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THE BIBLE ACCORDING TO EVE

A diverse group of scholars is reinterpreting the role of women in the Good Book and in ancient religious life

by Cullen Murphy

It is one of the most famous scenes in the Bible--the moment when the woman from the Valley of Sorek causes Samson's hair to be cut, shearing the Israelite leader of his powers. "She made him sleep on her knees," the Book of Judges says of Delilah, "and she called a man and had him shave the seven locks of his head. Then she began to torment him, and his strength left him." Delilah's deed has been a cultural staple ever since, rendered in cathedral windows and vulgar verse. Samson, with his brute strength and his heedless libido, may be the heroic central character of the story, but down through the ages Delilah has been perceived as the epitome of feminine betrayal and lethal allure.

But is this age-old depiction of Delilah fair? That was one of the questions posed at a recent meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature--gathered for a session on "Women Who Kill." Delilah, it turns out, may have been depicted in popular literature for centuries as "a cheat," "a hypocrite," and a woman who has had "many lovers." But the Bible itself says none of these things about her. Nor is she the instigator of any plot: Although she accepts a bribe to learn the secret of Samson's strength, the Philistine men who bribe her are the true engines of the action. Delilah, moreover, never deceives Samson about what she wants to know--but Samson thrice deceives her. In any event, Delilah herself is apparently not an Israelite but a Philistine--so shouldn't she be considered, on her own terms, something of a patriot?

Academic sessions like the one about "Women Who Kill"--or about "Woman's Desire and the Song of Songs," "The Historical Jesus and Women," and "Feminist Interpretation of the Fourth Gospel"--illustrate the degree to which issues involving women have become a powerful seasoning, if not the dominant flavor, in biblical studies. The controversies over the use of "inclusive" language in translations are almost a sideshow. With one eye on the social transformations of our own time, feminist scholars are seeking to explore the unenviable place of women in the Bible; to understand why women are portrayed in such a negative way; and to assess what it all means for the understanding of religion and human history.

The Bible is famous for being the world's most overstudied book--overstudied by male scholars and commentators, that is to say. It has not been overstudied by women. Until recently, it was studied by female scholars hardly at all, let alone by female scholars who were interested specifically in what the Bible had to say about women--and who were interested in challenging or reinterpreting what they found the Bible to be saying.

Now, religion is feeling the full force of women's entry into fields of study from which they once were virtually absent. Today the Bible is being confronted not only by women who are theologians, and who have overtly religious motivations, but also by women who are biblical scholars, linguists, historians, archaeologists, and literary critics. The engagement of feminism with religion is a social phenomenon whose impact on popular attitudes, religious practice, and the life of the mind has already been profound. Its long-term impact may be deeper still. Asked once what he thought would be the outcome of feminism's encounter with religion, the Catholic theologian David Tracy responded immediately, "The next intellectual revolution."

The women taking on the Bible have much to confront. As a prescriptive text, the Bible has been interpreted down the ages to justify the subordination of women to men. It has been interpreted as explaining the creation of woman as an afterthought; as defining the purpose of woman to be the servant of man; as laying the blame on a woman, Eve, for humanity's expulsion from Eden; as declaring the pangs of childbirth to be punishment for Eve's transgression; as forbidding an equal role for women in religious preaching and ministry. The general assumption of what many would describe as women's second-class status emerges in countless biblical injunctions, sayings, and proverbs.

Interpretation aside, the sexual outlook of the Bible's very contents is frequently disturbing. Yes, the Bible offers portraits of exemplary women. More often, however, it depicts women as schemers and tricksters, as active threats to virtue and purity. Alternatively, it depicts women as pawns or victims, as passive, even disposable, objects of divine or masculine will (think of the daughter of Jephthah, never given a name, who becomes a human sacrifice to fulfill a father's bargain with God).

Of course, there is no getting around the fact that most of the Bible is androcentric--male-oriented--if not patriarchal. Its worldview was largely shaped by men and reflects the interests of men. In the Hebrew Bible, only about 115 of the more than 1,400 people who are given names are women. Five books of the Bible (Obadiah, Jonah, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, and Haggai) make no reference to women at all. Not surprisingly, some feminists want nothing to do with the Bible.

And yet there is significant material about women to investigate and perhaps to reclaim--once one decides that the subject is worth a look. Generations of male scholars rarely did. The women now exploring the Bible raise questions such as these: What fragments of evidence does the Bible yield about the reality of daily life for women deep in biblical antiquity? Did women sometimes exercise more power than we might imagine or than the Bible tends to acknowledge? How did Israelite women and men conceive in gender terms of this anomalous deity of theirs--a singular God who somehow held out against the polytheistic legions of powerful neighbors? Are there hints in the Bible of stories and traditions about women and their roles--and about a more egalitarian society--that have been lost to us? Does the theology of the Creation stories really mean that woman must be considered subsidiary to man? What social factors drew some Jewish women to the movement that grew up around Jesus of Nazareth?

Because the Bible speaks with authority to millions, the answers to these questions have a palpable modern impact. During the past few weeks stories touching on women and the Bible have twice made front-page news nationwide. In June, the Southern Baptist Convention voted to add a clause to the denomination's statement of beliefs affirming that a wife is to submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband--a position supported by a number of New Testament passages and also by the description of Eve in Genesis as a helpmate to Adam. A few weeks later the Vatican warned that those Catholics who continue to argue in favor of women's ordination would be subject to a "just penalty." The Catholic prohibition against female priests has always been justified in part on biblical grounds: that Scripture shows only men in apostolic roles.

Biblical attitudes toward women are of broader relevance still. Biblical language, biblical stories, and biblical ideas underlie high and low culture, political rhetoric, conceptions of self and community, of duty and justice, of denial and aspiration. The Bible's gender mythology provides ample raw material for popular culture. The most well-known rendering of the Creation remains Michelangelo's--the finger of a male God giving life to a male human being, an image painted on plaster but widely disseminated in short-sleeved polyester. The corporate logo of Apple Computer recalls Eve's bite of the forbidden fruit (from the tree, after all, of knowledge). To this day a femme fatale may be a "Jezebel" (although the Bette Davis character may be more vividly fixed in mind than the actual biblical figure).

Counting names. The women responsible for the feminist vitality in biblical studies, now numbering in the many hundreds, are a diverse group--no individual is fully representative. One project that unites about 70 of them is the compilation of a new reference work of broad scope, tentatively titled A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, The Apocrypha, and the New Testament and due out next year. These pages will feature everyone from Abigail to Zipporah, and the many anonymous bit players in between--the nameless mothers and nameless daughters, the whores and the widows, the drawers of water and dispensers of wisdom.

Heading this monumental effort is Carol L. Meyers, a professor of biblical studies and archaeology at Duke University, whose 1988 book Discovering Eve remains a landmark in feminist biblical scholarship. Like other women of her (1960s) generation in biblical studies, Meyers received arduous training--mastering a thorny repertoire of ancient languages; toiling at archaeological sites under the relentless Middle Eastern sun--in a predominantly male environment. Although ever mindful of the Bible's androcentric character, Meyers argues that some of the Bible's material on the premonarchical period (before 1020 B.C.) found in Joshua and Judges preserves hints of a relatively egalitarian family structure among the Israelites. These books also bring attention to an unusually large number of prominent and decisive women--women like Rahab, who helps deliver Jericho into Israelite hands; the prophet Deborah, who leads her people against the Canaanites; and Jael, who slays the enemy general Sisera. Women would also have shared with men the cultural responsibility for teaching children, as reflected in the Proverbs: "My son, keep your father's commandment, and forsake not your mother's teaching."

Meyers reads the Bible conscious of the precarious demographic circumstances facing the Israelites during the Iron Age--a period when, archaeologists say, infant mortality at times approached 50 percent and female life expectancy was perhaps 30 years. Meyers contends that environment sheds light on passages that have been misconstrued, especially the oft-cited "curse of Eve." Genesis 3:16 reads: "To the woman he said, / 'I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; / in pain you shall bring forth children.' " Meyers notes that the Hebrew word translated there as "pain" is translated as "toil" in the very next verse, when God is talking not to the woman but to the man. She also notes that the Hebrew word translated as "childbearing" refers not to the process of childbirth but to the fact of pregnancy. Her own proposed translation: "I will greatly increase your toil and your pregnancies; along with travail shall you beget children." Her point is not that the lot of women was a happy one but that the passage is meant to address the realities of community survival. It is not meant to single out labor pains as punishment, as some traditional commentators and translators have maintained.

During the past two decades feminist biblical scholars have produced a multitude of specialized studies--hundreds of books and thousands of articles. Several key topics emerge.

The problem of Eve. For women, the disturbing legacy of the Garden of Eden story is hard to overestimate. Paul conveys the interpretive flavor in 1 Timothy: "I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over men; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor." The cogency of this interpretation has now been undermined in several ways. Princeton's Elaine Pagels--whose book The Gnostic Gospels evoked ancient Christian communities in which women and feminine spirituality enjoyed unusual prominence--has explored earlier thinking about the Creation. She points out in Adam, Eve & the Serpent that these early Jewish and Christian traditions see the Creation as a parable of human equality (woman and man are both created in the image of God) and the story of the temptation as a parable of free will (human beings are responsible for their own actions).

There are two Creation accounts in Genesis. What about the second one, in which woman seems to be created after man? In fact, says Union Theological Seminary's Phyllis Trible, it is a mistake to think of that first human creature, Adam, as being male at all. Trible points out that the Hebrew word ha-'adam, from which Adam derives, is a generic term for humankind, denoting a being created from the earth, and is used at the beginning of Genesis 2 to describe a creature of undifferentiated sex. Only when God takes a rib from ha-'adam are the sexes differentiated, and the change is signaled by new terminology. The creature from whom the rib was taken is now referred to not as ha-'adam but as 'ish ("man"), and the creature fashioned from the rib is called 'ishshah ("woman"). In other words, the very act of creating woman also creates man.

Yet the notion of Eve, or woman, as a biblical afterthought and subsidiary character continues to leave its mark, at least symbolically, in places you wouldn't expect it. Try looking up "Eve" in the 15th edition (1993) of Encyclopaedia Britannica, hardly a brackish cultural backwater. The entry reads: "See 'Adam and Eve.' "

Lost histories. The brief but prominent mentions of certain women in the Bible hint at a bigger picture that can no longer be viewed. Think of Huldah (in 2 Kings) and Noadiah (in Nehemiah)--women who are called "prophets"--and of the "wise women" cited in 2 Samuel. The literary critic Mieke Bal has given a name to these durable feminine remnants in the Bible: "wandering rocks," a term that evokes the debris preserved and embedded in glaciers willy-nilly, and carried along over time to new destinations.

Consider the case of Miriam, the sister of Moses, who saves the life of her infant brother when he is discovered among the bulrushes. After the crossing of the Red Sea, Miriam is identified as a "prophetess" and sings a few lines of the victory song, known as the "Song of the Sea," already sung by Moses. Later, when she challenges her brother's leadership--"Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?"--she is struck down with an affliction and eventually dies. Have large parts of the Miriam story been suppressed by a heavy editorial hand? Probably so. Many scholars contend that in the most ancient Israelite traditions, the full "Song of the Sea" was ascribed not to Moses but to Miriam. Indeed, a hint of a version of the story along these lines has recently come to light in one of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The New Testament's Mary Magdalene is another woman whose story has been largely lost--and at the same time greatly distorted. She is identified as a person of means, a follower of Jesus who had once been possessed by demons. In all four Gospels it is Mary Magdalene who discovers the empty tomb of Jesus. She is never identified as a prostitute--the one thing "everyone knows" about her. How did she become a whore? Jane Schaberg of the University of Detroit--Mercy, among others, has exposed an intricate process of conflation culminating in the sixth century A.D., whereby Mary Magdalene acquired the attributes of certain other women mentioned in the Gospels. Such conflation may not have been an accident. As Harvard's Karen L. King has noted, in some early Christian documents, such as the so-called Gospel of Mary, a struggle over women's leadership and right to prophesy finds expression in accounts of struggle between Mary Magdalene and the apostle Peter. Then as now, King observes, besmirching a woman's virtue was an effective way of eroding her legitimacy.

Still, important and positive references to Miriam and to Mary Magdalene do survive, underscoring the strong hold of these women on the popular imagination. In Miriam's case, the evidence of that hold is hard to deny: She persisted in ordinary life in the obvious but easy-to-overlook form of her Hebrew name and its variants. The New Testament, compiled more than a millennium after Miriam's death, is populated with a multitude of Jewish women who bear (as the Magdalene herself does) the Hellenized version of Miriam's name. The most prominent of these women, of course, is Mary, the mother of Jesus.

Mother of ambivalence. Elizabeth Johnson, a Catholic theologian and the author of She Who Is, has taken note of the modest, tenuous connection between anything that can reliably be said about Mary, the actual person, and "the immense sprawl of the historical phenomenon." Not even the names of Mary's parents (said by tradition to be Anna and Joachim) are given in the Bible. As a matter of historical reclamation, the "facts" of Mary's biography verge quickly into the speculative. Most scholarship focuses instead on Mary's place in our culture and her place in religious doctrine.

Few biblical figures elicit so divided a response as Mary does, and expressions of anger or annoyance from feminists have been both common and loud. Some commentators see her as an essentially pliant figure meekly acceding to the demands of her God and to the social norms of her day: "Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to me according to your word." They view the emphasis on Mary's virginity as a denigration of female sexuality. They see Mary, in her officially sanctioned role, as a tool of patriarchy. "Mary," writes Marina Warner in Alone of All Her Sex, "cannot be a model for the New Woman." Even so, some important modern voices demur--for instance, by finding in Mary's story, like Eve's and Adam's, an affirmation of free will. Here is the feminist theologian Rosemary Ruether on Mary's embrace of the divine plan: "Indeed, it puts her under danger as someone who has been making her own choices about her body and sexuality without regard for her future husband. . . . Luke goes out of his way to stress that Mary's motherhood is a free choice."

The difficulty of pinning Mary down has always been among her major cultural assets--so writes the historian Jaroslav Pelikan in his recent Mary Through the Centuries. Pelikan cites the enduring power of Mary's prayer, the Magnificat: "He has put down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of low degree; / he has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent empty away." Mary, says Pelikan, is invoked today by people engaged in struggles for social justice around the world. Despite all attempts by various authorities over the years to set boundaries on Mary, to define her in certain ways for certain purposes, she has resisted such efforts and so remained beyond official control.

Was Jesus a feminist? Some Christian women yearn to see him as one, and feminist scholarship has placed new emphasis on his egalitarian ethic. Women were prominent among the marginalized people who made up so much of Jesus's circle. Jesus invited women to join him at meals--defying custom, some say. When the time of Jesus's crucifixion drew near, it was an unnamed woman at Bethany who broke open a jar of oil and anointed his head, in reverent imitation of the act of anointing a king--an action whose symbolism was lost on the men in the group but that moved Jesus to say, "Wherever the good news is proclaimed in the whole world, what she has done will be told in remembrance of her." (Theologian Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza's influential book In Memory of Her commemorates this woman. Schüssler Fiorenza, the first female president of the 120-year-old Society of Biblical Literature, observes acidly that despite Jesus's prophetic statement, no one thought to provide the woman's name.) Women stayed courageously at the side of Jesus during the crucifixion, and they were the first to discover the empty tomb and to experience a vision of the resurrected Jesus. An early Christian theology of equality is embodied in the ancient baptismal formula preserved in Paul's epistle to the Galatians (3:28): "There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." It is a passage that some would hail as "the Magna Carta of Christian feminism."

Egalitarian he may have been, but Jesus never speaks explicitly about issues of gender equity. And some scholars question whether the egalitarianism of Jesus with regard to women really represented a radical departure from his Jewish environment. The Jewish biblical scholar Judith Plaskow, author of Standing Again at Sinai, has put the matter bluntly: "The argument that Jesus was a feminist--rather than just a Jewish man who treated women like people--rests on 'the rule of antithesis,' on contrasting his behavior with his supposed Jewish background." More and more archaeological and literary evidence points to the sheer variety of thought and practice within ancient religion, including Judaism--and to the fact that Jewish women lived lives similar to those of their Gentile counterparts.

Undeniably, many Jewish women were drawn to the Jesus movement. Vanderbilt's Amy-Jill Levine, invited to formulate one question she would like definitively answered about first-century women, replied: "I'd like to talk to Martha and Mary. I'd like to ask, so what did you and Jesus talk about? What did you guys get out of this? What was in it for you?"

As for "the Magna Carta of Christian feminism," its subsequent fate has been the subject of much discussion; for whatever reason, the tenor of commentary on women from Paul through Augustine and beyond takes a markedly harsher turn. (In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas defined a woman as mas occasionatus--a "missed opportunity" for creating a male.)

George Bernard Shaw once characterized Paul as the "eternal enemy of woman." Paul, writing two decades after the death of Jesus, may have expressed sentiments in Galatians that a feminist would hail, but he also demanded that women be subordinate to their husbands, that they learn in silence, and that they refrain from exercising authority over men. The contradictions in Paul about gender issues are real, even if it is also true that some of the most troublesome passages for women were composed long after the authentic epistles. The tensions became only more acute as Christianity gained social acceptance in the Greco-Roman world, whose underlying gender template defined women (in the words of Brandeis University's Bernadette Brooten) as "inferior, unfit to rule, passive, and weak." And the University of Pennsylvania's Ross S. Kraemer has observed, "Most Christian movements we know to have been characterized by the prominence of women were ultimately judged heretical."

Women as leaders. Whatever the conflicts in his own thinking, Paul mentions many women by name in his epistles, and the same terms used to designate male church leaders are used to designate female church leaders. A woman named Junia is called an "apostle." Similarly, inscriptions from around the Mediterranean world describe specific Jewish women as "leader," "elder," "mother of the synagogue." It was not at all unusual in the ancient world for women to assume the leadership of voluntary, civic, even religious institutions. Christians, like Jews, also saw the role of prophet as existing heedless of gender lines. In Acts 2:17-18, Peter quotes the prophet Joel: "I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy."

One of the principal investigators in this field is Claremont Graduate University's Karen Jo Torjesen, author of When Women Were Priests. Asked if any scholar today entertains real doubts that women were exercising important leadership roles, including clerical roles, in early Christian times, Torjesen says carefully, "There are scholars with very conservative religious commitments who probably still resist." Her own views on the matter are unequivocal: "The early church's specific leadership functions posed no barriers to women."

Is God a woman? Well, of course not--and not a man, either. To be sure, the preponderance of male language associated with divinity in the Bible seems to have spurred in our own time a reactive surge of interest in goddesses. But the God of Israel, unlike the gods of all other contemporaneous religions, was ultimately seen to be asexual. As the Assyriologist and biblical scholar Tikva Frymer-Kensky has memorably observed, God was never imagined "below the waist." Moreover, when God had to be described metaphorically, both male and female imagery was used. "Now I will scream like a woman in labor, I will pant and I will gasp," says God in Isaiah. "You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth," Moses tells his people in Deuteronomy. What about all those references to God as "father"? Most of them come relatively late in the development of Israelite religion, and altogether there are only about a dozen references to God as "father" in the entire Hebrew Bible.

In Proverbs and elsewhere the figure Wisdom personifies the divine--and is conceived of as a woman (just as Sophia often is in Christian thought). Imagery aside, the Hebrew God is indivisible, as is human nature.

A growing power. Undoubtedly, the influence of feminist biblical studies will grow. Women have always been the social backbone of religious institutions in the Judeo-Christian tradition, even as they were largely barred from intellectual and political authority in religious life. This is changing in front of our eyes. Women are admitted to the ministry in about 80 Christian denominations and to the rabbinate in Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Judaism. They account for a third of all students in seminary programs. Leadership exercised by women in religion will become more and more prevalent, and interpretation of the Bible by women will accordingly become more and more routine. Phyllis Trible has likened this Bible to a pilgrim traveling across time, changing in function and in guise. Feminist readings will surely affect the spiritual life of believers and debates about women's place in American culture.

At a symposium on women and the Bible held at the Smithsonian Institution a few years ago, a member of the audience rose and remarked that after listening to some of the angry critiques, she wondered if she had any choice but to forget about the Bible altogether. One of the panelists replied, in effect, "Good idea."

Tikva Frymer-Kensky was also a panelist, and she sharply disagreed. "The Bible," she said, "is an extremely complex document that revels in a multiplicity of voices, that critiques its own society and confesses its divided opinion about everything. The Bible is a document of struggle, of God-wrestling. It is a record of a society and the response of individuals who constantly go back over their history and think about these things."

Conceive of it as one will--as "wandering rock," perhaps, or as "pilgrim"--the Bible remains an ageless provocation. That is why feminist scholars were drawn to the biblical tradition in the first place. And their own provocations can only revitalize it.


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