throughout the letter. All of this material is used to communicate a number of seemingly unrelated teachings that are applicable in a variety of settings, further supporting the circular or general nature of the letter. Because of its focus on a works-based understanding of faith (2:14–26), during the Reformation this letter was deemed an “epistle of straw” and overshadowed by Paul’s teachings on faith as an unmerited gift of God’s grace (Rom. 3:28; Gal. 2:16). With the exception of the widows in 1:27 and Rahab in 2:25, the letter does not specifically discuss women. Yet throughout the text, the author refers to both men and women as his brothers and sisters (1:2; 2:1; 2:5; 2:14; 3:1; 5:12) and more generally as brothers and sisters (4:11; 5:10), envisaging a variegated community united in faith and support. The widows and Rahab function as symbolic exemplars of pure religion and engaged faithfulness. Through these exemplars and other illustrative narratives, the author consistently demonstrates that social and economic disparities, immoral judgments, and insensitive favoritism must be eradicated. This writing offers many resources for exploring contemporary injustices against women and children, as well as other injustices emanating from inequitable distribution of resources (e.g., financial, health care, educational, etc.) that continue to affect women across the globe.

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Comment Doers of the Word Many of the themes in the letter—cultivating spiritual discipline (1:2–27), addressing the needs of the poor (2:1–13), clarifying the meaning of faith (2:14–26), recognizing and addressing socioeconomic disparities between the rich and poor (4:13–5:6), submitting to God (4:1–12), guarding the tongue (3:1–12), living with wisdom and humility (3:13–18), and cultivating a life of unceasing prayer (5:12–18)—are introduced in the first chapter and discussed throughout the entire letter, although not in a systematic manner. These themes reflect a collection of ethical teachings and practical wisdom that is best exemplified by those who are “doers of the word and not merely hearers who deceive themselves” (1:22). The author encourages engaged faithfulness, responsible economic relationships, and a consistency of life and faith grounded in a call to wholeness and hope. Engaged Faithfulness Faithfulness is at the heart of the letter of James. In the first chapter, the author indicates that faith must be active and put to the test (1:2–4). It requires “perseverance” (hypomonē) and, oftentimes, overcoming some form of temptation or suffering (1:2; 5:10–11). Interpreters generally go immediately to the second chapter of the letter (2:1–26), in which faith is described in detail, without understanding that before one can fully embrace a working faith, one must cultivate a disciplined life. This disciplined life is the gateway to wisdom, humility, and peace (1:5–16; 3:13–18). In chapter 2, both the ancestor Abraham (2:21) and the prostitute Rahab (2:25) are cited as exemplars of engaged faithfulness. Their extreme actions demonstrate that faith and works must operate in tandem (2:22). Rahab’s bold act of hiding the spies and hanging out a red ribbon has been considered a call for justice and life. It is not enough that she confesses her faith, trusts God, and is listed (along with Sarah) in the roll call of the faithful in Hebrews (Heb. 11:31). Rather, her story (Josh. 2:1–21; 6:17, 23, 25) demonstrates that God is on the side of the oppressed and responds to those of different ethnic, economic, social, and cultural backgrounds. Rahab intentionally risked her

life, and in doing so she and her family were given an opportunity to chart a new course. Although she may be strategically included in the narrative to advance the patriarchal agenda of the author, for contemporary readers she provides an invitation to pursue acts of justice—with engaged faithfulness. Responsible Economic Relationships Another significant theme in the letter of James is God’s preferential option for the poor. This is articulated most clearly in James 2:5: “Has not God chosen the poor in the world to be rich in faith and to be heirs of the kingdom that he has promised to those who love him?” This verse harkens back to the discussion in 1:9–11 of the “lowly,” who will be exalted (Matt. 5:3; Luke 6:20), while the rich will disappear or wither away. And it resonates with the admonitions in 4:13–17 and 5:1–6 critiquing the “rich” who are profiting from the labor of the poor and ignoring their responsibility to help those who are suffering (Matt. 25:31–46). So, James is not simply setting up a dichotomy between the rich and the poor in these texts; rather, he is appealing to all in his global community (diaspora) to assume responsible economic relationships—that is, to seek ways to redistribute the imbalance of wealth, to acknowledge fraudulent activities, to pay more equitable wages, to welcome (even honor) the poor, and to renounce arrogance, greed, and gluttony. In fact, the importance of this challenge is indicated in 2:5 with the use of the imperative “Listen!” and with the use of “beloved” to refer to his brothers and sisters. In communities filled with people of diverse economic backgrounds, the author shows sensitivity for those on the margins. He advocates for “true religion,” best exemplified by caring for orphans and widows in their distress (1:27). Wholeness and Hope One of the chief concerns addressed in James is the issue of “double-mindedness.” This theme is also introduced in the first chapter and subsequently reiterated later in the letter (1:5–8; cf. 2:4; 4:8). Double-mindedness is the act of wavering in one’s faith commitment and wavering in one’s tangible support of the oppressed. Such instability and uncertainty is to be avoided at all cost, so that the individual and the larger community

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can keep themselves free from the temptations of the world (4:1–10). James encourages the double-minded to submit to God through spiritual discipline and prayer (4:7–8). Such a life is marked by a sense of integrity or wholeness (in an ethical sense) that strives for a consistency between believing and speaking on the one hand and action on the other. Another way of understanding the call for wholeness is in a communal sense. According to James, one can understand the meaning of faith only in the context of a community of individuals striving to become “mature and “complete,” lacking in nothing (1:4). Womanist interpreters argue for this type of wholeness through their commitment to the wholeness of the collective community, which transcends the boundaries of racism, sexism, heterosexism, classism, and able-ism. In the warnings to avoid favoritism, class distinctions, and any other forms of partiality (2:1–13), James provides a paradigm for community accountability whereby all members are free of judgment and empowered to strive for wholeness and hope (2:13).

Conclusion In summary, the book of James is a repository of practical advice and ethical instruction for pursuing a life of active faith. There is no easy or direct path to the engaged faithfulness encouraged in this document. Yet, if one cultivates spiritual discipline, responds to the needs

of those on the margins, acknowledges and critiques the injustices still flourishing throughout the world, and builds a prayerful community of accountability, then it may be possible to meet the challenges of this timeless text. Bibliography

Aymer, Margaret P. First Pure, Then Peaceable: Frederick Douglass Reads James. Library of New Testament Studies. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Byron, Gay L. “James.” In True to Our Native Land: An African American New Testament Commentary, edited by Brian Blount et al., 461–75. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007. Conti, Christina. “James.” In Global Bible Commentary, edited by Daniel Patte et al., 539–44. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2004. Dube, Musa. “Rahab Is Hanging Out a Red Ribbon: One African Woman’s Perspective on the Future of Feminist New Testament Scholarship.” In Feminist New Testament Studies: Global and Future Perspectives, edited by Kathleen O’Brien Wicker, Althea Spencer Miller, and Musa W. Dube, 177–202. New York: Palgrave, 2005. Tamez, Elsa. The Scandalous Message of James: Faith without Works Is Dead. Foreword by Mortimer Arias. Study Guide by Pamela Sparr. Rev. ed. New York: Crossroad Publishing Co., 2002.

1 Peter Cynthia Briggs Kittredge

Introduction First Peter is a letter written in the name of the apostle Peter from Rome, coded as “Babylon” (5:13) to “the exiles of the Dispersion (1:1),” Christians in Asia Minor in the late first century CE. Classified in the canon under the Catholic Epistles, the authorship and canonicity of 1 Peter was not questioned by the church fathers. Critical biblical scholarship attributes the letter to an author after the time of Peter who communicates apostolic teaching to a later generation. Written as a letter like the letters of Paul and attributed to Peter the apostle, the letter encourages and instructs members of the Christian community on the basis of their identity as the people of God. The liturgical tradition associates 1 Peter with the Easter season and values its evocative and powerful images of the people as “living stones” and a “spiritual house.” Its extended exhortation to endure suffering with an inner attitude of freedom and with faith has given strength to many throughout history. However, 1 Peter presents difficult interpretive issues for women today because its rhetoric constructs the female gender as the “weaker sex” (3:7) and both assumes and reinforces the social structure of masters and slaves. Its injunctions to slaves to endure harsh masters, wives to submit to husbands, and all who suffer to accept it without protest have inflicted harm when received as universal instruction to the weak to endure injustice and abuse. First Peter employs the form of a letter, beginning with the name of the author, a salutation to its addressees, a thanksgiving, body, and concluding greetings. The author relies on

the authority of the letter genre and the prestige of Peter and frames the letter in terms of images and metaphors that are well known to the audience from the scriptural tradition and that have been appropriated and adapted in the context of the community or ecclesia: “but you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people.” The letter is laced with allusions to Scripture and shares vocabulary and concepts with the letters of Paul, especially Romans. The overarching metaphor is that of the household. Believers are children of the Father and “brothers and sisters” of one another. Baptismal language of “new birth” and the Spirit figures prominently in the letter. The epistle incorporates liturgical traditions of doxology, confession, and hymns. The rhetoric of the letter characterizes the audience as “resident aliens,” “exiles” (1:17; 2:11) who behaved as Gentiles (4:3) before their conversion. They live in a hostile environment where they are harassed and persecuted on account of their faith (1:6; 2:12; 4:12–16; 5:9). The letter strives to strengthen their distinctive identity as those who have been chosen, recreated as a new people, and saved, and who now suffer as they await the revealing of Christ. Scholars conclude from the evidence of the letter that the audience is a community in Asia Minor that is being persecuted in the Roman Empire for appearing to subvert the imperial values of household order and propriety. Behavior of women and slaves that violated Greco-Roman conventions of family order could arouse slander (2:12) and make the community appear to be a dangerous foreign cult.

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This reconstruction makes it possible to attribute the injunctions to submit to the emperor, for wives to obey husbands and slaves to submit to cruel masters, as a sensible response to this suspicion and a strategy necessary for the survival of the community. The need to accommodate to conventions of wifely obedience and submission for slaves explains a teaching that, without this context, would appear to be cruel and unfair. Historical explanations that contextualize the injunctions to submit ease the force of the commands for the present, but the rhetoric of the letter itself grounds the teaching of submission

by appealing to the examples of Christ and Sarah and by alluding to the teaching of Jesus, and it does so in the voice of Peter, the elder. An alternative reconstruction from a feminist perspective focuses on the presence and activity of women and slaves in the community, how they received the injunctions of the author, and what they contributed to the christological and ethical perspectives of the letter. A feminist perspective critically questions the conclusions for behavior drawn by the author on the basis of other understandings of baptism and community in the ecclesia.

Comment Greeting and Blessing: New Birth and Salvation (1 Pet. 1:1–1:12) In greeting the “exiles” the author describes them as “chosen,” “sanctified by the Spirit,” and “sprinkled with his blood.” This allusion to the traditions of Israel as the elect people of God is the foundation of the exhortation in the body of the letter. The thanksgiving takes the form of a blessing of God, the Father, who is said to have “given us a new birth into a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.” The birth language alludes to the rite of baptism, which grants a new identity to those in Christ. Diversity of traditions about baptism in the epistles shows that its impact on relationships within the community was contested. For some it meant that traditional relationships of subordination were no longer in effect (Gal. 3:28; 1 Cor. 12:13), while for others the traditional household order, where masters, husbands, and fathers ruled, was definitive (Eph. 5:21–6:9; Col. 3:18–4:1). The blessing assures that the suffering being endured is temporary and will be ended in the process of the revealing of salvation “in the last time.”

New Identity and Exhortation to Holiness (1 Pet. 1:13–2:10) The author exhorts the audience to “be holy” and cites Leviticus 19:2, the basis of the Old Testament understanding of holiness. The language echoes God’s proclamation of the election of Israel: “Now therefore, if you obey my voice and keep my covenant, you shall be my

treasured possession out of all the peoples. Indeed, the whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation. These are the words that you shall speak to the Israelites” (Exod. 19:5–6). The call to be holy is amplified by other biblical images of the people of God: “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people” (2:9). While customarily 1 Peter’s directions to wives are read as the particular place where women are addressed, women are also powerfully identified in this call to be holy. The conversion from “no people” to “God’s people,” like the choosing of Israel, created a new relationship with God and a new relationship with one another. Women in the community who heard and spoke these words grew strong in their new self-understanding. From the perspective of those who understood baptism to make them new, these opening verses would be significantly compromised by the instructions that follow.

How to Live as Exiles in the Empire (1 Pet. 2:11–3:12) Having asserted the identity of the community with images that distinguish Israel from other nations, the author recalls that identity with the phrase “aliens and exiles,” a name that evokes the formative experience of exile for Israel and the challenges with which it negotiated living in a foreign land. They are to “conduct themselves honorably among the Gentiles” and abstain from the desires of the flesh. The contrast between Gentile lack of control and Jewish mastery over desire was common

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in the ancient world. However, the instructions that follow commend not resistance, but accommodation to the system of domination and subordination typical of the Roman Empire. The word that the NRSV translates “accept the authority of ” is the Greek word hypotassō, translated elsewhere as “subject yourselves,” “submit,” or “be subject” (KJV, REB). The author uses the verb “submit” five times, to the hearers in general (2:13), to slaves (2:18), to wives (3:1), of the holy women who were subject to their husbands (3:5), of the angels, authorities and powers, subject to Jesus Christ (3:22), and to those who are younger to submit to the elders (5:5). The series of commands begins with two references to the emperor (2:13, 17), subsuming the household instructions to the wider imperial context. There is a tension between the inclusive call to be a royal priesthood and to be holy as God is holy, and the instructions to the subordinate members of the household to submit to the order of the household and the imperial structure. In this community the new identity bestowed on those who had become God›s people did not express itself in transformed relationships but in strengthened inequity. The author enjoins slaves to submit not only to kind masters, but to harsh ones, receiving more credit for suffering unjustly. They are “called” to this suffering by Christ’s example of faithful, nonviolent suffering. Women are among the slaves addressed in these verses. While other New Testament texts proclaim the death and resurrection of Christ and the corresponding death and resurrection of believers (Rom. 6:4–5), here it is Christ’s suffering that makes sense of the suffering of slaves, without reference to the resurrection. The injunction to wives to submit, which is linked to the command to slaves by the phrase “in the same way,” highlights that the slavemaster relationship is analogous with the wifehusband relationship. The text does not say that behavior of wives had led to criticism. However, it is possible to imagine that women, baptized into Christ, who identified with the royal priesthood and heard the call of holiness, questioned the logic that required their subordination in the household of God. They might have concluded that preaching the good news to their Gentile partners and resisting the claims of the emperor for honor would have been the just response for members of the elect people of God. The author commends to wives reverent

conduct that might win over a pagan husband. Proper dress and adornment symbolize appropriate submission. The author calls on the example of holy women whose dress and manner demonstrated their subjection and invokes Sarah as the epitome of this virtue, citing that she “obeyed Abraham and called him Lord.” The Old Testament narratives portray Sarah as a complex figure, resourceful, jealous, and harsh, and twice God tells Abraham to obey her. During their sojourn in Egypt, Sarah assents to Abraham’s ruse to deceive the king of Egypt and is given to him to save Abraham’s life. A feminist perspective asks what other traditions about Sarah were valued by the women in the community of God’s people and whether her character would have motivated them to faith, resourcefulness, and courage. Feminist analysis of the stories in Genesis about Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar, in light of her appearance in 1 Peter as the obedient wife, provokes more complex reflections on the cost of submission, the exercise of power, and the challenges for faithful life in a foreign land.

Suffering and Blessing and Judgment of God (1 Pet. 3:13–5:11) The author encourages those who suffer with the assurance of God’s blessing and of God’s future judgment of evil and of good. Here, unlike in 2:21–25, both Christ’s passion and his resurrection are cited, in such phrases as “made alive in the spirit” (3:18), who is “in heaven at the right hand of God” (3:22), “live in the spirit” (4:6), “when his glory is revealed” (4:13). The address emphasizes agency and dignity in hardship: “giving an accounting for the hope that is in you” (3:15). The encouragement to cultivate an inner attitude of faith and freedom, to suffer as a witness to others, and to name the meaning of one’s suffering for oneself is addressed to women as well as men. Therefore the call to a clear conscience (3:16) and to “speak with the very words of God” (4:11) gives women resources to interpret their experience of suffering. Despite the text’s construction of women as the weaker vessel, they read the biblical text today as agents who critically engage 1 Peter’s exhortations to suffer for doing good. First Peter is one early Christian response to the challenges of living as a holy people in a hostile environment. To appropriate this text in the present requires one to make appropriate



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historical analogies between the context of text and the situation of the present. It makes a difference whether one reads from a position of dominance or from one of marginalization and with whom one identifies in the text. First Peter speaks to the reality that, during a time of hardship, women and slaves were asked to submit rather than to resist, and to give up, replace, or postpone the vision of baptismal equality. Bibliography

Boring, Eugene M. 1 Peter. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1999.

Elliott, John Hall. A Home for the Homeless: A Sociological Exegesis of 1 Peter, Its Situation and Strategy. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981. Levine, Amy-Jill, ed. A Feminist Companion to the Catholic Epistles and Hebrews. Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2004. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. The Power of the Word: Scripture and the Rhetoric of Empire. Minneapolis, Fortress Press, 2007. Trible, Phyllis, and Letty M. Russell, eds. Hagar, Sarah and Their Children: Jewish, Christian, and Muslim Perspectives. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2006.

2 Peter Cynthia Briggs Kittredge

Introduction Second Peter is the second letter in the New Testament canon attributed to Peter. Its authorship was contested in the early church, and some early lists of canonical books do not include it. Dated to the late first or early second century, 2 Peter is a pseudonymous work that is presented as a testament, or farewell speech before his death, of the apostle Peter to those who share his faith. The author appeals to general apostolic teaching (3:2) and the letters of Paul (3:15–16) and presents proofs from history and from Scripture to argue that God will judge the wicked and that Christ will return. Those who question the promise of the Lord’s return are attacked as wicked and immoral “false teachers.” The audience is exhorted to live lives of holiness and godliness (3:11). Second Peter is dependent on the Epistle of Jude. A number of interpretive issues in 2 Peter are of significance to women. As the latest book of the New Testament, the letter represents

a point in early Christian history where religious authority and leadership are centered in Peter and the male apostles, to the exclusion of other traditions of women’s leadership. Instructions from Peter coincide with an appeal to the authority of Paul’s letters and show the appropriation of the Pauline legacy that would become early orthodoxy. Peter and Paul are the twin heroes of the faith, and evidence of criticism of Peter (the Gospel of Mark) or of theological disagreement between Peter and Paul (Paul’s undisputed letters) is unacknowledged. The letter’s vituperative and graphic characterization of the enemies sets the rhetorical pattern for religious debate in a manner that has violent results for those who are characterized as “other,” including women and men of other races, sexual minorities, and females in general. The image of the destruction of the earth by fire has been used to oppose those who advocate for care for the earth.

Comment Peter’s Claim to Authority (2 Pet. 1:1–1:16) As in the Pastoral Epistles, the author contrasts apostolic faith and truth with that of false teachers. By placing his teaching at the time of his imminent death, which he knows from the Lord, and by naming this as his second letter to them, the letter underscores the reliability of its teaching. The author claims that he did not follow “cleverly devised myths” when he “made

known” to them the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ. Rather, he was an “eyewitness of his majesty” and heard the voice from heaven on the mountain, the event that from the Gospels is known as the transfiguration. Feminist analysis places this particular claim to authority by the author of 2 Peter within the range of sources of authority for leadership within the church. These sources of authority include being a follower of Jesus, witnessing his

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death and resurrection, visionary and prophetic experience of the Spirit and the risen Christ, reading of Scripture, and ongoing anamnesis (“remembering”) of the death and resurrection of Christ in Eucharist and baptism. Women participated in all these activities and drew on them for their authority as apostles and teachers. Evidence in the literature of early Chris­tian­ ity from within and outside the canon shows the growing restriction of apostolic leadership to men. The Gospel tradition shows women present at the crucifixion and burial of Jesus and, in the Gospels of Matthew and John, the first to encounter the risen Christ. Thus, while the Gospel of Matthew recounts that the two Marys meet the risen Jesus outside the tomb, hold his feet, and worship him (Matt. 28:9), and Jesus in the Gospel of John commissions Mary to tell the sisters and brothers that he is ascending (John 20:17), the canonical tradition does not explicitly link these experiences of Jesus with apostolic authority for these women.

Prediction of False Teachers and Their Punishment (2 Pet. 2:1–22) The author characterizes the opponents as both wrong and immoral. Not only do they lack the authoritative experience for their teaching and do not believe in the return of the Lord, but their behavior is “licentious” (2:2) and they are motivated by “greed” (2:3) and “lust” (2:10). They are described as “irrational animals,” “blots and blemishes,” “waterless springs,” a dog who returns to its own vomit, and a sow who returns to wallow in the mud (2:22). Accusations of immoral behavior against one’s philosophical rivals were a typical feature of Greco-Roman rhetoric. Such strategies of demonization and vilification continue to operate in contemporary religious and political debate. Women readers and others who have been objectified and characterized as inhumanly “other” critically evaluate such language and resist this strategy as a pattern for Christian debate.

Creation and Destruction of the Heavens and the Earth (2 Pet. 3:1–13) In order to counter the arguments of the “scoffers” who deny the promise of the Lord’s coming, the author of 2 Peter asserts that “the present heavens and earth have been reserved for fire” (3:7), and “the elements will be dissolved with

fire” (3:10). The author uses the image of fiery dissolution to motivate them to holiness and describes them as “waiting for and hastening the day of God.” The apocalyptic scenario of endtimes burning has been used in some Christian circles to repudiate ecological concern and even to welcome the end of the world by fire as presented in 2 Peter. Such a reading goes beyond its function here, which is to exhort the hearers to repent. This apocalyptic scenario may be contrasted with that in the book of Revelation, which pictures the renewal of the created world.

Peter’s Appeal to All Paul’s Letters and Their Misinterpretation by Opponents (2 Pet. 3:15–16) The author appeals to “our beloved brother Paul” as another authoritative figure, in agreement with Peter, who also wrote to them. The comment that “there are many things in Paul’s letters that are hard to understand, and that the ignorant and unstable twist to their own destruction” (my trans.) is evidence of the dispute over interpretation of Paul’s letters and legacy in the early church. One subject at stake was the authority and leadership of women. For example, the Acts of Thecla and the Pastoral Epistles present contrasting readings of Paul’s teaching about women’s authority to teach and baptize. The warning against those who misinterpret Paul’s letters and other Scriptures shows how 2 Peter attempts to resolve this debate. Bibliography

Johnson, Luke T. “2 Peter and Jude.” In Luke T. Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, 442–52. Philadelphia: Fortress Press: 1986. Kittredge, Cynthia. “The Second Letter of Peter.” In A Postcolonial Commentary on the New Testament Writings, edited by Fernando F. Segovia and R. S. Sugirtharajah. London: T. & T. Clark, 2007. Rossing, Barbara. “Hastening the Day When the Earth Will Burn: Global Warming, 2 Peter, and the Book of Revelation.” In The Bible in the Public Square: Reading the Signs of the Times, edited by Cynthia Briggs Kittredge, Ellen Bradshaw Aitken, and Jonathan A. Draper. Minneapolis, Fortress Press: 2008.

1, 2, and 3 John Gail R. O’Day

Introduction First John, 2 John, and 3 John were fixed as a group and identified with the name of John, the traditional author of the Gospel of John, at the end of the fourth century CE. There is no external or textual evidence to support this traditional designation of authorship. First John identifies no author at all, and 2 and 3 John identify the author only as “the elder.” The three epistles share some theological language and concepts with the Gospel (esp. language of love and family), but they address a quite different situation. The purpose of the Gospel of John is stated explicitly in John 20:31: “But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” The Gospel story is written to introduce its readers to the story of Jesus so that through the story they can come to believe. Conflict and controversy in the Gospel story is focused on those, in the crowds and among Jesus’ own disciples, who are not persuaded to believe. The epistles, by contrast, are addressed to readers who already believe that Jesus is the Son of God (e.g., 1 John 1:3; 2 John 3). Conflict and controversy in the epistles focus on believers who differ on the correct expressions of faith, in word and deed. The conflicts take many forms. The author of 1 John argues with those who do not believe that Jesus was fully human (4:2–3) and do not practice love toward one another (2:9–11). In 2 John the author’s antagonists also deny the full humanity of Jesus (v. 7). In 3 John the conflict focuses on one disruptive church leader (vv. 9–10) whose practices violate the

centrality of God’s love for proper Christian community. The similarity of the situations that all three epistles address suggests that the epistles were written by persons who lived in the same community and shared the same theological traditions. It is possible that all three epistles were written by the same person, but that cannot be shown conclusively. The intra-Christian nature of the conflict argues for a date no earlier than the late-first-century CE. The organized church structure suggested by the role of the elder in 2 John and 3 John also argues for a late date. The Johannine epistles, like the Pastoral Epistles, which date from a similar time period, are often overlooked in feminist theological conversations. Yet the very issues that are at the heart of these brief documents continue to be pivotal for women’s experience in the life of institutionalized Christianity. Disagreements over the relationship of ortho-doxy (right doctrine) and ortho-praxis (right practice) continue to dominate Christian conversations. One important contribution of feminist theologies is the insistence that word and deed, thought and action, must be held together for a vital Christian faith. The Johannine epistles share that insistence: in these three epistles, vital community occurs where believers live their faith in action and make God’s love visible in their hospitality toward others. The issues of institutional religious life are complex—how can the freshness of faith be maintained in and through institutional structures?—and the Johannine epistles are valuable resources for feminist conversations on these topics.

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Comment: 1 John Family language is prevalent in 1 John and is used in three distinct ways. First, family language is used to speak of the relationship between God and Jesus (e.g., 2:22–24; 4:14). Second, the author frequently addresses the community as “little children” (e.g., 2:1; 3:7) or “beloved” (2:7), which are terms of endearment and intimacy. Even though the author is in a position of authority with respect to the community, he emphasizes his closeness with them rather than distancing himself. Third, the author describes the community to which he writes as “children of God” (e.g., 3:1; 5:19) and as those who “have been born of God” (5:1). Other members of the community are one’s brothers and sisters (e.g., 4:20). The central image for this community is family. The centrality of family is echoed in the central ethical demand of the epistle: “that we should love one another” (3:11). The community of 1 John is disrupted by two events: some members deny the full humanity of Jesus (4:3), and some do not love one another as they should (2:9). Belief in the full humanity of Jesus is tied to the community’s emphasis on love, because for Jesus and the community, the sharing of love is the mark of full humanity.

Theological doctrine and human experience are inseparable: “Those who love God must love their brothers and sisters also” (4:21; see also 2:9–11; 4:11–12, 20). Those who deny the humanity of Jesus are expressing theological dualisms between spirit and body, good and evil. Such dualisms were prevalent in certain forms of Gnosticism, which tended to devalue human experience as a sphere where God could be known. God’s revelation was available in the realm of spirit and knowledge, not in the flesh. Body/spirit dualisms were, and continue to be, detrimental to women’s place in Christian experience. As the spirit/body dualism was refined in later Christianity, women were increasingly identified with the inferior, and even evil, realm of the body. Feminist theologies of embodiment recognize what the author of 1 John also knew: Christian religious experience begins with the incarnation, and so the body is an essential, not an optional, element of Christian theological doctrine. First John is an important theological resource for conversations about embodiment, because it emphatically negates body/spirit dualisms and affirms the corporeality of Christian faith.

Comment: 2 John The author of 2 John, who identifies himself as the “elder” (v. 1), uses feminine imagery to speak of the church. The community to which he writes is addressed as “elect lady” (vv. 1, 5), and the community from which the elder writes is identified as “your elect sister” (v. 13). Lady and sister are thus metaphors for the church. The use of feminine imagery continues the family language already noted in the Gospel of John and 1 John. In 2 John members of the Christian community are referred to as “children” of the lady/sister church (vv. 1, 4, 13). Whereas in the Gospel and 1 John believers are described as

“children” of God, in 2 John the family of God is becoming the family of the church. The noun “lady” (kyria) is the feminine form of the noun “lord” (kyrios). This vocabulary emphasizes the relationship between the church (lady) and its Lord. This language links 2 John with other New Testament writings that use feminine images for the church (e.g., Rev. 12:1–2; Eph. 5:22–31). These images may show the value the early church placed on female leadership in the church, or they may indicate the beginning of patriarchal structures of governance in which the elder becomes “lord” over lady church.

Comment: 3 John The letter known as 3 John differs from 2 John in two important ways. First, whereas 2 John is addressed to the whole community (v. 1),

3 John is addressed to an individual, Gaius (v. 1). Second, the controversy in 2 John (and 1 John) is primarily doctrinal, but in 3 John

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the controversy focuses solely on behavior and action, and particularly on the disruptive behavior of Diotrephes (vv. 9–10). The central ethical issue in 3 John is hospitality. Offering one’s table and home to the stranger was an ethical imperative for Christian communities (cf. Heb. 13:2). In verses 5–8 the author of 3 John commends Gaius for giving hospitality and fellowship to missionaries who have passed through his town. Diotrephes, by contrast, does not show hospitality to the missionaries, prohibits others from doing so, and even expels from the church those who have offered hospitality (v. 10). Gaius is urged not to imitate Diotrephes’ behavior (v. 11). A second ethical concern of 3 John is the problem that unchecked personal ambition can cause in the life of the Christian community. Diotrephes disregards the canons of hospitality because he “likes to put himself first” (v. 9). Diotrephes acts out of his own

self-centered ambition, to the exclusion of the needs of others. By putting himself first, he clearly violates the spirit of the Johannine vine metaphor (John 15), in which all branches are intertwined. Bibliography

Brown, Raymond. The Epistles of John. Anchor Bible 30. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1982. Callahan, Allen. A Love Supreme: A History of Johannine Tradition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2005. Lieu, Judith. I, II, and III John: A Commentary. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2008. ———. The Theology of the Johannine Epistles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Jude Leticia A. Guardiola-Sáenz

Introduction Jude, the last letter in the New Testament canon, is a passionate epistle containing both warnings against false teachers who have infiltrated the community and exhortations to the audience to remain steadfast in the faith they have received. The identity of the author and the date of the letter are matters of debate among scholars. The author introduces himself in verse 1 as a brother of James, the leader of the Jerusalem church mentioned in Acts 15 and Galatians 2, and thus also as the brother of Jesus. These connections suggest that Jude can be dated as early as 50 CE. Jude’s eschatological fervor and expectation of an imminent return of the risen Christ, like that held by Paul in 1 Thessalonians (49–51 CE), could also point to an early date for the letter’s composition. The author’s citation of such works as 1 Enoch and the Assumption of Moses, along with recognized canonical texts, could also point to an early date for this letter, before canonical lists became fixed. On the other hand, the author could also have connected himself to Jesus’ family in

order to lend greater authority to the writing. The reference in verse 3 to the faith as a body of tradition that can be passed on to other believers, not as a relationship to Christ, also points to a later development in the early church. Jude’s urgent call to keep the community from stumbling and following false teachers is very similar to the situation described in 2 Peter, of a community at the end of the first century. This is also the time of the Roman emperor Domitian, who killed many aristocrats and was suspicious of everyone who had connections with the church. Jude’s warning in verse 16 against the “grumblers and malcontents” can be read against that background, as a description of the transactions between false teachers and Roman aristocrats. Finally, Jude was not included in the list of the books of the Christian canon until the year 367 CE, in a list issued by Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria. In the canon of the Eastern churches, moreover, Jude did not appear until two centuries later.

Comment The letter of Jude is structured in five sections: the greeting (vv. 1–2), the purpose of the letter (vv. 3–4), a warning against intruders (vv. 5–16), a call to faithfulness (vv. 17–23), and a doxology (vv. 24–25). In the greeting the author establishes his identity as the servantbrother of Jesus and also a brother of James, and he identifies the audience of this “general”

or “catholic” letter by theological qualities, not by a specific geographical location. After his greeting Jude explains how his original plan of writing about their common salvation changed with the arrival of the intruders. Now he needs to warn them about the ways of these ungodly people, so they can defend the faith that has been delivered to them (vv. 3–4). The 625

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author does not identify what heresy the false teachers are promulgating, but rather assumes that the audience knows the situation and needs no explanation. Language pointing to sensuality, sexual immorality, and “unnatural desires” as the root of the problem suggests that behavior rather than doctrine might be at stake. A more careful reading, however, shows that the heart of the problem seems to be the unnatural desire for a human union with angelic beings, and not a union between human beings. The third section reminds the audience that what is happening now is the expected conflict that follows when those who defy authority try to transcend their proper limits (vv. 5–16). From the negative examples and their tragic consequences, the letter moves to a positive exhortation in verses 17–23 that people keep themselves in the love of God, remember the words spoken by the apostles, and build on the foundation of their faith through prayer “in the Holy Spirit” (v. 20) with the support of the community (v. 21). The final section concludes with a doxology (vv. 24–25), which is Jude’s prayer for the community to be kept safe from intruders. This conclusion makes us realize that Jude has actually written the letter he originally wanted to write (about their common salvation, v. 3), at the same time that he warns the community about the deceivers.

Conclusion Several points in this letter are of particular importance for feminist interpretation. First, there is the lack of mention of women or women’s concerns, and the silence about the women implicated in the behavior condemned in verses 5–16. That silence points to women’s minimal role in the life of the community. Second, the insistence on correct belief and practice, as defined by the author of the letter, functions to limit the acceptable forms of religious belief and experience to the official ones, which usually mean those defined by elite males in the community. Bibliography

Chester, Andrew, and Ralph P. Martin. The Theology of James, Peter, and Jude. New Testament Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Kraftchick, Stephen J. Jude, 2 Peter. Abingdon New Testament Commentaries. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2002. Reese, Ruth Anne. 2 Peter and Jude. Two Horizons New Testament Commentary. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2007. Watson, Duane F. “The Letter of Jude.” In The New Interpreter’s Bible, vol. 12. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998.

Revelation/Apocalypse of John Tina Pippin

Introduction The biblical end of the world appears throughout the Hebrew Bible and New Testament, but this last book holds the longest vision dedicated to earth’s last days. The book’s title, from the Greek, means “revelation, a revealing, a taking the lid off ” of the end-time chaos, like Pandora opening the box. As a bookend to the book of Genesis, the Apocalypse is about the total destruction of earth and the re-creation of a new heaven and earth (21:1–2) as part of God’s divine plan. John takes the reader back to a garden paradise within an urban setting. The true believers (the 144,000 purified males) are the only ones definitely slated to return to the holy city of God. Perhaps women are included in the persecuted souls under the altar (6:9–11), but John never clearly states their inclusion, and these souls remain in a “not yet” waiting position. Some feminist biblical scholars celebrate and reclaim the hopefulness of John’s end-time vision, while others decry John’s controlling and exclusivist rhetoric. The Apocalypse of John begins with John in a visionary state, receiving messages from an angel intermediary (1:1–2). His vision is full of symbols: numbers, colors, images, and references to other biblical texts (e.g., the plagues of Exodus). This book is loud and colorful, along with being quite violent and bloody. Jesus appears to John on the island of Patmos as the Son of Man, “clothed with a long robe and with a golden sash across his chest. His head and his hair were white as white wool, white as snow; his eyes were like a flame of fire, his feet were like burnished bronze, refined as in a furnace, and his voice was like the sound of many waters,”

and he had a two-edged sword in his mouth and a shining face (1:14–16). John addresses his dream of the end in the form of “letters” to the seven churches of western Anatolia (Asia Minor or current-day Turkey). In these letters the churches are judged individually, based on their faithfulness or lack of it (e.g., 3:7–13). He ends each letter with the admonition: “Let anyone who has an ear listen to what the Spirit is saying to the churches” (2:7, 11, 17, 29; 3:6, 13, 22). There are letters to the seven churches of western Asia Minor that chastise, praise, and offer guidance for their individual and communal actions. A series of seven visions follows, with angel intermediaries as guides. John sees into the heavenly throne room, where the twenty-four elders, the four living creatures, and God on the throne reside. This central, and highly desirable, space of the throne room of God is depicted as an allmale enclave, a portrayal that begs a queer reading. In this way the Apocalypse echoes the realm of God from Genesis on; there is God and other supernatural creatures, such as angels, and these are all male. Women remain on the outside, on the margins, and are either punished (“Jezebel” and the Whore of Babylon) or left behind (the Woman Clothed with the Sun and the Bride). There are other female spaces in the abyss and the heavenly city: the earth goddess Gaia (12:16), the tree of life (if the tree is read as a symbol of some ancient goddesses), along with the gender-bending Lamb and other spaces yet to be discovered. Only the 144,000 purified men have spaces reserved for them in heaven. The duality of male-female is not 627

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so clear in this book, even as the main female characters are under patriarchal control and ultimately erased from the end visions. Issues of gender and sexuality in this last book of the Bible are complex, and the play of these differences calls for the interpreter to enter this difficult journey with John, with no clear, definitive “meaning” at the end. The book of Daniel, chapters 7–12, in which Daniel has visions of the Ancient One on the heavenly throne and of a terrifying judgment, heavily infects John’s visions. John dreams of a Deity-led kingship and of two realms of heaven and earth. In the heavenly realm the twentyfour elders (along with the four living creatures) worship God and the Lamb on the throne. The heavenly throng sings songs as a prelude for the end-time pronouncements. There is a scroll of seven seals full of the secrets of God’s plan for humans and the earth, which only the Lamb is worthy to open (4:1–5:14). The series of seven (a number signifying perfection in the ancient world) continues with the seven seals (Rev. 6–7). The seventh seal brings angels with trumpets (8:6–9:21) and bowls of wrath (16:1–21), and these announcements bring great destruction to the earth. After the defeat of the Whore of Babylon and her followers and the marriage of the Lamb and the Bride (Rev. 17–19), the New Jerusalem appears, and John ends his prophecy on an open note: “Do not seal up the words of the prophecy of this book, for the time is near. Let the evildoer still do evil, and the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right, and the holy still be holy” (22:10–11). The end is always not yet, and the visions are in an eternal cycle. The book of Revelation or the Apocalypse of John ends the official canon of the Christian Bible in some very challenging ways. This book has gripped readers’ imaginations beyond its text into many spheres of influence, including

art, music, film, and social movements. Women readers of this text grapple with its violent imagery and marginalized women figures. As the visionary John had a difficult experience with what he heard and saw, so too do contemporary readers, who have to decide on the text’s message and authority and whether or not this text is a liberating and hopeful one in their specific contexts.

Authorship and Social Setting The tradition is that John of Patmos is the John of the Gospels, a disciple of Jesus, grown old in Ephesus (with Mary, mother of Jesus) and imprisoned for political activity by the Romans and eventually martyred by being boiled in oil. Most contemporary biblical scholars find the author John to be an itinerate preacher in western Anatolia, either right after the Jewish rebellion against Roman rule in Palestine (66– 73 CE) or, more likely, at the end of the first century immediately after the murder of the Roman emperor Domitian (81–95 CE). John sets himself in prison on the island of Patmos “because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus” (1:9). John refers to persecutions (e.g., his own in 1:9; of the souls under the altar in 6:9–11; by Antipas in 2:13; of the two witnesses in chap. 11), but even more to false teaching (2:14–16, 19–26). The author holds to a two-hundred-year-old tradition of extreme anti-Roman sentiment in western Anatolia. Roman rule is evil, and John’s vision is heavily focused on the downfall of Rome (coded as “Babylon,” from the memory of the Babylonian exile of the Jews beginning in 587 BCE). The faithful do not fight this bloody battle. In the ultimate colonized fantasy, God and God’s army arrive to wipe out the colonizer, along with a fiery purification of the planet.

Comment Biblical scholars offer several paths to interpretation. Mainstream feminist readings focus on reclaiming or recovering the text for women readers. These revisionist readings interpret the women characters as symbols, not to be read as literal female bodies. In other words, women represent false teachers (Jezebel), the mother of the Messiah (the Woman Clothed

with the Sun), the evil empire (the Whore of Babylon), and the companion of the Lamb of God (the Bride). These symbols are either oppressive or liberating. The positive view is of the mother who gives birth to the Messiah (Rev. 13) and the sacred marriage of the Bride with the Lamb (19:6–9). The “good” women triumph (the Woman Clothed with the Sun and

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the Bride), while the “bad” women, who represent errant theology (Jezebel) or the Goddess Roma and Roman colonialism (the Whore of Babylon), receive the destruction they deserve. Some scholars point out that the main issue is the destruction of Rome/Babylon, and this is a liberating event for all. Does the author intend actual, real women? The debates center around this question, and how one answers it determines the authority of this book for the reader. Other feminist scholars read the women characters and female imagery more literally. They find no liberating vision and no just relations in the text and focus on the violence against women who are either murdered (Jezebel and the Whore) or left in liminal space (the Sun Woman and the Bride). Other interpretive strategies are to reveal the ambiguity of the female imagery in the text and the limitation of the roles of women (as independent teacher and religious leader, reproductive mother, submissive bride, or sexually promiscuous prostitute). The choices are not just to read the text as symbolic or as literal. The text complicates any “straight” or even dualistic reading. What is revealed in these discussions is the history of women being taught to read as men, that is, to celebrate the centrality of the male in this text (in the throne room, the 144,000). This eschatological story is ultimately about the gynocide of the earth (Gaia), and extreme misogyny is the order of the end time.

Jezebel (Rev. 2:20–23) In the letter to the church in Thyatira, John gives quick praise to the church for their faith, then launches into a critique of a false teacher in their midst: “But I have this against you: you tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophet and is teaching and beguiling my servants to practice fornication and to eat food sacrificed to idols” (2:20). This “Jezebel” (as John names her, referring to King Ahab’s queen) had a chance to repent but continued to teach or, in the words of the vision from the Son of Man, to “commit adultery” with members of the church (2:22). The warning comes to both the church members and to Jezebel: stop following these teachings (“‘the deep things of Satan,’” 2:24) or suffer the consequences: “Beware, I am throwing her on a bed, and those who commit adultery with her I am throwing into great distress, unless they repent of her doings; and I will

strike her children dead” (2:22–23). Anyone who follows Jezebel will die. The Apocalypse holds to a duality of true versus false teachings and the choice of “Christ or Caesar.” Like the lukewarm water at Laodicea, God says, “So because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I am about to spit [i.e., forcefully vomit, in the Greek] you out of my mouth” (3:16). This prophetess—whatever her real name is—is never allowed to speak for herself; we know only one side of the story. For a book whose inclusion in the canon was hotly debated in the early church, the Apocalypse makes many absolute claims for its authority as a trailer for the last days.

The Woman Clothed with the Sun (Rev. 12:1–6, 13–17) This mother of the Messiah is an image of the ancient goddess “clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars” (12:1). She has been interpreted as many things: the image of Israel, of Mary, of Ishtar, of Inanna, of Isis, and more recently of Our Lady of Guadalupe (a merger of Mary with the Aztec goddess Coatlaxopeuh). The diversity of this goddess images fits easily into a variety of culture contexts as a symbol of power. The great red dragon threatens to devour the woman’s child; after she gives birth, her child (“a male child, who is to rule all the nations with a rod of iron,” 12:5) “was snatched away and taken to God and to his throne” (12:5). The woman, with the dragon in hot pursuit, receives two great wings and flees to the wilderness, and when the dragon unleashes a great flood from his mouth, she is rescued by the earth (Gaia), who swallowed all the water. The woman remains in the wilderness for the duration of the narrative, while an angry dragon pursues her children. John fails to tell the end of her story. Does she remain stranded in the wilderness, and if so, could this be a liberating space for her? There are many unanswered questions in this text concerning the female characters. John’s silence allows for feminist interpreters to fill in the gaps with a more hopeful ending, or not.

The 144,000 Who “Have Not Defiled Themselves with Women” (Rev. 14:1–5) The angel Michael is joined in this holy war by the 144,000 purified men. They are slaves of

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God, with the names of the Lamb and his father on their foreheads (14:1). They are the only ones who could learn the heavenly song of the harpists, and they perform before the throne (14:2–3). They have “been redeemed from the earth” and “have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins; these follow the Lamb wherever he goes” and are “first fruits for God and the Lamb, and in their mouth no lie was found; they are blameless” (14:3–5). These men keep the code of holy warriors (see Deut. 23:9–14) to the extreme and are the example of the redeemed. The mainstream interpretation of this group is that they represent not solely men but all believers who hold to God’s truth, since the number is a multiple of twelve, a symbol for wholeness. For other interpreters, a more literal reading is in order. These men become the “queens of heaven,” yet their place in the throne room is not a liberating one. In this story the desire of the male God for eternal companionship comes with strict entry standards and unclear responsibilities beyond this choir.

The Whore of Babylon (Rev. 14:8; 16:19; 17:1–19:5) This Rome is also the goddess Roma, a warrior goddess of the great city and empire. She is a female goddess but also a male warrior. The Whore is a performer; sitting on her great beast in her elegant garb, does she represent a male warrior in drag or a female queen with a male identity? Is she dressed as a prostitute? She sits in grand purple, bejeweled splendor on her scarlet beast with her eucharistic “cup full of abominations and the impurities of her fornication” (17:4). On her forehead is written “‘Babylon the great, mother of whores and of earth’s abominations.’ And I saw that the woman was drunk with the blood of the saints and the blood of the witnesses to Jesus” (17:5–6). The Whore speaks arrogantly—one of two women characters to speak (the other is the Bride). She says in her heart: “‘I rule as a queen; I am no widow, and I will never see grief ’” (18:7). The Whore is then destroyed by her followers: she is stripped naked, gang raped (by the kings, merchants, and sailors), cannibalized, and burned forever (17:16) with “pestilence and mourning and famine” (18:8). She and her wealth will be “laid to waste” in one hour (18:10, 17). “‘Hallelujah! The smoke goes up from her forever and ever’” (19:3), the heavenly choir sings.

Is this Goddess Roma a male-warrior state in drag that is feminized and raped and murdered? Is this vision the ultimate dream of humiliating the colonizer? Sex workers in the United States identify with the Whore of Babylon. In their reading, she is a prostitute like them and a victim of male violence. Groups of women victimsurvivors often use these “texts of terror” in the Bible to name their own experiences with male violence. The violence done to the Whore is extreme; why does the demise of empire have to be symbolized by a sexually abused and devoured woman?

Abyss (Rev. 9:1–11; 11:7; 20:1–3) The abyss or the bottomless pit houses all sorts of evil creatures, from locusts (9:1–11) who have golden crowns on their faces that were like “human faces, their hair like women’s hair” with lion teeth (9:8). These big, noisy creatures sting like scorpions (9:5), torturing “those people who do not have the seal of God on their foreheads” (9:4). The fallen star/angel with the key to the pit (9:1) is called “in Hebrew . . . Abaddon, and in Greek he is called Apollyon” (9:11), which mean “Destruction” and “Destroyer,” respectively. Beasts come out of the pit (11:7) and are thrown into it by “an angel coming down from heaven” (20:1) who also has a key on a great chain. The bottomless pit is a place of evil monsters and a place to be feared. The abyss is represented as a hell mouth in medieval theatre sets and art; it is a giant monster head with numerous sharp teeth. It is not a big step to consider a Freudian analysis of this gaping hole in the text, a vagina with teeth, set to castrate any male who ventures too close to the edge. Yet this pit has power; is it a space of female power made evil by patriarchal interpretation? The abyss eventually becomes the opening to hell, under lock and key by a heavenly angel. As vaginal space, the lips are sealed, locked and controlled by God. For John the abyss is a vile space to be feared and avoided. In what ways can women readers reclaim this space?

Earth/Gaia (Rev. 12:16) The earth comes to the rescue of the Woman Clothed with the Sun; she swallows the river the dragon spews to sweep her away. In one early

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drawing, the earth is the upper torso and head of the goddess Gaia, who rises up to protect the flying woman. There is double female power here: the Sun Woman with “two wings of the great eagle” (12:14) and Gaia, earth goddess, who gets a good drink. As one of the powerful female characters in the Apocalypse, Gaia uses her small role to block the dragon and allow the Sun Woman to retreat to her wilderness escape. But it is also the earth that God and God’s army destroy in the text and replace with a new earth and heaven.

The Bride/The New Jerusalem (Rev. 19:7; 21:1–22; 22:17) The Bride is the most passive of female characters in the Apocalypse. But she is true beauty as opposed to the glamour of the Whore: “‘his bride has made herself ready; to her it has been granted to be clothed with fine linen, bright and pure’—for the fine linen is the righteous deeds of the saints” (19:7–8). The truly blessed are on the list for the wedding supper (19:9). This supper is eerily framed on one side by the feast on the Whore (18:16) and on the other by the subsequent feast (“the great supper of God” in 19:17) of the birds of midheaven on those who feasted on the Whore (19:17–18). Is the Bride to be envied because she gets to marry the Lamb? She soon becomes “the holy city Jerusalem” (21:9– 10), where John measures and examines her wealth and adornments. She speaks only once: “The Spirit and the bride say, ‘Come’” (22:17) to gather the faithful who have come out of the Whore and into the city/bride. Is this scene another gang rape? True believers who reject the Whore are promised entry into the city/bride.

The Tree of Life (Rev. 2:7; 22:2) The tree of life is mentioned twice in the Apocalypse; the first mention is in the letter to the church in Ephesus as a reward for faithfulness: “To everyone who conquers, I will give permission to eat from the tree of life that is in the paradise of God.” John describes the location of this tree in the New Jerusalem: “On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations” (22:2). This tree is highly desirable, with its excess of fruit and promise of eternal life and world peace.

The Apocalypse echoes the first mention of the tree of life in Genesis 2:9. After an initial buildup, we learn of God’s command not to eat of one tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Gen. 2:17). It is not until after Eve’s discovery and enlightenment that God bars man (not woman Eve, “the mother of all living” in Gen. 3:20) from the tree of life: “Then the Lord God said, ‘See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever’—therefore the Lord God . . . placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life” (Gen. 3:22–24). The Apocalypse holds out the promise for fulfillment of the desire for this tree and its fruit. Whether one sees women as present or absent in this vision of the heavenly city determines who gets to eat of these most desirable and powerful fruits. Is this tree the ancient goddess in exile in the male God’s heaven? There are many ways to question the reappearance of this tree at the end of the biblical story.

Conclusion Goddesses roam (pun intended) the Apocalypse of John, sometimes in their supernatural selves and sometimes in the guise of human women: Asherah (represented by her priestess Jezebel), Roma (the Whore of Babylon), Isis, and others: the Woman Clothed with the Sun, Gaia (Greek goddess of Earth), the Deep or Chaos (Tehom in Gen. 1:1) and perhaps Tiamat, creatrix serpent goddess/dragon of the Babylonian creation story (Enuma Elish), or Eris (Greek goddess of chaos and discord). The end-time male fantasy is full of powerful females, and not all (or any?) of them are easily contained—by God or the reader. Ultimately it is difficult to navigate the rugged and war-torn terrain of the last book of the Christian Bible. What is at issue in interpreting this text is how much one buys into and invests in John’s apocalyptic vision. Regardless of how much hope and liberation or misogyny one finds in the portrayal of the female characters and the gender-bending characterizations of Serpent and Lamb, the destructive, genocidal violence leaves many ethical questions for those who accept this text as canonical and in any way authoritative. Is one to desire these apocalyptic endings of John’s? Are readers called to

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question the inevitability of this vision of “God’s plan” and imagine a different, more peaceful and inclusive, ending? Bibliography

Garrett, Susan. “Revelation.” In The Woman’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, 469–74. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998. Ibsen, Avaren. Sex Working and the Bible. Sheffield, UK: Equinox Publishing, 2009. Keller, Catherine. Apocalypse Now and Then. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 2004.

Levine, Amy-Jill, with Maria Mayo Robbins, ed. A Feminist Companion to The Apocalypse of John. New York: T. & T. Clark, 2009. Moore, Stephen. “Metonymies of Empire: Sexual Humiliation and Gender Masquerade in the Book of Revelation.” In Postcolonial Interventions: Essays in Honor of R. S. Sugirtharajah, edited by Tat-siong Benny Liew, 71–97. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009. Pippin, Tina. Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image. New York and London: Routledge, 1999. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment. 2nd ed. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1998.

Beyond the Canon Deirdre Good

In the beginning there was no canon or creed. What became canonical and authoritative only emerged over centuries. Since women’s concerns did not engage the elite males who ultimately determined the church’s canon, for a full understanding of early Christian traditions, all traditions, church orders, and images must be used alongside literary materials. Texts outside the New Testament are commonly identified as (but not restricted to) New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. Through these sources, we know something of men and women leaders, as well as ordinary people, their relationships, and social networks in the first few centuries of the Common Era. Furthermore, by scrutinizing the ways that gender ideology functions in these texts, we gain insight into particular social constructions of what it meant to be a man or a woman according to this early literature. Initial enthusiasm about recovering women’s voices from early Christian traditions, however, has been tempered by the realization that, like the Wisdom figure of Proverbs and the Wisdom of Solomon, male authors sometimes use women figures in the texts to express their own concerns and interests. With these caveats in mind, this essay explores female figures constructed by men and several women’s roles in texts beyond the canon of the New Testament.

The Nag Hammadi Library A cache of extracanonical writings was discovered in 1945 in Egypt. Called the Nag Hammadi Library (from the town near the discovery),

these fourth-century books comprise a Coptic collection of texts. Coptic is the last form of the Egyptian language, using mostly Greek letters. These texts may have been hidden in jars by monks from the nearby monastery to avoid censorship by an emerging dominant church. Some reflect a religious movement that came to be called Gnosticism (from the Greek word gnōsis, “knowledge”). The collection itself is not so easily classified, however, and later anachronistic names like Gnosticism should be resisted. Initial assessments of texts in the Nag Hammadi Library suggested that, while some texts gendered the ideal being as male or rational and transcendent, and the lower or material reality as female, other texts described egalitarian or nongendered ideals, with gender and sexuality identified as belonging to the lower sphere. We have to ask in every case what model of gender is being used to what end. The first model might promote sexual asceticism, or spiritual perfection as the transcendence of what is female by what is male. The Gospel of Mary uses the second model to argue that man and woman show spiritual maturity apart from gender.

Valentinus and Ptolemy’s Letter to Flora Evidence exists that educated women were keenly interested in the religious teachings of the new religion of Christianity in its various forms. In this text, Ptolemy sets out a detailed introduction to Valentinian Christianity for a newly initiated woman named Flora, probably a resident of Rome. Valentinus was a Gnostic Christian who in the middle of the second 633

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century came from North Africa to Rome, where Valentinian Christianity existed for several centuries.

Women’s Leadership in Syria and Asia Minor In Syria and Asia Minor leadership roles for both men and women existed. Some of these are described in the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. In these and other texts, women are prophets, ascetics, martyrs, widows, deacons, and scholars. Women Prophets Prophecy by women was a common phenomenon in Greek, Jewish, and early Christian society, as indicated in a variety of texts from different periods. For example, the fifthcentury-BCE playwright Euripides describes, through the voice of Menelippe, how women prophesy the thoughts of Apollo and Zeus at the sacred shrines Delphi and Dodona, and how they also perform rituals for the Fates (Moirai) and the nameless Eumenides. In the Hebrew Bible several women are identified as prophets, including Miriam (Exod. 15:20), Deborah (Judg. 4:4), Huldah (2 Kgs. 22:14), and Noadiah (Neh. 6:14). Within the New Testament, Acts 21:9 identifies the four prophesying daughters of Philip in Hierapolis, and in Revelation, John the seer of Patmos criticizes a woman prophet (Rev. 2:20–23). In addition, women prophets at Corinth, in Egypt, and in Asia Minor from the first to the fourth centuries CE expand the New Testament tradition that assigns prophetic roles to women. While 1  Corinthians identifies women prophets, recent scholarship recognizes that the text conveys as much if not more about the function of rhetoric. In 1 Corinthians 11:5–10, Paul urges that women prophets at Corinth prophesy in the public assembly with a head covering, “because of the angels,” that is, perhaps because angels might be attracted to the women, as in Genesis 6:1–4. Paul intends to encourage an ordered community in which women “know their place” by not prophesying with heads unveiled. In the larger scope of Paul’s argument, control of one’s own body (1 Cor. 7) is the starting point for domination of others on the basis of nature and order (1 Cor. 11). The female body in turn becomes the cultural and rhetorical battleground for the

maintenance of custom, in this case the custom of women covering their heads in public. First Corinthians 11:2–16 thus becomes a powerful statement not so much about women prophets but about Paul’s status as head of household and maintainer of Corinthian order. Perhaps the Corinthian women prophets were like the women described by Philo as members of a first-century-CE group of Therapeutai or Therapeutrides near Lake Mariotis outside Alexandria in Egypt. Yearning to have Sophia (“Wisdom”) as their true companion, these men and women renounced their spouses and property to become celibate. In worship, “having drunk the strong wine of God’s love, they mix and both together become a single choir set up of old beside the Red Sea in honor of the wonders there wrought,” singing hymns of praise and thanksgiving to God their Savior, “the men led by the prophet Moses and the women by the prophetess, Miriam” (Philo, The Contemplative Life 85–87). Luke’s Gospel portrays Mary in a manner that suggests he sees her as a prophet. She receives a revelatory word from the angel Gabriel and engages him in conversation. Her song of praise in response to the angel Gabriel’s news that she will bear a child by the Holy Spirit, a poem known as the Magnificat, is like that of the prophet Miriam in Exodus 15:1–21, in that it celebrates with insight God’s just actions on behalf of the poor and oppressed, and presages Jesus’ own understanding of his ministry (Luke 4). Luke names her “Mariam,” the Greek rendition of Miriam. Mary’s prophetic abilities are recognized outside the New Testament in a second-century text called the Protevangelion of James. This is her vision while she is pregnant, fleeing with Joseph for her own life and that of the child: And so [Joseph] saddled his donkey and had [Mary] get on it. His son led it and Samuel brought up the rear. As they neared the three-mile marker, Joseph turned around and saw that she was sulking. And he said to himself, “Perhaps the baby she is carrying is causing her discomfort.” Joseph turned around again and saw her laughing and said to her, “Mariamme, what’s going on with you? One minute I see you laughing and the next minute you’re sulking.” And she replied, “Joseph, it’s because I see two peoples in front of

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me, one weeping and mourning and the other celebrating and jumping for joy.” (Protevangelium of James, 17.5–9)

In this text Mary is called Mariamme, a variant of Miriam, the seer. Where Luke attributes prophecy to Simeon and Mary (but leaves the prophet Anna mute, Luke 2:38), the author of the Protevangelium of James gives Mary enhanced prophetic vision. In the mid-second century, a movement called the New Prophecy or Montanism, after its founder Montanus, swept through Asia Minor, North Africa, and Rome. Women were prominent in this movement. In addition to oracles of Montanus, those of Priscilla, Quintilla, and Maximilla are preserved in the writings of their supporters and their opponents, including Tertullian and Hippolytus. “Hear not me, hear rather Christ,” said Maximilla. Priscilla, speaking on the authority of the Paraclete (Spirit Advocate) of John’s Gospel, declared, “Appearing in the form of a woman, radiantly robed, Christ came to me and implanted Wisdom within me and revealed to me that this place [Pepuza] is holy and that here Jerusalem is to come down from heaven.” Montanism might be derived from Johannine communities, since “the Spirit blows where it wills.” In his account of Montanism, the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius of Salamas says, “They acknowledge the sister of Moses as a prophetess and as support for their practice of appointing women to the clergy.” Other references to women prophets exist in the third and fourth centuries. The Acts of Paul refers to the prophetic teaching of Theonoe and Myrta, while Eusebius refers to the prophet Ammia of Philadelphia, in Asia Minor (Ecclesiastical History V, 16–17), and a fourth-century tomb epitaph in Asia Minor identifies a woman named Nanas as a prophet.

Women in Narratives of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection Women are particularly prominent in the narratives of Jesus’ death and resurrection, both in the New Testament and in later writings. Each Gospel describes women visiting Jesus’ empty tomb, alluding to lament rituals (Matt. 28:1–8; Mark 16:1–8; Luke 24:1–12; John 20:1–18). Also, in the Gospel of Peter Mary Magdalene, for example, visits the tomb “to do what women

were accustomed to do for the dead beloved by them” (12.50). It is possible that women’s oral funerary lament traditions provided the core of what became the passion narrative of the New Testament Gospels and the Gospel of Peter. Both the Gospels and extracanonical writings report on appearances of the resurrected Jesus to various individuals and groups in Galilee, Jerusalem, and Syria. Such appearances were interpreted as granting authority to those who witnessed the appearance. Three of the Gospels (Matthew, Luke, and John) include stories of such appearances to particular followers, including Thomas, Cleopas, and Mary Magdalene. Similarly, extracanonical writings such as the Gospel of Mary, the Secret Book of John, and the Sophia of Jesus Christ also report Jesus’ appearance to Martha, to Mary, to John, to some called simply “women disciples,” and to men and women prophets. In John’s Gospel, Martha is shown as an ideal believer with the most developed faith of the entire Gospel when she declares: “Yes, Lord, I believe that you are the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming into the world” (11:27). Patristic writings, interpreting John 11:27, understand Martha as “a second Peter,” that is, a foundation of faith (Pseudo-Eustathius, Homily on John 12: 12, 141–45; fifth c.). In the secondcentury Epistula Apostolorum, Martha is sent as the first apostle of the resurrection. In fact, the tradition that places Martha at the tomb along with Mary may go back to an Easter liturgy. The Apostolic Church Order 28 (end of the third c.) and the (second or third c.) Acts of Philip 8 connect Martha’s service (Luke 10:40) to a eucharistic ministry by placing her alongside Mary at the Last Supper. Sparse information about Mary Magdalene in the New Testament contrasts with the rich materials and traditions about her beyond the canon. According to John 20 and the Gospel of Mary, her dialogue with the angels and the risen Christ moves from lament to recognition. With Martha, she is Apostle to the Apostles, that is, teacher of the other disciples. It may be that John 20 reworks traditions of 1 Kings 2 in which Mary Magdalene is the successor to Jesus in much the same way that Elisha is a successor to Elijah after the latter ascends into heaven (Schaberg). In extracanonical texts from the first to the fourth century CE, namely, the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, the Sophia of Jesus Christ, the Gospel of Mary, the

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First Apocalypse of James, and Pistis Sophia, Mary Magdalene is a bold, prophetic, visionary disciple and leader granted special visions of the risen Christ, whose understanding is deeper than that of the male disciples. She is a companion of Jesus whose significant role is challenged by male disciples, particularly Peter, and who is defended by Jesus or one of the male disciples. The Gospel of Mary relates the encounter of the risen Jesus with Mary Magdalene. When Mary recounts her experience to the other disciples, Peter questions the truth of Mary’s encounter with Jesus: “Why would he speak to you?” Mary denies that she has made up any of the story, and her part is taken by Levi, who accuses Peter of attacking Mary, “just like the adversaries.” All disciples are exhorted to get on with the work of preaching the gospel. This text mirrors a debate about the religious authority of women that took place in some early Christian communities. Peter’s challenge to Mary may represent the “orthodox” position. Mary may well stand for the experiences of communities in conflict with Peter and his heirs. If resurrection appearances gave legitimacy to those who were granted them, that legitimacy was seen also to extend to those who taught by the authority of the one who saw the risen Christ, and to those taught by them, and so on. One can see that principle of derived authority operating in the writings of Paul, in Revelation, and in the Gospel of John, as well as in noncanonical writings. Ptolemy promised Flora that she was a recipient of the apostolic tradition that Valentinians believed was traced back through Valentinus, who received it from Theudas, who, in turn, received it from Paul.

Women Ascetics In the fourth century and even earlier, asceticism, the practice of heightening spiritual awareness through renunciation of physical desires, was practiced in some communities, particularly in Syria. Accounts of women and men ascetics are strange to modern readers in praising lifestyles contemporary judgment would regard as disturbed. To sympathize with such accounts is to understand how controlling the body can be an expression of freedom, especially freedom from social expectations. A woman ascetic who does not choose motherhood, for example, not only circumvents social

expectations, but through her body experiences visions and revelations. Her autonomy is supported by a religious community that in turn is supported by the broader society (as in the case of religious orders). The second-century Acts of Paul tells the adventures of Thecla, a follower of Paul. By the fourth century, the fame of Thecla was so widespread that a shrine to her was found by the pilgrim Egeria (see below) in Seleucia, the ancient port city of Antioch in Syria. In the story, Thecla is captivated by Paul’s teaching, leaving her fiancé to follow the apostle. To travel freely, she cuts off her hair and wears men’s clothing. She miraculously baptizes herself and escapes being eaten alive in the arena when sympathetic women onlookers throw perfumes into the arena, causing the wild animals to become drowsy. We know that Thecla’s act of baptism and her teaching were emulated by other women, for the second- and third-­ century Christian author Tertullian criticizes such actions that the text suggested were authorized by Paul. More than conversion, however, the adventures and example of Thecla authorized women’s leadership aspirations to ministries of the word in their communities. True, Thecla is often the object of Paul’s missionary success, but Thecla has her own autonomy to pursue Jesus Christ as an itinerant apostolic witness. At the end of the narrative she converts households to the new faith. A similar story is told of Drusiana in the Acts of John. Although she is imprisoned by her fiancé in an attempt to coerce her into marriage, he is finally converted to asceticism. In another episode, Drusiana and a different suitor, Callimachus, are both resurrected by the apostle John. Drusiana in turn brings about the resurrection of the pagan Fortunatus—the only known account in which a woman raises someone from the dead. Women who chose an ascetic lifestyle were called virgins. The fourth-century author Jerome had a high regard for virginity. Adam and Eve, he argues in Against Jovinian I, 16 (393 CE), “were virgins in Paradise before the sin; however, after the sin and outside of Paradise, immediately they were married. . . . Marriage fills the earth (but) virginity fills Paradise.” In his Letter to Eustochium, Jerome congratulates her on choosing a life of virginity in early adolescence. “Death came through Eve, life through Mary. And for that reason, too, the gift of

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virginity pours forth more richly upon women, because it began with a woman.” Here, Jerome is using biblical figures (Adam, Eve, and Mary) as types or examples. Although the human condition is understood as “fallen,” paradise can be regained by choosing an ascetic lifestyle. The Virgin Mary, who “perfects” the sin of Eve by conceiving a child as a virgin, models this lifestyle. From the number of women to whom Jerome wrote, one can conclude that this reasoning was both appealing and successful.

Women Martyrs As is seen in the stories about Thecla, women and men are martyred for their beliefs. Accounts of martyrdom from the second to the fourth centuries indicate that qualities associated with martyrdom (strength, courage, heroism) were thought of as masculine in the same way that public spaces (courts, arenas) are thought of as masculine realms. Blandina, a slave woman, became a Christian gladiator in her martyrdom according to Eusebius (Ecclesiastical History 5.1.3–5.6.63). She and the fifteen-year-old Ponticus are the last to be killed. Encouraging him to endure, she not only transcends gender and social limitations but provides a new role for women: “like a noble mother encouraging her children, she sent them before her in triumph to her King, and then, after duplicating in her own body all her children’s sufferings, she hastened to rejoin them, rejoicing and glorifying in her death as though she had been invited to a bridal banquet instead of being a victim of the beasts” (Ecclesiastical History 5.1.55). Perpetua was probably martyred in North Africa in 203 CE. The Martyrdom of Saints Perpetua and Felicitas presents martyrdom as a powerful symbol for transcending gender roles. The account is introduced by an editor, but it then continues in the first person—the voice of the martyr herself. When her father takes her baby son away, Perpetua says, “God saw to it that my child no longer needed my nursing, nor were my breasts inflamed. After that I was no longer tortured with anxiety about my child.” Even the later fourth-century editor of the account comments imply that a first-person narrative by a woman is a rarity. Perpetua asks for and is granted visions, and in one of them she sees herself in the arena forced to fight an Egyptian gladiator,

representing the Devil. Preparing for the fight, she strips down and is rubbed in oil. “I found I was a man,” she says. Her martyrdom is “a second baptism,” and she is called “a true spouse of Christ” and “the darling of God.” The text describes Perpetua transcending maternal anxieties in favor of becoming autonomous, while at the same time reporting that she turns into a courageous gladiator. Scholarship proposes that male editors have sought to control the reading of the text by including praiseworthy actions appropriate to the conduct of a Roman matron, such as covering her nudity and arranging her disorderly hair in the gladiatorial arena. Similarly, Augustine preached several sermons in which he praises Perpetua’s sexual asceticism and unusual autonomy, since she had to overcome the fault of Eve. He eradicates her husband and modifies the confrontation between Perpetua and her father. The early popularity of the story of her martyrdom is shown by the existence of Latin and Greek copies of the text, by the dedication to her of a basilica in Carthage, and by the commemoration of the date of her martyrdom in the official calendar of the church in Rome. Responding to annual public readings and celebrations, Augustine had to warn North African Christians that Perpetua’s words were not canonical Scripture.

Widows Young girls were married to older men. This age disparity created many widows, which accounts for the frequent mention of widows in the New Testament and elsewhere. Acts 6, for example, describes the need to provide for widows. James 1:27 stipulates that true religion is to care for orphans and widows. First Timothy 5:16 proposes to distinguish between true and false widows in order not to burden the providing community unduly. Younger widows are advised to marry again. In the Apostolic Constitutions of the fourth century, there is evidence that qualifications for the order of widows were similar to those listed in the Pastoral Epistles. Such women were to be over sixty, married once, mature, economically dependent, and with pastoral duties of counsel and comfort. Their teaching function was to train younger women. They were not permitted to teach publicly, “but only to pray, and to hear those that teach.” Similarly, widows were not permitted to baptize men, “for the man is the

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head of the woman” (1 Cor. 11:3), and besides, Jesus was not baptized by his own mother. Widows were, however, permitted to anoint women in baptism. In third-century Syria, according to the Didascalia Apostolorum, widows’ duties were expanded to include care of the sick (visiting and laying hands on them) in addition to fasting and prayer on their behalf. It was the bishop alone who gave permission for them to visit homes or to engage in other forms of religious activity. Questions about matters of doctrine were outside the widows’ domain, and such questions were referred to (male) ecclesiastical authorities. The strange image in the text of a widow as an altar of God (Didascalia Apostolorum 133–34) is interpreted by the author to mean that she should stay in one place and not run around. This image may reflect a tendency to restrict the order’s influence. At least by the fourth century in Syria, and perhaps elsewhere, it appears that the roles of widows passed to the deacons.

Women Deacons The office of deacon was held in the early church by men and women designated to care for the underprivileged, such as widows and orphans. Evidence of that office is found in a letter written at the end of the first century by the Roman administrator Pliny to the emperor Trajan. In that letter, Pliny speaks of questioning two women “deacons” about Christian practices. By the third century, admission to the office of deacon was by ordination, and its functions lay in the care of men by male deacons and of women by female deacons. Those functions probably included bringing the Eucharist to the sick. In Syria, women deacons also anointed with oil the female candidates for baptism, and they may well have given these women their prebaptismal instruction. In the West, however, the role of women deacons seems to have been more restricted.

Women Scholars The activity of women scholars and scribes is attested in Christian traditions of the fourth and fifth centuries, when Christianity had spread to the aristocracy. Jerome describes Paula, a woman who belonged to a wealthy Roman family and whom he admired for her zeal in

learning biblical languages. Melania the Elder is portrayed in Palladius’s Lausiac History (written about 419 or 420) as being well versed in scriptural commentaries. From similar circles in Rome comes the poem of Faltonia Betitia Proba in the form of a cento, a poem composed of verses of Virgil’s poetry. This poem, whose subject matter spans creation and the ascension of Christ, remained popular until the Middle Ages, in spite of a decree by Gelasius, bishop of Rome, in 496 CE, relegating it to the apocryphal writings. Among the writings of women ascetics who retreated to the desert to live in celibate communities under female leadership are the sayings of the Desert Mothers (see Ward). Sara, for example, said, “It is good to give alms for humanity’s sake, for even if it is done for the sake of pleasing others, it begins to effect pleasing God.” She also said, “Even if I prayed to God that everyone would think well of me, I should be found at the door of each, repenting. I shall pray rather that my heart be pure toward all.” Syncletica said: “Just as poisonous beasts are driven out by the bitterest of medicines, so evil thoughts are driven out by prayer with fasting.” “If you should happen to be in a monastery, do not go elsewhere, for you will be greatly harmed; just as a bird abandoning the eggs makes them sterile and useless, so also a monk or a nun [virgin] grows cold and their faith dies when they go from place to place.” She has some sound advice about the inner life: It is dangerous for anyone to teach not having been trained in the practical life, for if a person who owns a ruined house makes strangers welcome there, he or she harms [them] on account of the poverty of the house. So it is also with those not having first built up themselves: those coming to them are destroyed. By words they may be called to salvation, but by a wicked manner of life, they are injured. (Sayings of the Fathers)

Also from this period comes Egeria’s Diary (discovered in 1884), reporting her travels for a group of women. She traveled through Egypt, the Holy Land, and Syria. Egeria is educated and of high social status, for she is welcomed at famous sites by local clergy. She visits the shrine of St. Thecla, where she hears a reading from the Acts of Paul about Thecla.

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Egeria’s life shows that not all early Christian women were drawn to asceticism or monastic life. It is quite likely that as a laywoman she belonged to a group of pious women interested in the monastic life, who knew of liturgical matters since they performed the daily office. Such groups of women “canons” emerge in subsequent Christian history associated with cathedrals. Perhaps Egeria and her sisters are foremothers of these uncloistered women.

Conclusion Marginalization of women is a product of the development of the canon. Interpreting all the available evidence from Christian tradition throughout the Mediterranean world in which women are prophets, apostles, leaders, ascetics, martyrs, and scholars uncovers rich and varied pictures of women and men correcting the derivative picture of women’s roles that comes from seeing the canon as descriptive of the early centuries of Christian history. Gender analysis of texts helps us see that, for example, arguments about ordering households are as much the projection of an author’s ability to control, order, and dominate as they are about domestic relations. Control over the female body in some early texts of the Pauline tradition is not a description of, for example, Corinthian women, but rather an indication that women’s bodies are cultural and rhetorical battlegrounds for the maintenance of custom. On the other hand, a variety of extracanonical texts provide a different portrait of women’s leadership, pastoral capacities, scholarly activities, and endurance of religious persecution. These sources help modern readers to recover the voices of those early Christian women whose contributions are not acknowledged in the biblical canon. Bibliography

Brown, Peter. The Body and Society: Men, Women, and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

Castelli, Elizabeth. Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. New York: Columbia University Press, 2004. Cobb, L. Stephanie. Dying to Be Men: Gender and Language in Early Christian Martyr Texts. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Ernst, Allie M. Martha from the Margins: The Authority of Martha in Early Christian Tradition. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Heine, Re. The Montanist Oracles and Testimonia. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1989. Kaler, Michael. Flora Tells a Story: The Apocalypse of Paul and Its Contexts. Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier Press, 2008. King, Karen, ed. Images of the Feminine in Gnosticism. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988. Kraemer, Ross S., ed. Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: A Sourcebook on Women’s Religions in the Greco-Roman World. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988. Marjanen, Antti. “Male Women Martyrs: The Function of Gender Transformation Language in Early Christian Martyrdom Accounts.” In Metamorphoses: Resurrection, Body, and Transformation Practices in Early Christianity, edited by Turid Karlsen Seim and Jorunn Økland, 231–48. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009. Robinson, James M., ed. The Nag Hammadi Library in English. New York: Harper & Row, 1987. Schaberg, Jane. The Resurrection of Mary Magdalene: Legends, Apocrypha, and the Christian Testament. New York: Continuum, 2002. Schneemelcher, W., ed. New Testament Apocrypha. Translated by R. McL. Wilson. Rev. ed. 2 vols. Cambridge: James Clarke & Co.; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1991, 1992. Shoemaker, Stephen J. Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Ward, Benedicta, trans. Sayings of the Desert Fathers: The Alphabetical Collection. London: Mowbrays, 1975.

The Religious Lives of Women in Early Christianity Margaret Y. MacDonald

Introduction When discussing the religious lives of women in the early church it is important to begin with two important clarifications. First, our terminology is misleading. In order to be clear about the gradual birth of Christianity and distinction from Judaism, some scholars are hesitant to use the term “early Christians” at all for the first few centuries—preferring such language as the “Jesus movement” or “Christ-followers.” Even “early church” has seemed to some to conjure images of ecclesiastical structures that are foreign to the early period—despite the fact that “church” is the English translation of ekklēsia, a term that the earliest believers used to describe themselves and that, in simplest terms, means “assembly.” Similarly, the use of the term “Jew” for the worshipers of the God of Israel of this era has come under increasing scrutiny because of the potentially misleading associations with later traditions and because it fails to capture connotations of ethnicity (some now prefer “Judean” for the period before the second century CE). For the sake of clarity and simplicity, however, I will continue to use the terms “early Christian”/“early church member,” “Jew,” and “pagan” (for the majority inhabitants of the Roman world who were not members of early Christian or Jewish groups). But we must remember the existence of overlapping traditions and identities. Secondly, it is crucial to understand the distinction between the modern understanding of religion and the ancient perspective: Ancient people did not distinguish between religious activities and other aspects of their existence in the same way that modern people in a secular

society do. In particular, there was significant overlap between what we view as religion, politics, economics, and family life. For example, when the first-century-CE author Josephus sought to defend the civility and respectability of the Jewish population in the Roman Empire, he linked the wider political sphere with Jewish worship of God and family life. He identified marriage between Jews under the law as central to Jewish identity bound up with concepts of God and the temple (Against Apion 2.190– 203). For Josephus, the behavior of women and other members of the household could serve as a major indicator of eusebeia, a Greek term that is often translated simply as “piety,” but actually refers to the broad range of interrelated religious, familial, and political duties that were viewed as civic obligations (Against Apion 2.181). It was a term that was employed by pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman world to communicate community expectations and ideals. This ancient perspective will help us to understand what was at stake for women who offered their allegiance to emerging early church groups without the support of their husbands or male guardians. Loyalty to the gods, the state, and the heads of households was firmly connected. Thus, the second-century-CE author Plutarch stressed that fidelity to one’s husband meant fidelity to his gods, and a wife was to shut the door tight on strange rituals and superstitions (Plutarch, Moralia, Advice to the Bride and Groom, 140 D). Plutarch’s discourse calls to mind Pliny the Younger’s reference to the early Christians at the beginning of the second century as an illicit

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new movement (superstitio; Pliny, Letters 10.96). From an ancient (elite male) perspective, a wife who displayed disloyalty of this kind placed the entire household at risk, including its economic welfare. In legal terms, the authority of the male head of the household (paterfamilias) was conceived of largely in terms of property ownership; his wife, children, and slaves were grouped together with goods as things under his legal control (patria potestas). An appreciation of the interrelationship between what we would understand as religious activities and other aspects of existence can also help us to appreciate the depth of women’s contributions to early church groups. For example, although it has been widely recognized only within the past few decades, Phoebe’s leadership (Rom. 16:1–2) includes a clear economic component. She is called prostatis, sometimes simply translated as “helper,” but more accurately translated as “benefactor” (NRSV) or “patron.” Paul’s description of Phoebe reveals the influence of a fundamental pattern of interaction in the Roman world: social structures guide the dealings of superior (patron) and subordinate (client), and loyalty to one’s uppers is rewarded by social and material benefits of various kinds. Women of means acted as patrons throughout the Roman world for associations of various kinds (see below).

Women’s Allegiance to House Churches The New Testament explicitly names women as leaders of house churches. The most explicit reference to a woman’s independent leadership of a house church is to Nympha, who hosts an ekklēsia in her house (Col. 4:15). Later copyists were so uncomfortable about a woman head of a house church that they sometimes “masculinized” the text through a simple scribal alteration to read Nymphas (a man). Acts also suggests that the house of Mary (Acts 12:12– 17) and the house of Lydia (Acts 16:14–15, 40) served as bases for the movement. At the beginning of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch sent greetings to the house of Tavia in Smyrna (Ign. Smyrn. 13.2). In the secondcentury apocryphal Acts of Paul and Thecla, Tryphaena is presented as a household head offering assistance to Thecla. The independent service of a woman of means is also implied by the presentation of Grapte in the Shepherd of Hermas (Herm. Vis. 2.4.3); she appears to be

responsible for a center (a house church?) of instruction for widows and orphans. Probably the most widely attested influential woman in Paul’s letters, Prisca (her ministry is lauded not only by Paul, but also in Acts and the Pastoral Epistles), leads a house church along with her husband. Paul’s letters indicate that Prisca and Aquila were hosts to house churches in Ephesus and Rome (1 Cor. 16:19 and Rom. 16:3–5), and evidence from Acts (Acts 18:2–3; 18:18–9:1; she is called Priscilla) indicates that this was the case also in Corinth. What would leadership/hosting of a “house church” actually mean? There are many unanswered questions. Before the end of the second century CE, when houses began to be remodelled into buildings specifically for worship, living space was combined with church meeting space, but we do not know what kind of housing was used. There are hints in the sources, however, of various arrangements. Acts sometimes refers to upper rooms, which probably indicates communities meeting in rooms above shops— very simple apartment-type accommodation comprised of one or more rooms (Acts 9:37; cf. Acts 1:13; 20:7–12). First Corinthians 1:11 speaks of a report of divisions in the Corinth made by “Chloe’s people.” Rather than describing the church meeting in the house of Chloe, as in the case of Nympha (Col. 4:15), the reference is to the members of Chloe’s household, perhaps indicating that Chloe’s people gather in simple and fairly cramped accommodation. Some first Christians in all likelihood met in apartment houses (insulae) as well as in independent house structures of various proportions. Others probably met in a larger peristyled domus (a house building featuring a colonnade). Spacious housing was not reserved for elite members of society, for archaeological evidence from Pompeii has uncovered the spacious houses of people of modest social status, even former slaves, who nevertheless had accumulated significant wealth. The mother of John Mark has a house large enough to host a good number of the believing community (Acts 12:12; cf. Acts 14:16). While the housing available to Prisca (and Aquila) as housechurch hosts remains uncertain, the transient nature of their leadership associated with the life of migrant craftspeople is unmistakable. Although it is not generally recognized, one of Prisca’s main ministerial talents may have been in moving and setting up house and in making

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the necessary contacts in advance to allow new communities to grow and thrive. The association of house-church leadership and trade can also can be seen in the description of Lydia from Thyatira, the God-fearer (a Gentile worshiper of the God of Israel), who deals in (probably dyes and sells) purple cloth (Acts 16:11–15, 40). Commentators debate many things about Lydia, ranging from her social status to her very existence (see below). But it seems clear that Luke presents her house as near a river because of the source of water required for her work and perhaps because such a “smelly” trade is best located on the outskirts of the city. With respect to the religious lives of women, the representation of Lydia is intriguing because of the merging of various spaces and overlapping aspects of identity associated with Gentiles, Jews, and early church allegiance. Her house is clearly a place of commerce and becomes a place of church meeting. But her initial encounter with Paul is at another sacred space, a gathering of women near the riverside outside of Philippi, which Luke describes as occurring at a “place of prayer” (the term proseuchē sometimes means synagogue, but because Luke usually employs synagōguē for synagogue, “place of prayer” is often preferred [NRSV]). Some have seen a parallel here between Luke’s description and Euripides’ Bacchae, a well-known play that told the tale of the worship of Dionysos by old and young women known as “maenads” traveling into the wilderness to participate in ecstatic rites and sacrifices. Ancient literature displays various opinions of the maenads, but Luke may be hoping to dispel any suspicion about early Christian behavior by casting Lydia as a respectable figure. In a world fearful of the conversion of women to new movements, it is debatable whether Lydia truly represents a model respectable matron. Yet the presentation of Lydia as the owner of a house with an extended household, probably composed of slaves, that is, converted along with her, does fit with broader evidence. Women were property owners in the Roman world, and in legal documents such women could even bear the title of paterfamilias, the term usually reserved for male household heads. Elite widows, in particular, often wielded considerable power. But wives also had significant responsibilities in household management, including supervising household staff,

managing the storerooms, caring for guests, overseeing the education of children, and exerting much informal influence, including in the selection of matches for children. As Plutarch’s letter to his wife upon the death of their two-year-old daughter illustrates, such responsibilities only increased when husbands were away; Plutarch expresses his confidence that his wife can manage the funerary and household affairs in his absence (Plutarch, A Consolation to his Wife 2). Such evidence should make us cautious about drawing conclusions concerning the unique leadership opportunities offered to women leaders of house churches. At the same time, cultural patterns suggest that the merging of household space with ekklēsia space meant that household leadership included leadership in religious activities such as teaching and rituals. In the Roman world, it was normal procedure for the person in whose house a group met to preside, select the meal, and organize the entertainment to follow, which could include a visiting philosopher or wisdom figure. It is reasonable to conclude that women such as Lydia in Philippi and Phoebe in Cenchreae were presiding in their homes as they entertained Paul and his fellow workers. By the New Testament era, married women seemed to have dined together with men (the separation of women seems to have continued in some Eastern regions). Although the evidence is not always conclusive and uncertainties remain about whether the first believers sat or reclined during meals (including the Lord’s Supper), some Roman women were reclining on couches next to their husbands by this time; the presence of women leaders of house churches suggests that they would have adopted the same positions as men. But the dining practices of women were bound to attract scrutiny, as it continued to be an area of potential controversy if suspicions arose. Artistic depictions intent on communicating women’s virtue and sexual propriety have them seated next to reclining men as opposed to reclining next to them. Much also remains unknown about how a Jewish or pagan woman would have interpreted a call for exclusive commitment to Christ. Household rites and observances related to family life are especially interesting to consider. For example, the New Testament is silent on the matter of whether Jewish women continued to follow menstrual purity regulations (see Lev.

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15:19–24) in church groups, which is striking, given the explicit interest in other purity issues related to food laws and the association with Gentiles. Church members were to shun the worship of idols, but the homes of Roman Gentiles contained small shrines known as larariums, where offerings were made to the Lares (household deities), to Vesta (goddess of the hearth), and to the genius (the ancestor/guardian spirit of the head of the family). We do not have much information, but the matron apparently had special responsibilities of oversight for the hearth and to prepare it for festivals; her responsibilities over the storerooms meant that she honored the Panates, the deities who watched over it (Ovid, Fasti 2.645–54). Family life incorporated various aspects of domestic cult. On the eve of her wedding a young woman (typically girls married between twelve and eighteen) sacrificed her dolls and toys to the household gods or to Venus. It is impossible to know whether such practices came to an end in house churches or what might have replaced them.

Church Space as Family Space Family life in the early Christian era extended far beyond relations of kinship (i.e., relations of marriage, parenting, and siblingship). The inclusion of slaves in household life, and ongoing association of former slaves, clients, and dependent workers means that we must think in much broader terms than the modern nuclear family based largely on kinship relations. We can sense this broader understanding when we read the household codes found in the New Testament and some early church documents (e.g., Col. 3:18–4:1; Eph. 5:21–6:9) that address not only the marital and parental relationships, but also the slave-master relationship. These codes are widely recognized by scholars as reflecting many conventional features of ancient discussions of household management going back to the time of Aristotle (see Politics 1.1253b–1260b26) that often discuss the same three pairs of relationships. Like these ancient discussions, the early church household codes reinforce the patriarchal authority of the male head of the household. But with respect to the religious lives of women, the codes present mixed and challenging evidence. First, they remind us that early church members were sometimes addressed during assembly gatherings (epistles were

read aloud; Col. 4:16) directly as wives, children, and slaves (i.e., the texts depart from the usual practice of addressing male heads who are subsequently to guide their subordinates). Secondly, they inform us that although marriage was rejected by some adherents to early Christianity (see further below), married couples are clearly given an important place in the community, and in Ephesians marriage is given some type of spiritual significance in communicating faithfulness and commitment. Thirdly, the reference to wives who have joined the group without their husbands in the household code material of 1 Peter (1 Pet. 3:1–2; cf. 1 Pet. 2:18–3:7) is enormously significant, for it offers an indirect indication that some women made independent choices to join the group; they are enjoined to obey their nonbelieving husbands in the hope of winning them over by their model behavior, even though the decision to join the group without their husbands was insubordinate in its own right. This evidence from 1 Peter offers an example of how early church groups challenged traditional family structures to some degree. Moreover, the use of sibling terminology (e.g., brothers and sisters “in Christ”) and various proclamations of unity (e.g., Gal. 3:28) point to the joining of people together despite barriers of gender and social status. At the same time, patriarchal and oppressive institutions are not eradicated in the New Testament. Moreover, women like Lydia and Phoebe almost certainly owned slaves. In addition, the few slave women we hear about appear to be marginalized in various ways. The story of Lydia’s conversion in Acts is followed immediately by Paul’s encounter with a slave girl who has a spirit of divination and, consequently, is a source of revenue for her owners. Paul expels the spirit from the girl, who seems to annoy him (while possessed, she announces over and over that Paul and his entourage are slaves of the Most High), which renders her useless in the eyes of her owners. She is not explicitly welcomed by Paul, and we do not know what Luke intends us to think about her fate (Acts 16:16–19). Similarly, the slave doorkeeper Rhoda at the house of the mother of John Mark (Acts 12:12–16) is annoyingly insistent in announcing the miraculous appearance of Peter (the first reaction is that she is out of her mind). In Acts the presentation of female slaves seems to be in keeping

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with ancient stereotypes and social structures, but at the same time perhaps Luke—with some ambivalence—is revealing that such women were members of church groups and some were even prophets and bearers of important news (cf. Pliny’s reference to women slaves discussed below). It is not easy to determine whether the house-church base of earliest Christianity enhanced opportunities for women’s involvement or, alternatively, contained women’s behavior in various ways. Probably both phenomena were occurring at the same time. Readers are often struck by the apparent contradiction between Paul’s recognition of women prophets in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16 and his attempt to exert control over their ritual roles. This may well have been related to the merging of family space with the ritual space of the gathering of the ekklēsia. Despite the familial atmosphere of the house church, in a few places Paul seems to distinguish between the space of assembly and the space of the household (e.g., the space where women can asks their husbands questions [1 Cor. 14:32–34; cf. 1 Cor. 11:22]). In his response to women’s removing their head coverings during worship and prophecy (1 Cor. 11:12–16), Paul establishes a hierarchy: God, Christ, Corinthian men, women; order in the assembly is to reflect a cosmic order rooted in Genesis (see Økland; cf. 1 Tim. 2:8–15). As has been frequently pointed out, however, Paul’s views may well be at odds with aspirations and faith commitments of the women themselves. When we recall the influence of particular women in early Christian circles, we are reminded that the relationship between the prescriptive instructions of male authors and the religious lives of the women was not straightforward. We might consider, for example, the public proclamation of Paul’s letter in Nympha’s house (Col. 4:16). We need to imagine the diverse membership of ancient households being greeted by Nympha, probably a widow and property owner well known in the neighborhood. Believing husbands and wives accompanied by their children and slaves who cared for all the children of the household would come to assembly, but also wives, children, and slaves who were part of a household ruled by a pagan man. Sometimes slave families would arrive with their tenuous futures ahead of them, for neither their “marriages” nor progeny were recognized or protected by law. Perhaps

an adolescent girl would make her preference known to remain unmarried, finding encouragement and support from Nympha herself or other widows. The complexities of family life inevitably permeated the house-church atmosphere. We are almost certainly on the right track in imaging a bustling atmosphere of church meeting that included infants and toddlers, youths, as well as adults, slave and free. Yet all subordinate members of households would be instructed to submit to the paterfamilias “in the Lord” (Col. 3:18–4:1), while being hosted by an influential woman. We do not know whether Nympha would think that the call for wives to be subject to their husbands would have any bearing on her circumstances at all, and we might imagine that all women had heard this type of traditional teaching before, and it potentially had little immediate effect on their lives. But proclaimed aloud in the space of church meeting, this type of discourse did imbue hierarchical household order with divine sanction. The community is the faithful bride who must obey her heavenly groom, to adopt the perspective of Ephesians (Eph. 5:22–33).

Choice, Conversion, and Risk In the past twenty years, scholars have become increasingly cautious about drawing conclusions about the real lives of women based upon the textual representations of women in early Christian literature. This is especially the case when male authors engage in detailed description of women’s behavior, often with a broader agenda in mind, such as the need to engage in apology (e.g., Justin’s description in his Second Apology of the Roman matron who divorces her immoral pagan husband) or in novelistic accounts such as the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. Because Luke displays an interest in the conversion of the heads of households, followed by the remainder of the household (e.g., Acts 10:1–11:18), and in winning the allegiance of leading women (Acts 17:1–34), the figure of Lydia has been carefully examined, with some scholars viewing her as a construct intended to buttress the reputation of emerging Christianity rather than a real historical woman (yet, as noted above, there are many aspects of the presentation of Lydia that are in keeping with what is known about women as property owners and traders). Perhaps no texts have been subject to

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more careful scrutiny than those dealing with the conversion of women. But if the representations of the conversion of women are read in relation to more indirect evidence, we may find ourselves closer to the real experience of women. Particularly telling is the persistent thread of evidence suggesting that wives (and slaves) joined the community without (and presumably often without the permission of) the male head of the household (1 Cor. 7:12–16; 1 Pet. 3:1; 1 Tim. 6:1–2). These New Testament texts hint at the tension and complication that is explored in graphic and violent detail by the authors of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles. In fact, contrary to what one might expect, outside of Acts the reference to whole families offering their allegiance to early church groups is rare (cf. 1 Cor. 1:16; 16:15), suggesting more individualized conversions often took place. By the time Tertullian composed his treatise between 200 and 206 CE, the difficulties associated with mixed marriage were well known. Seeking to capture the pagan husband’s perspective, he also provides rare insights into the duties of a Christian wife, which include visiting imprisoned martyrs and various acts of service such as extending hospitality to traveling Christians—all of which become next to impossible if her husband is a non-Christian. According to Tertullian, one should understand a pagan’s husband’s reluctance to allow his wife to attend the Lord’s Supper when it has such a bad reputation (Tertullian, To His Wife 2.4)! The conversion of independent women presented both advantages and problems to early Christian groups. Publicly visible women could act as patrons and could enhance the reputation of the group, but the conversion of wives to new religious groups also increased the suspicion surrounding the group. Jewish evidence from this era can help us understand both the complex reaction to women and the initiative of the women themselves. While it is highly stylized and subject to doubt with respect to historical reliability, Philo’s description of the Therapeutrides, the female members of the sect outside of Alexandria known as the Therapeutics, is clearly written in a manner to bolster the group’s identity with a presentation of celibate, intellectual women; he is extremely careful to highlight their purity and virtue (On the Contemplative Life). In addition, recent research on the Dead Sea Scrolls challenges the assumption that the

Essenes were predominantly celibate men; the possibility of women joining the group independently—not primarily as a result of familial or spousal intervention—cannot be ruled out. The women followers of Jesus also offer evidence of women making independent choices, some perhaps with the blessing of husbands or other male relatives such as in the case of Joanna, wife of Herod’s steward Chuza, and others as single women (widowed, divorced, or unmarried) such as Mary Magdalene or Susanna, the other women singled out by Luke (8:1–3) as accompanying Jesus.

Offices, Leadership, and Ministerial Activities The issue of choice and risk is closely linked to women’s participation in ministerial activities and leadership roles. Two areas of general scholarly consensus have emerged in the last few decades. First, research has demonstrated that as in the case of the woman leader of a synagogue (archisynagōgissa) or women priestesses or officeholders in pagan practices, we cannot assume that women who are given leadership titles, such as “apostle” (apostolos, Junia, Rom. 16:7) or “deacon” (diakonos, Phoebe, Rom. 16:1), are simply being given honorific titles with no true leadership responsibilities. Nor can we assume that they bore these titles only because they are married to male leaders. Without evidence to the contrary, we need to assume that their roles were comparable to male counterparts. Secondly, perhaps more than any other topic, research in this area calls us to situate the women of the early church within the broader framework of the Roman world. Certain texts, especially from the early period, indicate that women in early Christianity had a good measure of social freedom, but this phenomenon reflects the greater social freedom and public visibility that was happening already in several places in the empire in the first century CE. In many respects, early church women were continuing in the roles they had as pagan and Jewish women before they entered believing communities, and we must guard against anachronistic arguments about their acquiring a greater degree of “liberation” than was found in other groups. Ministerial activities are often related to life choices (albeit the extent to which women had

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control over their own lives depended greatly upon their personal circumstances). Most obviously from the very earliest era it is clear that some women were remaining unmarried. Paul speaks of the “virgins” in 1 Corinthians 7 in a manner that suggests that they are consecrated women, holy in body and spirit (1 Cor. 7:34). At various junctures in this text, Paul seeks to regulate their behavior; their lives are a potent sign of the kingdom, but the dangers of immorality mean that their relationships with male members of the community must be guarded carefully (e.g., 1 Cor. 7:36–37; some English translations adopt the term “fiancée” rather than the more literal rendering of the Greek text here, “virgin” [parthenos]). Such concern for purity and its relation to worship and religious practice was not invented by the early Christians. The vestal virgins of Rome and Philo’s Therapeutrides (see above) are examples from the Roman world. More broadly, an interest in preserving the virginity of women is related to the traditional function of virgins and faithful brides to represent the shame (concern for reputation) of the house or community (see Eph. 5:25–27). Ascetic women found a place very early on early church communities, and they were not confined to young unmarried daughters, but included widows (at the beginning of the second century, Ignatius of Antioch speaks intriguingly of a seemingly mixed group of women of all ages with the phrase “virgins called widows” [Ign. Smyrn. 13.1]). Widows are singled out by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7:39–40, seem to be organized in groups with special ministerial roles by the period of the Pastoral Epistles (1 Tim. 5:3– 16) at the end of the first century CE, and clearly emerge as an office in the church literature of the second century. Much is unknown about their roles, but it seems to have included prayer on behalf of the community (Pol. Phil. 4.3: here widows are called God’s altar), and they are often praised for their example as role models in domestic service and care for the needy. Scholars have pointed to texts concerning widows as offering evidence of women taking initiative in the choice to remain unmarried, and it is clear from the Pastoral Epistles onward that their influence is sometimes of great concern to male church authorities. Unmarried women are also associated with prophecy in early Christian literature, such as in the case of the unmarried prophesying daughters of Philip (Acts 21:9), the

widow-prophet Anna (Luke 2:36–38), and the two women leaders Priscilla and Maximilla of the New Prophecy (or Montanism), a revivalist movement that originated in the second century. Ascetic evidence offers only part of the picture, however, for although it is rarely acknowledged, religious leadership was also tied to the role of mother in the early church. Mothers exercised significant informal authority in the Roman world and were praised for their influence in a variety of matters, including education. Ancient literature consistently praises mothers, often widows, for the education of sons, including setting an example in both morals and speech (Plutarch, Life of Tiberius Gracchus 1.6–7; Cicero, Brutus 211). Second Timothy’s reference to Timothy as being formed in the faith by his grandmother Lois and his mother Eunice (2 Tim. 1:5) reflects conventional expectations, but the absence of a reference to male family figures could well also point to the phenomenon of women turning to the Lord without their husbands and serving as evangelists to their children. Moreover, educational influences are not restricted to the mother-son relationship; in Titus 2:3–5, older women (mothers and grandmothers) are instructed to teach younger women to be good wives, mothers, and household managers, reflecting societal expectations concerning the ongoing education of girls as they made the transition to wife and mother. In the second-century writings of Polycarp, the education/discipline of children in general is presented as the special duty of wives (Pol. Phil. 4.2–6.1). Although their legacy is not recorded, we must remember too that slave women were frequently wet nurses and the first teachers of free and slave children alike and may well have been, therefore, evangelists of the very young. It is clear that both married women and widows acted as patrons to various groups and associations in the Roman world. Junia Theodora of first-century Corinth has often been compared to Phoebe, the female church leader from Cenchreae, the seaport of Corinth (see above); not only is similar patronage terminology used to describe both women, but Junia Theodora is described as offering hospitality to traveling Lycians and facilitating their relationship with Roman authorities in a manner that resembles the endorsement of Phoebe in Romans 16:1–2. Phoebe is also named as a deacon (diakonos), a

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term that later came to refer to the male office of the diaconate; yet in Paul’s first-century context it seems to have carried connotations of mediation, connection, and representation (closely related to Phoebe’s role as patron) and is in fact used flexibly by Paul to refer not only to local leaders, but also to his own ministry. Interpreters have usually taken the Roman governor of Bythinia’s reference to the ministrae, the title given to the Christian slave women whom he had interrogated and tortured, as a reference to women deacons. This breaks down a straightforward correlation between women’s leadership in early Christianity and the resources of women of means (Pliny, Letter 10.96). It also reminds us that the risks women took to join the group could lead to torture and martyrdom, a fact that was celebrated by various martyrologies such as the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicitas, which recounts the deaths of both a matron and slave, both of whom are depicted as new mothers. Probably emerging around the beginning of the fourth century, especially strongly in the East and overlapping with the office of widow to a certain degree, the institution of the deaconess (often diakonissa is used, but the use of diakonos continues) was seemingly restricted to women engaging in ministry among other women (there is no evidence of this in the case of Phoebe); these officeholders were devoted to service to the poor and sick, assisting at the baptisms of women, and the religious instructions of women according to such texts as the Didascalia Apostolorum and the Apostolic Constitutions. But inscriptional and textual evidence indicates that women’s leadership took different shapes in the different places; while women officeholders (e.g., women deacons and women presbyters) may have been absent or a rarity in some regions, in other areas they seem to have been widely accepted. The gnostic

material and apocryphal early Christian literature reveals very little about concrete historical setting because of either highly symbolic language or novelistic style; but the representation of Thecla of Iconium in the Acts of Paul and Thecla and some representations of Mary Magdalene in gnostic texts suggest that roles associated with male church offices, such as teaching, special insight to interpret the words of Jesus, performing baptisms, and itinerant preaching, can be imagined in some circles as taken up by early Christian women. This legacy has survived despite the strong efforts of church authors such as Tertullian, who wrote a response to the Acts of Paul and Thecla, in the hope that these tendencies would be snuffed out (On Baptism 17). Bibliography

Cohick, Lyn H. Women in the World of the Earliest Christians: Illuminating Ancient Ways of Life. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2009. Kraemer, Ross Shepard. Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender, and History in the GrecoRoman Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Matigan, Kevin, and Carolyn Osiek. Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Økland, Jorunn. Women in Their Place: Paul and the Corinthian Discourse of Gender and Sanctuary Space. Journal for the Study of the New Testament Supplement Series. London and New York: T. & T. Clark, 2004. Osiek, Carolyn, and Margaret Y. MacDonald, with Janet Tulloch. A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2006.

Acknowledgments

This page constitutes a continuation of the copyright page. Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material: Bitter Water and Miriam’s Song, artist unknown. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Creation of Eve, Gustave Doré. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Death of Jezebel, Gustave Doré. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Deborah, Gustave Doré. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Des cleres et nobles femmes. Spencer Collection. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations. Used by permission. Fall of Adam and Eve, Virgil Solis. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Hagar’s Despair, Gustave Doré. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Hagar, Wayne A. Forte, Laguna Niguel, California. Used by permission. Initial Letter C, artist unknown. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Jabach-Altarpiece, Albrecht Dürer. © Städel Museum–ARTOTHEK. Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Used by permission. Jael and Sisera, James Northcote. Royal Academy of Arts, London, United Kingdom. Used by permission. Excerpt from J. B.: A Play in Verse by Archibald MacLeish. Copyright © 1958 by Archibald MacLeish; renewed 1986 by William H. MacLeish and Mary H. Grimm. Reprinted by permission of

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved. Jephthah’s Daughter, Gustave Doré. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Jephthah’s Daughter, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Job’s Affliction, Hans Holbein, the Younger. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Judith Showing the Head of Holofernes, Gustave Doré. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Madonna and Child, artist unknown. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. The Penitent Magdalen, Georges de la Tour. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Image sources. Art Resource, New York. Used by permission. Several lines from A Masque of Reason from The Poetry of Robert Frost edited by Edward Connery Lathem. Copyright © 1969 by Henry Holt and Company, copyright © 1947 by Robert Frost, copyright © 1975 by Lesley Frost Ballantine. Reprinted by arrangement with Henry Holt and Company, LLC. Rahab, Otto Elliger and Joseph Mulder. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Samson and Delilah, Virgil Solis. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission. Susanna, Johann Christoph Weigel. Pitts Theology Library, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. Used by permission.

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Carol A. Newsom is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Old Testament at Candler School of Theology, Emory University. She was the 2011 President of the Society of Biblical Literature. Sharon H. Ringe is Professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary. Jacqueline E. Lapsley is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary.

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