Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature

By Luise Schottroff, Marie-Theres Wacker and Martin Rumscheidt

The original German edition of Feminist Biblical Interpretation received high acclaim and widespread positive reviews in Europe. That groundbreaking reference tool for contextual biblical interpretation is here available in English for the first time. With contributions from more than sixty female scholars, this is the only one-volume feminist commentary on the entire Bible, including books that are relatively uncharted territory for feminist theology.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Release date: Nov 29, 2012
• ISBN: 9781467436489

Book preview

Preface of the Editors to the First German Edition

I

It is no exaggeration to assert that in the last two decades the approaches, questions, and conclusions of feminist interpretation of the Bible have gained increasingly in plausibility and dissemination throughout the world. This is so not only in the domain of practical education but also in that of university scholarship. There have never been as many women qualified in theology and exegesis as there are now advancing feminist interpretation of the Bible through diverse methods and highly differentiated foci of interest. Frequently their points of departure are specific themes or else biblical texts that appear promising in relation to questions of particular relevance to women. It has been clear for a long time, however, that what is at issue here is not simply biblical texts that deal with women or favored topics of feminist theology. Critical feminist analysis has to be brought to bear on the books of the Bible and on the Bible as a whole.

Two works have appeared in the United States that make this wide-ranging endeavor visible and draw it together. The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol Newsom and Sharon Ringe, 1992, comprises contributions by women who live and teach in North America. All books of the Protestant Christian Bible are addressed in short commentaries; in addition, there are two historical, informational survey articles and two contributions dealing with selected early Jewish and Christian writings. The two-volume work Searching the Scriptures, edited by Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and published in 1993/94, offers, in its first volume, foundational essays on method and hermeneutics. The second volume contains brief commentaries on every New Testament book, and a wide range of other early Christian literature and early Jewish writings not part of the Hebrew Bible. The contributors to this work are drawn from five continents in accordance with the overall concept of this project: to document and advance the pluriform range of the women-specific engagement with the Bible.

Sometime in mid-1995 the two editors of the present work, Luise Schottroff for the New Testament and Marie-Theres Wacker for the Old Testament, wrote to a group of about thirty women in the German-speaking world and invited them to work with us in planning and producing a compendium of feminist biblical interpretation. All of them were known to us and active in the work of feminist exegesis, be it in postgraduate studies or in full-time academic teaching positions. The response was overwhelming: after the first phase of correspondence, nearly half of the writings to be addressed were claimed. In addition, we received numerous suggestions of other women who were interested in the project or who should be sounded out about it. In cooperation with Barbara Heller of the Evangelische Akademie Hofgeismar and Ruth Habermann of the Evangelische Akademie Bad Boll and with the generous financial assistance of Gütersloher Verlagshaus, two symposia were arranged, for the spring and the fall of 1996. At each symposium, six authors presented their contributions for discussion, with about twenty-five authors present. Other additional interested women and men also took part. These two very intense symposia allowed the authors to get to know one another, support one another with critique, and make decisions about further work on related questions and topics. But chiefly the symposia were an opportunity for the participants to be involved from the very outset in carrying this project forward, to give it shape and to influence its direction, to work together in clarifying or, at least, making manageable the numerous emerging hermeneutical questions.

II

The specific profile of the compendium was worked out at the symposia.

As a decidedly feminist project, it seeks to present women-centered exegetical work on the Bible. For that reason, the team of authors consists exclusively of women who relate themselves more explicitly than is the case in The Women’s Bible Commentary to one of the by now numerous and diverse feminist exegetical points of departure. On this point, the compendium is perhaps more akin to Searching the Scriptures. The clearly desired plurality in method and feminist hermeneutic marks every contributor individually, but all share the conviction that Christian anti-Judaism, Western colonialism, and all forms of racism have to be opposed at the same time misogyny is.

Furthermore, the compendium wishes to signal its women-centeredness and its feminism in noting that the contributors are especially concerned to provide bibliographical documentation of the feminist discussion of their respective writings. Works of traditional exegesis are only sparsely referred to and involve in general only commentaries worthy of commendation, as well as, of course, the monographs and articles actually used in the contributed essay. It was decided not to recite again what is known as introductory knowledge, such as the date or authorship of each writing. Greater detail is provided about such basic information only for little-known or relatively inaccessible writings.

Since this is a project of contextual interpretation of the Bible, we found it necessary to be consciously attentive to the context wherein the project itself was born and to its anticipated readership. The compendium came into being in Germany and wishes, in distinction particularly from the North American works mentioned earlier, to give visibility to the labor of the feminist exegetes of the German-speaking world whose number has grown noticeably in recent years. Our work appears as a publication in Germany. Since it is published by a firm whose program is one of Christian theology, it is expected that in Germany it will be primarily German-speaking Christian women and men who will pick it up. We do hope nonetheless to reach other readers also. Almost all the authors themselves also belong to one of the great Christian churches. This corresponds yet again to the way scholarship is structured in the German-speaking world and how it separates theological faculties along confessional lines as contrasted, for example, to the Anglo-Saxon world and its departments of religion where women of different denominations and religions study and do research together and often next to atheists interested in religion.

We editors do not at all intend to leave the impression that we view our context, as just depicted, as something natural. It was clearly a matter of course for us to go beyond it at least selectively and symbolically. We are pleased that we could involve authors from East Asia and Latin America and that a few women who straddle the boundaries between Europe and North America are on the team. We rejoice that the palette of Christian-feminist approaches to reality has become quite broad and that a number of such boundary straddlers are found in the pages of this book. We made a particular effort to involve Jewish feminist scholars of the Bible. Here German history caught up with us very quickly. In the context of the Federal Republic of Germany, Jewish women must experience being particularly co-opted when a group of Christian feminist women theologians invites their participation in a common project of biblical interpretation. Some Jewish women used this argument to turn down the invitation. So much the greater our joy when we were able to win over Athalya Brenner and Marianne Wallach-Faller, two high-profile scholars, for the project. The sudden and tragic death of Marianne Wallach-Faller in January 1997 came as a hard blow. She was not able to commit to paper her commentary on Malachi. In her memory, the present Christian feminist contribution on that prophet intentionally includes Jewish traditions of interpretation and refers in a pointedly critical way to crucial manifestations of Christian anti-Judaism.¹

A feminist interpretation of the Bible: that is what this work is meant to be. But even among Christians, what the word Bible comprises is not altogether unambiguous. The canon of the Protestant Reformation differs from that of the Roman Catholic Church in that the latter includes seven writings in addition to the books of the Hebrew Bible: 1 and 2 Maccabees, Baruch, Judith, Tobit, Sirach, Wisdom, as well as the Greek expansions of Daniel and Esther. The sequence of the biblical writings also differs in the two canons. And, of course, Judaism and Christianity exhibit a marked difference on the understanding of canon. The whole question of the canon has its own explosive force for Christian feminist theology insofar as the history of the canon is entangled in the history of how women were rendered invisible and excluded from the churches’ decision-making and governing bodies. As a way of redressing this, there now exist anthologies of texts, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Womanguides, published in 1985, where excerpts from biblical writings are juxtaposed with texts from ancient Oriental history of religion and with selections from the traditions of nonbiblical religions with the intent of creating a new canon grounded in feminist theology.

While The Women’s Bible Commentary does not take up this matter, Searching the Scriptures takes a position by rendering the boundaries of the canon fluid. Numerous noncanonical writings of early Judaism and of early Christian communities are included in that commentary. The order of chapters in the commentary volume does not follow the traditional sequence of books found in the Bible. It is more the genre of texts that dictated the order. The writings of the Hebrew Bible are completely absent; the reason for this was initially a matter of organization in that an intended cooperation with a Jewish editor could not be arranged. But that absence can also be read as a reminder of the explosive question of the common Jewish and Christian part of the Bible between Christian abandonment and Christian co-opting of it.

The feminist discussion of the canon is not silenced in the compendium but cannot be settled either in the circle of the contributors. For that reason, we name the problem and advance the discussion somewhat pragmatically. All writings that are part of the widest Christian canon are addressed in short commentaries. We were concerned to find authors for those books where uncharted feminist territory, apart from brief references in The Women’s Bible Commentary, had to be entered. Most of the noncanonical literary works we chose to include came about as a result of a proposal by an author who was ready to work on the suggested text or had already completed preliminary studies of it. The order of essays is, at it were, in layers: the writings of the Old/First Testament in the choice and order of the Protestant churches are followed by the seven writings added in the Roman Catholic biblical canon. However, the expansions to Daniel and Esther are addressed within the context of Daniel and Esther. Four further early Jewish writings were chosen; these are followed by the books of the New Testament and a series of selected early Christian pieces of literature. The latter provide insight into women’s history of biblical times, into the emergence of certain images of women, as well as into theological developments.

In naming the groups of texts in question, we did not insist on standardization. This holds especially for the names of the two parts of the Christian Bible. The designation Old Testament for the first part of the Christian Bible next to the New Testament can be misread as anti-Jewish and derogatory: the New surpasses the Old or annuls it. That designation needs to be problematized for that reason. The proposal to speak of the Hebrew Bible leaps too easily over the question of the Christian canon in that it takes into view only those books that were written in Hebrew. An alternate designation caught the attention of many: the First Testament; it seeks to stress the dignity of the never-abrogated covenant of God with the Jewish people. Yet, it too is not free of being misunderstood particularly when coupled with the corresponding concept of the Second Testament. Does not a second testament overtake once again a first testament? The designation of the New Testament as the Christian Testament is problematic as well since it threatens to exclude the First Testament from the Christian canon. In the compendium, these names are used one next to the other in order to create sensitivity for the already mentioned problem of the relation between Judaism and Christianity. Related to this is the question of the name of God. Throughout the Hebrew Bible the instruction is found to pronounce the four consonants of God’s name YHWH, the so-called Tetragrammaton, as Adonai, my Lord, my Lords, or also as shema, THE Name. Is exegetical language to dismiss this and speak of Yahweh? On the other hand, though, can feminist women reading the Bible with more than two decades of critiquing patriarchy on their backs, repeat the names my Lord, Adonai, kyrios (LXX and NT)? The women of the Marburg project Hedwig Jahnow have suggested² writing GOD, a word that, contrary to the Tetragrammaton YHWH, can be pronounced directly. In addition, it does not call into question the monotheistic confession of those who pronounce this name, and also calls to mind the Tetragrammaton through the use of capital letters. Numerous authors have taken up this suggestion for their essays in the compendium. But in this matter too we have not imposed majority opinions on one another; every contributor decided herself.

Finally, as befits a compendium, our authors have developed a coherent feminist reading of their respective writing, highlighted the primary foci of feminist research in that writing, and added a bibliography of women-specific substance to their contributions. In this way, the work mirrors the feminist discussion process especially in the German-speaking world and also stimulates it. And it gives an overview of feminist interpretation of the Bible in conversation with international research and discussion.

The readership we have primarily in mind are people with theological training, working in congregational settings, in adult education, and in the school system. The overall structure of this work, its language and the way it intensifies the problem, appears to be most appropriate to that target group. But, of course, students of theology, people interested in feminist interpretation of the Bible, professional colleagues, and the curious are invited wholeheartedly to study, browse, leaf through, immerse themselves in, and critique our work.

III

Last but not least, we express gratitude.

We thank all the contributors for their willingness to work together, for their ability to take criticism, and for their patience during the long birthing process of the compendium. Thanks also to the women who planned the gatherings in Hofgeismar and Bad Boll, to Barbara Heller and Ruth Habermann for their hospitality and competent accompaniment. But thank you also to those to whose time-intensive and indefatigable behind-the-scene work the compendium owes its present shape: Pauleen Cusack, Elisabeth Frey, Helga Gewecke, Gabriele Merks-Leinen, and Birgit Springer, who translated some of the essays initially written in various languages; to Sonja Strube, who prepared the index of authors for the German edition and without whom the index of women’s names would not have become reality. Thank you to Stefanie Kurzenknabe, Stefanie Müller, Annemarie Oesterle, Ute Ochtendung, and Sandra Schröers for proofreading throughout the various phases of this project. Thank you to Dr. Claudia Janssen and Beate Wehn, who from the very start inserted themselves in this endeavor with an infectious enthusiasm and offered important and valuable help for the New Testament part. In their hands also lay the editorial preparation and standardization of the entire manuscript, all the way to the final diskette formatting. Thank you to Gütersloher Verlagshaus for taking charge of the project; we want to mention Ms. Ulrike von Essen, who initiated the project and then assisted in planning it; Ms. Christel Gehrmann, who skillfully organized the conversations on how concretely to realize this endeavor; Ms. Linda Opgen-Rhein for her well-done work on the cover design; Mr. Johannes Lüers and his coworkers in the production department who, above all, magnanimously and promptly dealt with even late submissions in the final phase of printing.

As the first to have read the entire work, we wish all our readers as much pleasure and profit as we had ourselves!

LUISE SCHOTTROFF AND MARIE-THERES WACKER

Kassel and Cologne, June 1998

1. In memory of M. Wallach-Faller, cf. Marianne Wallach-Faller, Die Frau im Tallit. Judentum feministisch gelesen, ed. Doris Brodbeck and Yvonne Domhardt (Zurich, 2000).

2. See Hedwig Jahnow et al., Feministische Hermeneutik und Erstes Testament. Analysen und Interpretationen (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer Verlag, 1994).

Preface of the Editors to the Second German Edition

After five months, the Compendium of Feminist Interpretation of the Bible is already going into its second edition. Editors and contributors alike rejoice in the numerous positive reviews in journals and radio discussions as well as in the fine reception accorded the work since its appearance in the autumn of last year. No substantive changes were made to the new edition; misprints were corrected, proper names in the Bible were standardized, and, as much as possible, the short biographies of the contributors updated.

At the beginning of December 1998, the symposium Feminist Interpretation of the Bible was held at the Catholic Faculty of Theology of the University of Münster. There the compendium was presented to a broad public from the university milieu, to ecclesiastical and community-based women’s organizations, and to other interested groups. The exchange between the contributors and editors present and others who attended the symposium touched on first impressions of the text, the questions it raised, and what new perspectives it opened up. We express gratitude to the Ministerium für Schule und Weiterbildung, Wissenschaft und Forschung of Nordrhein-Westfalen for its financial support of this event; it particularly helped the contributors to reflect, on the basis of this work, on the present condition of feminist exegesis in its placement between feminist theory, theologically responsible interpretation of the Bible in its methodological plurality, and practical communication. We also envisioned future projects.

The circle of the compendium’s contributors does not see itself as a closed entity. We explicitly encourage theologians, desirous to specialize in feminist exegesis, to get in touch with us.

LUISE SCHOTTROFF AND MARIE-THERES WACKER

Kassel and Münster, February 1999

Editors’ Preface to the American Edition

The Kompendium feministische Bibelauslegung, the first edition of which appeared in the fall of 1998 and which went into a second edition just months later, presented for the first time a large compilation of feminist exegetical perspectives in the German language areas. The fact that a third, unrevised edition followed in 2007, this time as an inexpensive study edition, demonstrates that in the meantime it has found recognition as a standard work of feminist exegesis. In the foreword to the first German edition we describe the context that led us to undertake the project, and the intentions that directed us as editors and as authors. In the following we wish to sketch several important developments and shifts in the discourse that have occurred in Europe since the book was first published.¹

With regard to method, at the time of their first publication the essays in the Kompendium were already ahead of mainstream exegesis with its historical-critical-oriented methodology in that they increasingly took up alternative approaches. Meanwhile, it has been confirmed that of all historical methods used, those that allow biblical texts to be connected back to their contemporary historical context and are related to social processes are especially fruitful for feminist inquiry. However, a particular emphasis in recent publications has not been so much on historical methods, but on text-oriented or reading-oriented ones, especially with regard to the original further development of narratological and intertextual approaches. One factor here is certainly the significant growth of the number of German-speaking feminist exegetical scholars working in academia, many of whom regularly attend the congresses of the Society of Biblical Literature (SBL). Their networks in Europe have also become stronger and more interconnected. In the context of the European Society of Women Doing Research in Theology (ESWTR), a project has just been launched to bundle the results of women-specific exegesis and biblical interpretation by women in a grand total of twenty volumes. It will be published simultaneously in German, English, Italian, and Spanish.² The first volume on the Torah appeared in 2010.³

The sensitization with regard to Christian anti-Semitism that grew out of discussions in the 1980s, in feminist theology and exegesis as in other circles, led to numerous feminist-motivated studies in the past decade that decisively approached the Jesus movement as an internal Jewish movement, and the Second Testament writings as writings of early Judaism. Many of the authors of the Kompendium, notably Protestant authors, were involved in the translation of the Bibel in gerechter Sprache (literally, just language or, more familiar to English readers, inclusive language Bible), first published in 2006,⁴ which evolved out of the Bible studies held during the gatherings of the German biennial Protestant Kirchentag. This new Bible translation attempts not only to make women visible in the biblical texts and in their world, but also to place the writings of the Second Testament decidedly into their Jewish context, overcoming anti-Jewish clichés of traditional Bible translation, above all that of Luther. In the same time period, in part reinforced by the events of September 11, the demand for a Jewish-Christian-Muslim dialogue among women increased enormously. One can safely assume that conversation about common traditions in the Holy Scriptures (Tanakh, Bible, Koran) will receive even more attention.

Granted, even in the foreword to the first edition of the Kompendium, we had written that the work must combat Western colonialism as well as misogyny along with Christian anti-Judaism. However, the methods and perspectives of genuinely anticolonial or postcolonial biblical interpretation are still largely unknown in German exegesis and theology. Yet the efforts made in this context to pay conscious attention to voices from the Southern Hemisphere have also increased, particularly among women. We ourselves learned a lot in this process. Today we know that it was naïve of us, in describing the Christian canon, to claim that we based our work on the Kompendium on the most extensive form of the canon. In making this claim we recognized neither the fact that the canon of the Orthodox churches, which is based on the Septuagint, is more extensive than that of the Roman Catholic canon, nor that the canon of the Ethiopian church even includes books in its Holy Scriptures that Western Christianity locates far outside the canon, for example, the book of Enoch. However, we still lack a compendium of feminist biblical interpretation with such a broad perspective!

The developments mentioned so far can be described as a concrete manifestation of the insight that the many kinds of profound differences among women must be accounted for, and that every attempt to make statements about women or in the name of women must be rejected as naïve or imperialistic, because they disregard concrete contexts and concrete experiences. This insight has profoundly influenced the women writers of the Kompendium, and this insight led feminist theology and exegesis in the German-speaking world already in the early 1990s to accept as plausible the terminological and factual distinction between biological sex and cultural gender. This distinction provided the opportunity to discuss cultural differences among women appropriately under the rubric of gender, yet at the same time to retain biological sex as somehow still common to all women, without having to problematize it further.

Several major developments in the sex/gender debate entered the feminist theology and exegesis discussion in the German language area only after the publication of the Kompendium, for example, the idea that the distinction between sex and gender, when elaborated further along the lines of social constructivism or deconstruction, can lead to the questioning of such a distinction itself; that the construction of sex, too, is culturally conditioned; and that the binary sex/gender system in particular represents a powerful cultural norm with far-reaching consequences for society and individuals that can be the subject of critical study. Some of the Kompendium authors have entered into this debate in the meantime, for example, writing about constructions of the body in biblical texts or biblical symbolism of the body. Others have taken up impulses from masculinity studies or queer theory for their exegetical work.

But this debate has still further substantial far-reaching implications, of course. Without being able to presuppose stable definitions of essence, subject, or identity, it has also become more difficult to define even what is feminist, especially on a global scale. For feminist exegesis this means recognizing a diverse array of interpretive possibilities and options whose feminist common denominator is not established a priori. The authors of the Kompendium themselves are not bound to a common definition of feminism. However, the fundamental principles mentioned in the original preface—combating Western colonialism as well as misogyny along with Christian anti-Judaism—may still be regarded as a kind of political minimum on which the authors agree—a minimum standard that has not become outdated even in the age of deconstruction!

This translation is based on the German text of the first and second editions of the Kompendium, published in 1998 and 1999, respectively. It includes updated material, first of all in the short biographies of the individual women authors, who now report on their current areas of research and also refer to their recent publications. Secondly, the authors had the opportunity to add to their bibliographies titles that have appeared since 1998 and that they consider important. Since the more recent U.S. publications are not listed in every case, they should be named here: The Women’s Bible Commentary appeared in late 1998 in an expanded edition that now also includes a selection of Greek-Jewish texts, above all, those belonging to the Roman Catholic biblical canon.⁵ Athalya Brenner published a second series of her Feminist Companion to the (Hebrew) Bible;⁶ this project was continued by Amy-Jill Levine and others to include the Second Testament. The most recent work to mention is The Queer Bible Commentary.⁷

Thus, after a long process, the Kompendium now appears in English translation. We have many people to thank for the completion of this project, above all, its editor, Prof. Dr. Martin Rumscheidt. From the beginning it was he who made this volume possible by his persistence and vision, coordinating, translating, offering advice, and carrying it through to the end. We thank the William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company for its patient participation in this process. We know what a wealth of knowledge and persistence translating requires, so we offer very special thanks to each of the volume’s translators: Lisa Dahill, Everett Kalin, Nancy Lukens, Linda Maloney, the late Barbara Rumscheidt, Martin Rumscheidt, and Tina Steiner. In the last phase of manuscript preparation, especially in formatting the bibliographies, the assistance of Stephanie Feder and Daniela Abels in Münster was a great help.

LUISE SCHOTTROFF AND MARIE-THERES WACKER

Kassel and Münster, March 2010

Translated by NANCY LUKENS

1. See also Marie-Theres Wacker, Feminist Criticism and Related Aspects, in The Oxford Handbook of Biblical Studies, ed. John W. Rogerson and Judith M. Lieu (Oxford, 2006), 634-54; Marie-Theres Wacker, Challenges and Opportunities in Feminist Theology and Biblical Studies in Europe, Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 25, no. 2 (2009): 117-21.

2. Irmtraud Fischer et al., eds., The Bible and Women: An Encyclopedia of Exegesis and Cultural History (Atlanta and Leiden, 2011).

3. Irmtraud Fischer and Mercedes Navarro Puerto, eds., Torah (Atlanta and Leiden, 2010).

4. Ulrike Bail et al., eds., Bibel in gerechter Sprache, 3rd ed. (Gütersloh, 2007). See www.sblDsite.org/publications/article.aspx?ArticleId=760-764 for description and discussion.

5. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, eds., The Women’s Bible Commentary, expanded ed. (Louisville, 1998).

6. Athalya Brenner, ed., A Feminist Companion to the (Hebrew) Bible, 2nd ser. (Sheffield, 1998-2001).

7. Deryn Guest et al., eds., The Queer Bible Commentary (London, 2006).

Preface by the Editor of the English Language Edition

Many moons ago, at an annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the Society of Biblical Literature, one of the German editors of Kompendium feministische Bibelauslegung, Professor Luise Schottroff, and I met with Mr. William B. Eerdmans Jr. to discuss the possibility of having this major work published in English translation. No decision was made at that time. A number of months later, having gathered more information and assessments, Mr. Eerdmans decided to support the project. Since then, he has accompanied our work with patience, encouragement, and energy. The translators and editors on both sides of the Atlantic are deeply grateful to him for that.

Since its first publication in Germany, the Kompendium has seen two further editions, a signal of the significant attention it has aroused. While there exist numerous publications of feminist theological and hermeneutical studies of the Bible and of its individual writings, the Kompendium is the only work thus far to address every book of the Bible; it also addresses books of the Apocrypha and several extrabiblical contemporary writings. In many ways, by engaging existing feminist biblical research, this translation extends the dialogue and opens it to further exploration. In addition, a number of biblical writings are addressed here by feminist theological and hermeneutical approaches for the first time and thus introduced into the evocative and provocative feminist discussion. By the same token, this volume challenges secular feminist criticism to engage with biblical feminist theology.

Concurrently with writing the Kompendium, many of its authors were involved in a project to prepare a translation of the Bible that was sensitive to post-Shoah conversations between Jews and Christians and to the issue of gender justice. The Bible’s pervasive vision of justice is the undertone of that translation, as its title seeks to communicate: Bibel in gerechter Sprache.¹ It endeavors to do justice in a number of ways following these aims: to be as faithful as possible to the original languages of the Bible, to hallow the proper name of God in the Bible by offering several possibilities of rendering it, to make women visible in texts that intend to include them but rarely ever name them explicitly, to take seriously that Jesus was a Jew and that he lived in the tradition of Jewish religion and was faithful to the Torah, to avoid anti-Judaistic interpretations, and finally to be highly attentive to the social conditions of life in biblical times. All these aims guide the biblical interpretations presented in Feminist Biblical Interpretation, several authors of which actually use their translations of biblical verses from Bibel in gerechter Sprache in their essays.

Two additional distinct, albeit closely related, dimensions should be explicitly mentioned. One is the question that prodded the team of scholars who launched this project: What do or what can writings in and around the Bible really tell us about the day-to-day existence of women? In answer the authors have unearthed voices in the texts that resist the androcentrism, patriarchy, and misogyny present in the Bible. The second is that of women today who, bearing the debilitating burden of continuing and flourishing forms of patriarchy, turn to these scriptural texts to see if they might discover there traces or suggestions of a freedom they may find in the here and now. And so this work intends to address not only the scholarly community with its specific concerns but also all who search the Scriptures for an alternative and resisting reality.

The SBL Handbook of Style for Ancient Near Eastern, Biblical, and Early Christian Studies² presents two ways of transliterating Hebrew texts: the academic and the general-purpose style. In accordance with the German editors and their clearly stated conviction that Christian anti-Judaism, Western colonialism, and all forms of racism have to be opposed at the same time misogyny is (p. xiii above), it was decided to use the academic style in the English language edition as a way to honor Jewish tradition. In this context I wish to express profound gratitude to Dr. Nicole Ruane of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who readily accepted the task of preparing the transliteration of the Hebrew terminology for this book. How often have teachers of systematic theology (like this editor) been rescued by scholars with Dr. Ruane’s competence! Thank you, Nicole.

Similar gratitude is owed to others, and I wish to name several persons specifically for their participation in bringing this project to fruition. The initial plan that Barbara and Martin Rumscheidt would undertake the translation was defeated by Barbara’s untimely death not long after we had begun our work. The willingness of Lisa E. Dahill, Everett Kalin, Nancy Lukens, Linda Maloney, and Tina Steiner literally salvaged the project. For their enthusiasm and their labor I owe them a gratitude that cannot be translated into words. With heartfelt thanks I note the assistance of Luise Schottroff, Marie-Theres Wacker, and many of their sister authors who read and commented on the translated texts of their chapters, clarifying meaning and underlying intention, thereby helping us provide a translation as faithful as any translation can be to the original text. Two persons deserve thanks for an important but tedious part of scholarly translation: the preparation of bibliographies. Since every chapter includes its own literature section, this task required much research work. Professor Wacker engaged Ms. Daniela Abels and Ms. Stephanie Feder of the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster to undertake the requisite labor. To Ms. Abels and Ms. Feder the editor of the present edition is profoundly grateful, as well as to Professor Wacker for making these two women available for that component. And much gratitude is due to Mr. William B. Eerdmans for his generous financial support for their work. Often authors and editors cannot completely imagine how they tax the gifts and energies of those persons who through the labor of copy editing turn a written text into literature. I draw on a folksy expression from Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador to express respect and endless gratitude to Mr. Tom Raabe, our copy editor at Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, and to Ms. Jenny Hoffman for her guidance over the years this translation was in the making: I behold your work and, accordingly, humbly bow to you.

Finally, I acknowledge, deeply moved, the generosity of Luise Schottroff and Marie-Theres Wacker in joining with me to dedicate Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature to the memory of Barbara Rumscheidt—aleha hashalom.

MARTIN RUMSCHEIDT

Dover, N.H., November 2010

1. (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2006), 1st and 2nd eds. Fifty-two translators from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States of America were involved in this project.

2. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999).

Genesis 1–11: The Primordial History

Helen Schüngel-Straumann

Prefatory Note on the Hermeneutical Approach

My exegetical work is committed to the historical-critical method, sharpened by a specifically feminist perspective. This critique is aimed especially at the androcentrism of previous commentaries; that is, it opposes the de facto masculine standard that has been and is still being applied in interpreting this material. Related to this is the fact that the Bible has always been read and interpreted selectively, often abusing the Bible to fortify the bastions of male dominance. It is thus absolutely essential to distinguish between the biblical texts themselves and their impact throughout the history of their reception. By reception history I mean all forms of use and adaptation of biblical texts, not only in exegetical or scholarly contexts, but also in art, liturgy, and literature, as well as in the more narrowly theological uses, for example, by the church fathers. Often the reception history of certain biblical motifs—in the present context the motif of the first woman comes to mind—has resulted in more negative readings than with the biblical narrative itself. This does not mean, however, that the biblical texts, which undeniably originated in a patriarchal society, should be excluded from feminist critical view. Here, too, it is important to avoid thinking in polarities such as positive biblical texts versus negative reception history.

The Fateful Reduction of the Primordial History in Christian Tradition to Woman and the Fall

In roughly two thousand years of traditional interpretation, the statements of the first eleven chapters of Genesis have been significantly narrowed to certain themes that have played a dominant role in Christian theology: first, the role of woman, particularly her second-class status and her subordination to man, and second, the fixation on the so-called Fall (Gen 3), in which woman has been foregrounded as the more active party, as so-called seductress. These two problems have to a great extent defined the so-called Christian image of woman, routinely assigning to the female half of humanity the heavier burden vis-à-vis the question of evil and thereby acquitting men from facing it. Many women have also internalized this narrowing interpretation. This is made worse by the fact that several First Testament writers incorporated such views, which had already formed in antiquity, into their work, and by passing them on to the church fathers, they defined the entire Middle Ages. By contrast, Jewish tradition largely ignored this misogynist reception. Thus, by valuing the Second Testament narratives over those of the First Testament, Christian tradition framed a far more negative image of women than did postbiblical Jewish tradition.

In light of these selective readings, primordial history must now be explored holistically. It is a complex that was largely taken over in its given sequence from the world of Oriental antiquity. The individual narratives are considerably older than the Bible, and the span from creation to the flood was a given for all biblical writers. The most interesting question for us today is how these writers use this inherited material, change it, and adapt it to their own faith context. In pursuing this question I will focus on the image of human being.

Primordial history can stand on its own as a separate complex from the later story of the people of Israel, which begins with Sarah and Abraham (Gen 12). Its statements are intended to address issues of humanity, specifically everything that played a role before and beyond tangible history. For example: Where do human beings come from? What is human being? What determines human destiny? Why is there evil if God created a good world? Why are there conflicts among people, between man and woman, between brothers, between human beings and their environment? And so forth. All these questions relating to humankind are of course fundamental to any theology. This explains why the first chapters of Genesis have always played a prominent role in biblical commentaries.

The Older Part of Primordial History (Genesis 2–11)

The source to which historical-critical scholars have attributed the older portions of Genesis 1–11, the so-called Jahwist (J), is adamantly questioned by many today, especially in dating his material. It does appear certain, however, that the more narrative parts attributed to him are older than the later chapters of the priestly writings (P) written in exile and afterward, and that the J narratives can be assumed to have been written down in the so-called kings era of Israel (tenth to sixth centuries B.C.E.).

What can be attributed to the Jahwist are the two chapters about the creation of the garden and of human being, the creation of woman, and the violation of God’s commandment (Gen 2–3); the story of Cain and Abel as well as that of Lamech and his wives Ada and Zillah (Gen 4); the mythical story of the sons of the gods and the daughters of humans (Gen 6:1-4); the older parts of the story of the flood (Gen 6–9); and, after the flood, the story of the building of the tower of Babel (Gen 11).

The exegetical direction taken since the Hellenistic period has affected women negatively because this is when precisely those texts that assign a special role to women or to one woman, namely, Genesis 2 and 3, as well as 6:1-4, from primordial history, were singled out for commentary.

In Genesis 3, the woman is positioned in the center of the action and plays the active role, while the man in this narrative is completely passive. In Genesis 6:1-4, to be sure, the women are seen as passive, but in later commentaries they have become active seductresses (see below). Predecessors to the traditional Christian practice of singling out Genesis 3 of all texts as hard evidence for the so-called Fall can be found in commentaries on this story from late antiquity. In the First Testament of the Bible itself, this connection is made only once, in Sirach 25:24:

Woman is the origin of sin,

and it is through her that we all die. (NEB)

This sentence, which is quoted in all subsequent commentaries, clearly refers to Genesis 3. For Roman Catholic and Orthodox tradition, this sentence belongs to the canon of Holy Scripture, whereas the Reformed churches regard the book of Sirach as apocryphal. Sirach is also absent from the Jewish canon.

Thus the misogynist thread connecting Genesis 3 with Sirach 25:24, which is then woven into the late post-Pauline letter 1 Timothy (2:8-15), is a particularly Catholic problem. The fact that there is not a single allusion to the woman of Genesis 3 in the entire rest of the First Testament, even among the prophets, who reflect so often on guilt and sin, should give us pause. The identification of woman and sin (most often in the context of sexuality and the body) thus does not originate in the Genesis texts at all, but results from a tendentious interpretation that was adopted and expanded upon by Christian tradition, especially that of ascetic movements, throughout history.

Complicating the Christian image of woman is the fact that exegetes as early as the second century introduced the typological juxtaposition of Eve-Mary, in analogy to the Pauline typology Adam-Christ. In the process Eve as sinful woman came to be positioned as a foil to the perfection of Mary (see Leisch-Kiesl 1992, 40ff. for documentation from the early centuries). This pattern, too, was more influential in the Roman Catholic Church than in the Reformed churches, which do not assign such an exemplary role to Mary. The situation is different still in the development of Jewish commentaries, which make no such juxtaposition between Eve and Mary but do set her against Lilith, Adam’s first wife, who plays the negative role (see Ruether 1985, 123ff.; Levinson 1992, 67-71), while Eve enjoys high regard as the mother of all living beings. Since Jewish theology does not speak of a fall or of original sin, it is almost entirely free of the drastically negative evolutions of the figure of Eve that dominate Christian theology.

Genesis 2 and 3

These two chapters of Genesis belong together. They are closely related in content; numerous key terms and wordplays, which are partially lost in translation, also unite the two chapters. To be sure, these narratives of the primordial history must not be read as historically factual statements. Christian tradition did so to a great extent up until the historical-critical method became prevalent. Early Christian scholars took great pains to harmonize the numerous discrepancies and contradictions in the narratives. However, Genesis 2 and 3 were never intended to represent a historical sequence. Instead, the two chapters should be read concurrently as parallel stories. Genesis 2 describes how God planned the creation of man and woman; that is, it shows the divine intention for human beings to live together as partners. Genesis 3, by contrast, describes human reality as it actually is. The moment one looks for a before and after (e.g., an original state of human being), one misses the intended point of the story entirely.

The biblical narrator clearly has a special interest in woman, for he tells about the creation of woman as a separate act, whereas ancient Near Eastern sources do not. What is more, the presumed sources for the biblical narratives spoke only of the creation of humankind (ʾādām). This ʾādām (earthling) is made from ʾădāmâ (earth) and must return to it in the end, that is, must die. ʾĀdām is put into the garden and is driven out of the garden at the end of the story. Thus the skeletal narrative focuses on ʾādām (human being) as a species. If ʾādām were not every human being, man and woman, then woman would be immortal—an absurd idea! The words ʾādām and ʾădāmâ constitute the first pun in Genesis 2–3. The second, a play on ʾîš and ʾiššâ, occurs in the center of Genesis 2 in the account of the creation of woman.

God constructs a woman out of the ʾādām, a creature obviously still incomplete or androgynous. This is the beginning of sexual difference in humankind, ʾîš and ʾiššâ. The climax of this text is the poetic line in 2:23, the formulaic claim of relatedness: This, finally, is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh! With these words ʾādām expresses joy in having found a partner who is a peer. Just as the Song of Songs describes how God intends unself-conscious intimacy between man and woman to look, here the Jahwist conveys how the life of man and woman in God’s good creation should look. There is no statement about marriage here. This is a fundamental description of human beings as partners in an ideal relationship. The numerous parallels to the Song of Songs, including the garden metaphors, were first identified by Phyllis Trible. In the perspective of the narrative’s male author, of course, ʾādām becomes a man the moment the woman is added to the picture. This can cause misreadings of the biblical narrative itself.

In Christian tradition, the concepts of rib and helpmate were especially introduced to document woman’s second-class status and inferiority. These views are not supported by the Hebrew text. The masculine concept ʿēzer kĕnegdô (a help to correspond to him) signifies not a subordinate helper in the sense of a maid, but precisely a specially qualified source of support. The masculine ʿēzer, in almost half of its biblical occurrences, refers to the assistance God gives that humankind alone cannot provide. Neither does ʿēzer refer to woman’s role in procreation, as in Augustine’s reading (De Genesi ad litteram 11.5). Rather it connotes very substantial help for humankind as a species (cf. Schüngel-Straumann 1989b, 30-31).

Genesis 3 then describes things as they really are. Trust between the sexes has been ruptured; human beings are not doing justice to their relationship with God, nor with one another. The expression of this rupture comes by way of shame, which signifies something much more basic than sexual self-consciousness before the other. Here the author makes a pun on the root ʿārôm/ʿārûm (naked/clever), which occurs in both chapters. Chapter 2 ends with the comment that the humans are naked (ʿārôm/ʿārûm) but are not ashamed before one another. Then in Genesis 3 they are ashamed before one another—and before God!—and they hide. Genesis 3:1 introduces the serpent, who begins a dialogue with the woman. The serpent is more clever (naked?) than all the beasts of the field. It promises the woman cleverness, but later on the only thing the human beings discover is their nakedness (Gen 3:7). Thus the serpent wraps itself around the concepts ʿārôm/ʿārûm by misleading the woman, literally deceiving her.

There have been numerous attempts to explain the serpent—a symbol of wisdom as well as a symbol for cults—which First Testament authors frowned upon. According to the text, it is a creature, not a devilish oppositional force as later readings would have it. The serpent represents the force that again and again makes Israel listen to other voices than YHWH’s, whenever they present their interests cleverly enough.

The question of the role of woman is more difficult. Why does the biblical author have the woman carry on a discussion with the serpent alone? Where is the man? All the common traditional interpretations—that the woman is more easily tempted, more susceptible to sin, and more fleshly—must be rejected. Ancient Near Eastern iconography also shows that the author put the woman, not the man, under the tree. The association is frequently made between tree and woman, tree and goddess. And the act of offering food is a matter for women; they are the nurturers. Thus we see that the Jahwist was beholden to certain formal rules. He had no choice but to put the woman under the tree. This has nothing to do with a greater affinity of woman for sin. At first, the connotation is value-neutral. Thus the Jahwist gives no explanation for evil in Genesis 3—nor does the entire Bible. He demonstrates the fact that evil is in the world, but he does not attribute guilt as misogynist commentaries have done.

Genesis 3:14-19 raises a special problem in the form of the etiological descriptions of how things really were, that is, the statements about the serpent, the woman, and human beings. It is a fateful mistake to interpret these poetic lines as punishments, as has been and still is the case. The result of the human violation of God’s command is their exile by God from the garden, analogous to God’s placing the first human creature in the garden (Gen 2:8; 3:23-24). The author describes etiologically in these sentences what he sees happening in his own time: toilsome and often fruitless labor in the fields, woman’s painful experience of pregnancy and childbirth, and then the domination of man over woman. The author’s choice of words shows that these conditions were not willed by God. Genesis 2 describes the way God intended the relationship between man and woman to be. The author expresses unequivocally that this intended relationship has been perverted, trust ruptured, and instead of joy in one another’s company, there is domination of the one by the other.

The way the lines about the woman are translated already gives cause for misreadings. Often they are rendered in the form of commands, as if God had given instructions to be obeyed: In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you! Today it is accepted without question among biblical scholars, male and female, that these sentences are etiological descriptions of a state of being, not commands. Thus they should be rendered in the present or future tense: He rules over you or He will rule over you. The first line about pains during childbirth, which still leads many women today to internalize every humiliation relating to sexuality as a punishment they deserve because of the Fall, is totally nonexistent in the text. Genesis 3:16 merely mentions toil, using exactly the same word that elsewhere describes human labor and the toil associated with it. To translate it with pain is to read unwarranted meaning into the text. Though childbirth is undeniably associated with pain, this is not mentioned in the text. Most translations of this passage are typical of the strictly male perspective of the outsider. This perspective ignores the ambivalence in the very experience of childbirth as women know it—namely, pain and joy.

Finally, something must be said about the naming of the human being, especially the woman, in the creation story. Besides the gender-differentiated words ʾîš and ʾiššâ, Genesis 2–3 contain only one other word for woman, namely, ḥawwâ (derived from ḥay, life, mother of all living things) at the end of chapter 3. This characterization has no foundation in the text because the account of the first human birth follows only in Genesis 4:1. There the word ḥawwâ, which is later repeated in connection with Eve, is more justified. Since this name occurs nowhere else in the entire Hebrew Bible, it is likely a later addition. However, it is precisely here that Jewish interpretations looked for reason to elevate the first woman to the mother of all living things. This intertwining of chapters 3 and 4 through use of the name for the first woman shows the close connection between the two stories of misdeeds. In other places, too, they are closely associated with one another by content and terminology. At the end of Genesis 4:1-16 we see the same kind of exile as at the end of Genesis 3; Cain is driven out of the field, in fact he is even cursed, whereas neither of the human beings in Genesis 3 is cursed but only the serpent (Gen 3:14). Thus Genesis 4 can be seen as an intensification of Genesis 3.

The Male Acts of Violence in Genesis 4–11

The Jahwist author follows the story of the so-called Fall immediately with the story of Cain and Abel, and with it the story of the first murder. In the course of the rest of primordial history he shows a succession of acts of male violence, beginning with Genesis 4. As soon as two men engage in competitive behavior with one another, one murders the other. For the author, the human state of fallenness into sin is such a comprehensive phenomenon that he cannot demonstrate it conclusively in a single narrative, but needs various starting points to circumscribe the different nuances. And it is here in Genesis 4 that a word for sin first occurs in the Hebrew Bible. It is interesting, after all, that such a term is absent in Genesis 3, even though Hebrew has over a dozen concepts for guilt and sin. Not until Genesis 4:7 do we find a reference to resisting this sin. Significantly, it comes in the form of God’s warning to Cain, that is, not to kill his brother. Sin here is something demonic that lurks, waiting for the person to fall for it. Cain is challenged to resist it, which in the end he does not do, or even try to do. Sin here is equated with an act of violence against one’s brother.

In Genesis 4:23-24, in describing Lamech, the text escalates violence almost endlessly as Lamech sings the praises of his vengeance. Finally, the rebellion against God finds yet another variant in Genesis 11:1-9 with the story of the building of the tower of Babel. Here the point is to make a name for ourselves (11:4) and to become independent of God. The men who build the tower plan a special kind of uprising against God. It is possible that this last story in the Jahwist narrative shows that humankind was in no way different or better after the flood (see below) than before.

Women do not figure into any of these accounts except as mothers, wives, and daughters of the men named. In Genesis 6:1-4 it is a different matter.

Genesis 6:1-4

Immediately prior to the flood narrative, the Jahwist inserted what is likely an ancient mythical piece that tells of a relationship between the sons of the gods and earthly women. These (sexual) relationships do not meet the narrator’s approval; they serve as an etiological explanation for a certain sort of hero or giant who, given his size or strength, apparently has a special connection to heaven. Women play a strictly passive role in these four brief verses, which are obviously meant to show the increasingly fallen state of sinfulness if even the heavenly ones participate in it.

What is interesting for a feminist interpretation, beyond this short biblical text itself, is the reception it has experienced in numerous apocryphal narratives. In the last centuries before the common era, there was an extreme heightening of interest in all kinds of heavenly beings (angels) (cf. Tobit), and this short narrative led to numerous apocryphal writings and commentaries that describe in most glowing colors the relationship of angels with earthly women. Since they cannot be quoted at length here, we will briefly summarize the very different perspective of these writings and the far more negative view of women they convey. While the women in Genesis 6:1-4 were strictly passive as victims of the sons of the gods—more specifically victims of rape—in the apocryphal narratives the women become more and more the active parties. It is they who seduce the heavenly ones to descend from their heights and strike them dumb with their beauty (cf. the especially drastic wording in 1 Enoch 6–11). In addition, the texts present value judgments throughout. There is another aspect as well: the angels are made impure by the earthly women; sexual desire is identified with earthly women, and this desire ultimately brings evil into the world. All these texts, which are influenced by Hellenism, reveal a strong dualistic opposition between spirit and flesh that does not exist in the Hebrew Bible. In these commentaries, the daughters of humankind in Genesis 6:1-4 represent the flesh, lower human nature, sexual desire, evil.

These numerous writings of the Hellenistic-Roman era were adopted by Second Testament writers, especially Paul, as well as by more than a few church fathers later on. They stem from groups of male ascetics and reflect a typical male fear of sexuality that is projected onto the heavenly sphere. Because the tendentious bias of these writings has had such disastrous results—a subterranean current leads from here to the fifteenth-century witch hunts (Hexenhammer)—it is crucial to take up these texts and investigate them further (cf. Küchler 1986).

The Flood

In the older variant of the flood narrative in the J source, one can still detect traces of the Oriental sources. Thus there are incongruities in the narrative, which become understandable in view of the long period over which they evolved. Common among Oriental accounts is the motif of the gods sending a flood as punishment for human misbehavior. However, in the J source, the reason for punishment is more closely associated with the human being. In his introduction to the biblical flood narrative (Gen 6:5-7), the author very clearly emphasizes that human beings are responsible for their actions and their consequences.

In these three verses the concept ʾādām is used four times to mean humankind (die Menschheit). First, there is reference to their wickedness, then YHWH recalls the creation of human beings. Thus in Genesis 2 and 3, ʾādām as a collective term includes every human being that is distinct from the animal world, women and men and of course children as well. Everything that is human must drown in the flood. If ʾādām only included men, as a later misreading claimed again and again (see below on Gen 1), women would not have died in the flood, which is as absurd as the idea that in Genesis 3 only the men were mortal (cf. 3:19). Thus no distinction at all is made in the biblical text between human beings—neither regarding their spoiled state nor for the resulting consequences; all are equally at fault, all die in the same manner.

Things become somewhat more complicated with the image of God. At the end of the flood YHWH promises never again to allow such a catastrophe to befall humankind, no matter how they behave (Gen 8:21-22). YHWH, who speaks after the flood, appears completely transformed, yet people have remained the same, and have learned nothing from the catastrophe. This change (8:1) can be traced through the religious history of prebiblical flood narratives, especially the Gilgamesh Epic. Thus in the Gilgamesh narrative it is the god of storms and nations, Enlil, who inspires the flood and sets it in motion. In the end, however, it is the great mother goddess Ishtar, herself also a creator of human beings, who cannot bear to see that her people have been drowned. She breaks out in a loud lament at the end of the flood (Gilgamesh Epic, tablet 11). In the end a sacrifice is offered as in the biblical story, but Ishtar prevents Enlil, who caused the flood, from enjoying the sacrifice. The Jahwist combines in the one YHWH figure, the only deity, features that had been spread over diverse divine beings in the ancient Near Eastern narratives. The simple characters in the polytheistic context become a complex character in the one God YHWH who changes from Enlil to Ishtar (cf. Keel 1989).

In moving toward monotheism, an attempt is made to combine the diverse characteristics of a polytheistic world in this one YHWH. The side of the Sumerian-Akkadian mother deity that is sympathetic to humankind thus constitutes the merciful side of YHWH. The significance of