The Queer Bible Commentary, Second Edition

First published over ten years ago, The Queer Bible Commentary brings together the work of several scholars and pastors known for their interest in the areas of gender, sexuality and Biblical studies. Contributors draw on feminist, queer, deconstructionist, utopian theories, the social sciences and historical-critical discourses. The focus is both how reading from lesbian, gay, bisexual and/or transgender perspectives affect the reading and interpretation of biblical texts and how biblical texts have and do affect LGBTQ+ communities. This revised 2nd edition includes updated bibliographies and chapters taking into account the latest literature relating to queer interpretation of scripture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: SCM Press
• Release date: Sep 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9780334060802

Book preview

Queer Bible Commentary

Queer Bible Commentary

Second Edition

Edited by

Mona West and Robert E. Shore-Goss

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© The Editors and Contributors 2022

First Edition published in 2006

Second Edition published in 2022 by

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Contents

The Contributors

Preface to the Second Edition

Acknowledgements

Acknowledgements for Scripture Translations

Abbreviations

Part 1: The First Testament

Genesis – Michael Carden

Exodus – Jay Michaelson

Leviticus – David Tabb Stewart

Numbers – Carmen Margarita Sanchez De Leon

Deuteronomy – Deryn Guest

Joshua – Deryn Guest

Judges – Deryn Guest

Ruth – Mona West

1 and 2 Samuel – Ken Stone

1 and 2 Kings – Ken Stone

1 and 2 Chronicles – Brian Rainey

Ezra-Nehemiah – Durrell Watkins

Esther – Mona West

Job – K. Renato Lings

Psalms – S. Tamar Kamionkowski

Proverbs – Elizabeth Stuart

Ecclesiastes – Jennifer L. Koosed

Song of Songs – Anddré S. Musskopf

Isaiah – Timothy Koch

Jeremiah – Angela Bauer-Levesque

Lamentations – Deryn Guest

Ezekiel – Teresa Hornsby

Daniel – Mona West

The Book of the Twelve Minor Prophets – Michael Carden

Bibliography

Part 2: The Second Testament

Matthew – Thomas Bohache

Mark – Ana Ester Pádua Freire

Luke – Robert E. Shore-Goss

John – Robert E. Shore-Goss

Acts of the Apostles – Sean D. Burke

Romans – Tom Hanks

1 and 2 Corinthians – Holly E. Hearon

Galatians – Melissa Harl Sellew and Joshua M. Reno

Ephesians – Karl Hand

Philippians – Justin Tanis

Colossians – Thomas Bohache

1 and 2 Thessalonians – Theodore Jennings with Robert E. Shore-Goss

The Pastoral Letters – Deborah Krause and Robert E. Shore-Goss

Philemon – Hugo Córdova Quero

Hebrews – Tom Hanks

James – William Countryman

1 and 2 Peter – Robin Hawley Gorsline

1, 2, and 3 John – William Countryman

Jude – William Countryman

Revelation/Apocalypse – Tina Pippin and J. Michael McNeir Clark

Bibliography

The Contributors

Angela Bauer-Levesque is Emerita Professor of the faculty of the Episcopal Divinity School, Cambridge, MA. She received a PhD from Union Theological Seminary and an MDiv from Universitat Hamburg. She is the author of Gender in the Book of Jeremiah: A Feminist-Literary Reading, Seeing God in Diversity: Exodus and Acts, and The Indispensable Guide to the Old Testament. She has emphasized various aspects of social location (gender, race, sexual identity) and their impact on hermeneutics.

The Revd Thomas Bohache retired in 2018 from active ministry after pastoring churches in California, Virginia, Delaware, and New Jersey and teaching courses at the seminary level in the areas of Bible, gender, and theology. Currently he is affiliated with the Episcopal Church, preaching and teaching in northwest Texas and lecturing in the sociology department of Texas Tech University. He is the author of Christology from the Margins (SCM Press, 2008) and co-editor and contributor to The Queer Bible Commentary (1st edn, SCM Press, 2006) and Queering Christianity (Praeger, 2013). He dedicates his work in this volume to his life- and soulmate, the Revd Tom Simmons.

The Revd Sean D. Burke is an Associate Professor of Religion at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. He joined Luther’s faculty in 2007 and currently serves the college in the role of Associate Provost. He is the author of Queering the Ethiopian Eunuch: Strategies of Ambiguity in Acts (Fortress Press, 2013). He is also an Episcopal priest. See the full list of publications at https://www.luther.edu/burkse01/assets/SeanBurkeCV.pdf.

Michael Carden is the Support and Event Coordinator for Griffith University Postgraduate Students Association. Michael completed his PhD in 2002 at the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics, University of Queensland. His book, Sodomy: A History of a Christian Biblical Myth, was based on his dissertation and published by Equinox Publications in 2004. As well as the essays in the Queer Bible Commentary, Michael has published a number of essays on Bible, sexuality and religion, including contributions to Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (2001), Redirected Travel: Alternative Texts, Readings and Spaces in Biblical Studies (2003), Popular Spiritualities: The Politics of Contemporary Enchantment (2006), and Speak Now: Australian Perspectives on Same-Sex Marriage (2011). He contributed to and co-edited, together with Julie Kelso and Roland Boer, The One Who Reads May Run: Essays in Honour of Edgar W. Conrad (2012). Michael has a long history of community involvement and activism around LGBTQ+ and HIV/AIDS issues and was convenor of the Queer History Action Group in the Queensland Aids Council 2009–16 and helped organize a range of events and activities around the Museum of Brisbane exhibition, Prejudice and Pride, in 2010.

Hugo Córdova Quero is Associate Professor of Critical Theories and Queer Theologies and Director of Online Education at Starr King School, Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. He holds a PhD in Interdisciplinary Studies in Religion, Migration, and Ethnic Studies (2009) and an MA in Systematic Theology and Critical Theories (2003) both from the GTU; and an MDiv (1998) from ISEDET University, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. He is a member of the research groups Emerging Queer Asian & Pacific Islander Religion Scholars, Multidisciplinary Study Group on Religion and Public Incidence (GEMRIP) and the Queer Migrations Research Network. He is also a fellow at the Institute for the Study of Asian Religions (CERAL), Pontifical University of São Paulo (Brasil). Member of the Global Interfaith Network (GIN), he is actively working in Latin America to promote interreligious dialogue among queer believers from different religions, spiritualities, and beliefs.

The Revd L. William Countryman is Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies at the Church Divinity School (Berkeley). He received a PhD from University of Chicago. He is an ordained Episcopal priest. He is author of The Mystical Way according to John: Crossing over into God, Interpreting the Truth: Changing the Paradigm of Biblical Studies, Good News of Jesus: Reintroducing the Gospel, and Dirt, Greed, and Sex: Sexual ethics in the New Testament. For a listing of his books, see https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/l-william-countryman/233582/?gclid=Cj0KCQiAraSPBhDuARIsAM3Js4rc3pSgsv4cSxCw772sBgoR-7cxDm8jhraFMatKxsfehsNAWBnkx9EaAunqEALw_wcB

Deryn Guest is Senior Lecturer at the University of Nottingham. She received her PhD from University of Birmingham UK. Her research interests are focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgendered interpretations of the Hebrew Bible. Prior to her academic career, Deryn worked as a Salvation Army minister, and she retains a keen interest in the biblical hermeneutics operative within faith communities. She is author of When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics; YHWH and Israel in the Book of Judges: An Object-Relations Analysis; and Beyond Feminist Biblical Studies; and is co-editor of Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation.

The Revd Karl Hand is a pastor in Metropolitan Community Churches, serving at CRAVE Church in Sydney, Australia (on Gadigal Land). On a global level, he works on the Council of Elders of Metropolitan Community Churches. He has a PhD in New Testament through Charles Sturt University.

The Revd Tom Hanks has been a missionary since 1963 in Latin America. Dr Hanks has written commentaries on every book in the Bible, each focusing on the themes of (1) oppression-poverty; (2) women; and (3) sexual diversity. These commentaries are available in both Spanish and English from the website of Other Sheep: www.fundotrasovejas.org.ar under that section on Bible/Biblia and may be downloaded at no cost.

The Revd Robin Hawley Gorsline received his PhD from Union Theological Seminary and is a retired pastor in Metropolitan Community Churches. He is a lover of all beings, queer public theologian, writer and poet, and antiracist/anticapitalist/pro-Palestinian advocate who lives in Greenbelt MD with his husband of 24 years and their standard poodle. He is co-editor of Disrupting White Supremacy from Within: What White People Need to Know.

Holly Hearon is T.J. and Virginia Liggett Professor of Christian Traditions and New Testament Emerita at Christian Theological Seminary (Indianapolis). She is completing, with Débora Junker, a commentary on James for the Wisdom Commentary Series. Through CTS, she was the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts grant to present, in partnership with the early music vocal group The Rose Ensemble, a special project on the transmission of oral tradition through music at a national meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Teresa J. Hornsby, Professor Emerita of Religion at Drury University. She is also an Affiliated Professor of Religion at Chicago Theological Seminary and a Visiting Professor at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Dr Hornsby holds an MTS degree from Harvard Divinity School, and an MA and PhD in New Testament Studies from Vanderbilt University. Her most recent book, Transgender, Intersex, and Biblical Interpretation, co-authored with Deryn Guest, was published in July 2016. She is a co-editor (with Ken Stone) of Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, as well as numerous essays, chapters, and encyclopedia entries. When she isn’t teaching or writing, Dr Hornsby plays drums, restores old drum kits, and brews beer.

The Revd Theodore W. Jennings was Emeritus Professor of Biblical and Constructive Theology at Chicago Theological Seminary and ordained minister in the United Methodist Church. He passed in 2020 while working on the update for this volume. He received his PhD from Emory University. Most recently he is author of Plato or Paul? The Origins of Western Homophobia (2009); An Ethic of Queer Sex: Principles and Improvisations (2013), and Outlaw Justice: The Messianic Politics of Paul (2013).

S. Tamar Kamionkowski is Professor of Biblical studies at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, where she served as the vice president for Academic Affairs for almost a decade. She holds a BA from Oberlin College, an MTS from Harvard Divinity School, and a PhD from Brandeis University. She is author of Gender Reversal and Cosmic Chaos: Classic Studies in Ezekiel. She is co-editor of Leviticus (Wisdom Series) and Bodies, Embodiment and Theology in the Hebrew Bible.

The Revd Dr Tim Koch, JD, is a Pastor, Professor, and Attorney with a passion for justice expressed through love. An innovative teacher and author, Dr Koch is engaged in working on the paradigmatic plane in theology, queer experience, and socio-economic realities. Currently working at Lees-McRae College in Banner Elk, North Carolina, as the Executive Director of Compliance and Title IX Coordinator, he has served both United Methodist and Metropolitan Community Churches and taught undergraduate and graduate students in religion and communication. Tim is an avid classic film buff and dog lover who thrives on synergy.

Jennifer L. Koosed is Professor of Religious Studies at Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania. She is the author of several books including (Per)mutations of Qohelet: Reading the Body in the Book (Continuum, 2006); Gleaning Ruth: A Biblical Heroine and Her Afterlives (University of South Carolina, 2011); and Reading the Bible as a Feminist (Brill, 2017). She is also the editor of several works including The Bible and Posthumanism (SBL Press, 2014); and Reading with Feeling: Affect Theory and the Bible (with Fiona C. Black; SBL Press, 2019).

The Revd Deborah Krause is President and Professor of New Testament at Eden Theological Seminary. Her teaching and scholarship focus on methods of biblical interpretation and their roots in critical theory, theology, and politics. In addition to a required course in Biblical Studies, she teaches courses in the Gospels, early Jewish exegesis, the Deutero-Pauline and pastoral epistles, and feminist-womanist, postcolonial, and postmodern biblical interpretation. She is author of the commentary, 1 Timothy and co-author of New Proclamation Year B, 2005–2006: Advent through Holy Week. An ordained minister of the Presbyterian Church (USA), Deborah serves the church through social justice advocacy work, teaching, preaching and scholarship.

K. Renato Lings is a Danish translator and biblical scholar currently living in Spain. Renato’s work focuses on the multiple ways in which biased translations of the Bible create hostility to diversity of gender and sexuality. Books published in English: Holy Censorship or Mistranslation? Love, Gender and Sexuality in the Bible (HarperCollins, 2021) and Love Lost in Translation: Homosexuality and the Bible (Trafford, 2013).

J. Michael McNeir Clark was a founder of Atlanta’s gay/lesbian synagogue, Congregation Bet Haverim (1985), founding co-chair of the gay men’s program unit in the American Academy of Religion (1988), and a long-time contributing editor of the Journal of Men’s Studies (1992–2010). He also served one term on the board of directors of the American Men’s Studies Association. He is credited with pioneering unapologetic gay liberation theology in the late 1980s. He taught both English and Religious Studies at numerous institutions, retiring in 2013 from Warren Wilson College. He authored several dozen articles and some fifteen books, most importantly Beyond our Ghettos: Gay Theology in Ecological Perspective (1993) and Defying the Darkness: Gay Theology in the Shadows (1997, 2009). He and his husband Bob now live in rural western North Carolina.

Jay Michaelson is a non-denominational rabbi and teaches meditation in a Theravadan Buddhist lineage. He holds a PhD from Hebrew University, a JD from Yale Law School, and non-denominational Rabbinic ordination. He works at the intersection of politics and spirituality. He is the author of eight books and over three hundred articles on religion, sexuality, law, and contemplative practice. He is a columnist for The Daily Beast, an editor at the Ten Percent Happier meditation platform, and an affiliated assistant professor at Chicago Theological Seminary.

André S. Musskopf is a Professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora (Brazil), Institute of Human Sciences, in the Religious Studies Department. He holds a Bachelor’s (2001), Master’s (2004) and Doctorate (2008) Degree in Systematic Theology from Escola Superior de Teologia/Faculdades EST. From 2013 to 2019 he was part of the Coordination of the Gender and Religion Program and Leader of the Gender Research Group at the same institution, chief editor of coisas do gênero journal, and coordinator of the Latin American Gender and Religion Congress. His areas and themes of research interest are: Feminist Studies, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Masculinities, Homosexuality and Sexual Diversity, in their relation to Theology, Religion and Education. He is a lecturer in his areas of expertise in academic, religious, grass roots and social movements’ events in Brazil and internationally. He has published several books and articles.

The Revd Ana Ester Padua Freire is a Brazilian feminist-lesbian-queer theologian and holds a PhD and Master’s in Religious Studies from the Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil. She is ordained in the Metropolitan Community Churches. She is the Latin American representative (2021–23) for the Global Interfaith Network for People of All Sexes, Sexual Orientations, Gender Identities and Expressions (GIN-SSOGIE). She is also a member of the American Academy of Religion and the Brazilian Association of Homoculture Studies (ABEH).

Tina Pippin is the Wallace M. Alston Professor of Bible and Religion at Agnes Scott College in Decatur, GA. She was a member of The Bible and Culture Collective (The Postmodern Bible, Yale UP, 1995), the author of Apocalyptic Bodies: The Biblical End of the World in Text and Image (Routledge, 1999) and the co-editor with Cheryl Kirk-Duggan of Mother Goose, Mother Jones, Mommie Dearest: Biblical Mothers and Their Children (SBL, 2009), along with other publications on apocalyptic and the Bible and film studies. Tina is the first recipient of the American Academy of Religion’s Excellence in Teaching Award. She is an activist-educator and also co-hosts a radical pedagogy podcast with Lucia Hulsether, Nothing Never Happens, at https://nothingneverhappens.org/.

Brian Rainey is Assistant Professor of Hebrew Bible at Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, Georgia. He has previously taught at Princeton Theological Seminary and Appalachian State University. His biblical scholarship centres around race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, justice, and violence in the literature of the Bible and ancient East Africa and West Asia. His most recent book Religion, Ethnicity and Xenophobia in the Bible: An Exegetical and Theological Survey looks at negative depictions of foreigners in the Bible and ancient Mesopotamia both from an historical-critical and theologically interested perspective.

Joshua Reno is Lecturer in the Department of Classical & Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota. His research covers discourse(s) around sex work in Greek and Roman literature. He is the author of several essays on sex, gender, and the Pauline epistles, most recently ‘Pornographic Desire in the Pauline Corpus’ (JBL, 2021). He is currently completing a book on Pauline sexual invective.

The Revd Justin Sabia-Tanis is a gay, transgender theologian. He is an assistant professor of Social Transformation and Christian Ethics and directs the Social Transformation program at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. He earned his PhD from the Graduate Theological Union in Interdisciplinary Studies in addition to a Master of Divinity degree at Harvard Divinity School and a Doctor of Ministry from San Francisco Theological Seminary. A pastor, scholar and activist, he is clergy with the United Church of Christ. Previous work included serving as the Managing Director of the Center for LGBTQ+ and Gender Studies in Religion at Pacific School of Religion, and work with national non-profits. In addition to his book, Transgender: Ministry, Theology, and Communities of Faith, he has chapters in the Queer Bible Commentary, Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, Unlocking Orthodoxies for Inclusive Theologies, and Understanding Transgender Identity: Four Views.

Carmen Margarita Sanchez De Leon is a Caribbean who conceives we-self as a person in a constant process of deconstruction. Is curious about the beings that inhabit the planet and about the social movements that are currently eroding systems of oppression. Married to Frida Kruijt, they have twins. Carmen Margarita’s knowledge comes from feminism, antiracist, decolonial, and queer movements.

Melissa Harl Sellew is Professor Emerita of Classical and Near Eastern Religions and Cultures at the University of Minnesota and Adjunct Professor of New Testament at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities. Her scholarly interests revolve around the emergence of early Christianity in the ancient Mediterranean world. Recent work has focused on queer and trans oriented readings of Scripture and related texts, including the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. Her current writing projects involve Paul’s Letter to the Galatians, the story of the Ethiopian eunuch in the Acts of Apostles, and narratives featuring the early female apostle Thekla.

The Revd Robert E. Shore-Goss, ThD in Comparative Religion at Harvard, is a retired UCC clergy working on environmental justice in the United Church of Christ. He serves on the denominational Environmental Justice Council of the UCC and the Florida Conference. His recent books are The Insurgency of the Spirit: Jesus’s Liberation Animist Spirituality, Empire, and Creating Christian Protectors (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) and co-editor of Unlocking Orthodoxies for Inclusive Theologies: Queer Alternatives (Routledge, 2020). He was co-editor of and contributor to the Second Testament of The Queer Bible Commentary. See his website for a complete list of his books and publications: www.mischievousspiritandtheology.com

David Tabb Stewart received his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley – a degree focusing on Hebrew Bible and Hittitology in their Department of Near Eastern Studies, an MA in Middle East Studies-Hebrew from the University of Utah, and a BS in Finance from the University of Oregon. He joined the CSULB faculty in 2007. His special interests include biblical and ancient Near Eastern religion and law, the literary art of the Hebrew Bible, intertextuality, and ancient notions of disability, otherness, sex and gender. Dr Stewart has taught at Stanford, U.C. Berkeley, U.C. Davis, San Francisco State University, and Southwestern University (Texas).

Ken Stone is Distinguished Service Professor of Bible, Culture, and Hermeneutics at Chicago Theological Seminary. His books include Practicing Safer Texts: Food, Sex, and Bible in Queer Perspective (2005) and Reading the Hebrew Bible with Animal Studies (2018). He also edited Queer Commentary and the Hebrew Bible (2000) and, with Teresa J. Hornsby, Bible Trouble: Queer Reading at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship (2011).

Elizabeth Stuart is Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Professor of Christian Theology at the University of Winchester UK. She is the author of a number of books and articles on Christianity, sexuality and gender including Gay and Lesbian Theologies: Repetitions with Critical Difference, and Just Good Friends: Towards a Lesbian and Gay Theology of Relationships. She was editor of Theology and Sexuality.

The Revd Durrell Watkins is the Senior Minister of Sunshine Cathedral in Fort Lauderdale, FL USA. He holds degrees from Henderson State University (BA), Goddard College (MA), Union Theological Seminary in NYC (MDiv), and the Episcopal Divinity School (D. Min). The Revd Watkins is an ordained Divine Science minister, is also credentialed as a Metropolitan Community Churches (MCC) minister, and has standing in the International Council of Community Churches. He is a life member of the International New Thought Alliance and is currently the President of the Divine Science Federation International.

The Revd Mona West has a PhD in the Hebrew Bible and has published extensively in the area of queer biblical hermeneutics. She is a contributing editor of Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible (Pilgrim Press, 2000), The Queer Bible Commentary (1st edn, SCM Press, 2006) and Queering Christianity (Praeger, 2013). She served as an active clergy with Metropolitan Community Churches for 28 years as a pastor and denominational staff. She is currently affiliated with the Episcopal Church USA and is on staff as Director of Adult Christian Formation at St David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, TX USA. She lives with her spouse of 25 years, Deb Elder, in Austin, TX USA.

Preface to the Second Edition

Since the first publication of the Queer Bible Commentary in 2006, queer readings of the Bible have proliferated globally, resulting in the emergence of resistant readings against heteronormative, cisgender and colonizing Christianities. Some of these resistant readings have been inspired by the first edition of the QBC and the growing body of international queer readers of the Bible (Greenough 2020: 114–25; Quero 2015: 210–31). Their inclusive methods and imaginative readings bring a God of love and justice into their interpretative strategies. Some engage in postcolonial analysis and the foregrounding of empire and imperial religion in biblical scholarships in the last decades; others develop their readings from varied queer contextual events and culture. Some contributors have aligned queer critique with postcolonial analysis of occupied religion against imperial religion (Howard-Brook 2010, 2016; Carter 2000, 2008; Sugirtharajah 2005; McKnight 2019; Crossan 2007). Crossan argues ‘empire is the normalcy of civilization’s violence’ (Crossan 2007: 30). Both Testaments deal with people struggling against empires that exploit the many for the benefit of the few. Empire exists in biblical times and now.

In a provocative essay, Heather White argues how Paul became a ‘straight word’ with the invention of biblical heteronormativity (White 2019: 289–310). Biblical heteronormativity and cisgender assumptions infect numerous evangelical and conservative Christian churches in their interpretation of the Judaeo-Christian biblical texts. Heteronormative and cisgender interpretations were wedded to an imperial Christianity from the nineteenth-century European and American cultural colonization. This has led to a conservative Christian exercise of dominance and interpretative control over the biblical texts resulting in religious abuse and trauma of non-conforming Christians.

Such heteronormative privileged interpretation and control of the Bible supports certain cultural ideologies of Christian nationalism and patriarchy. This has resulted in migrant children being separated from their parents at the US border, mass incarceration and killing of African Americans in the US, huge displacements of people due to climate change, and a global economy controlled by the one per cent. Moreover, biblical heteronormativity has a capitalist (and imperial) agenda, which gay biblical scholar Luis Menéndez-Antuña refers to as the multi-billion dollar ‘industrial biblical complex,’ that spreads biblical texts, interprets and publishes them, and deploys them for ideological, economic, colonizing, and political agendas (Menéndez-Antuña 2018: 105–6). This biblical industrial complex maintains and collaborates with an imperial plutocracy based on an unbridled capitalism that privileges white males, gender fundamentalism, heterosexuals, and white nationalist policies of economic privilege and scapegoating. The Bible has been weaponized against LGBTQ+ folks stripping them of their legal rights and, in many African countries, making homosexuality illegal. Similarly, Adrian Thatcher explores how the Bible has been deployed by Christian churches as a ‘savage text’ about contemporary issues of sexuality and thus promotes a cultural homophobia (Thatcher 2008). In the biblical journal Semeia, Episcopal priest Leng Lim entitles his article, ‘The Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself’ (Lim 2002: 315–22). A quick search of LGBTQ+ groups on social media reveals how queer folks are victims of religious abuse and trauma. They are the focus of the so-called ‘clobber texts’ that are used to shame, stigmatize, and exclude ‘unrepentant’ and active LGBTQ+ people. In Stories of Queer Lives: Queer Narratives from Kenya, one Christian raises the possibility, ‘Maybe there is another way of reading the Bible. I think the Bible is more than just a punishment structure for sinners’ (Nest Collective 2015: 302).

There are other ways of reading the Bible that move beyond an apologetics of the clobber texts. Deryn Guest uses the interpretative principles of resistance, rupture, reclamation and re-engagement as lesbian biblical reading strategies (Guest 2005: 110). Ken Stone speaks of safer practices of biblical interpretation; others speak of troubling the text (Hornsby and Stone 2011). Marchal uses queering as reading strategies ‘that resist or trouble modes of respectability, normalcy, or inclusion’ (Marchal 2019: 9). Miguel De La Torre (2002) uses South American theologies’ strategy of a ‘militant reading’ from those dwelling on the ‘underside of history’ (Gutiérrez 1984: xi). De La Torre claims,

To read the Bible from the margins is to grasp God in the midst of struggle and oppression. Hence, such a reading attempts to understand why God’s people find themselves struggling for survival within a society that appears to be designed to privilege one group of people at the expense of others. (De La Torre 2002: loc. 170)

Queer reading strategies decolonize controlling dominant interpretations of the Bible, destabilize what is assumed as the normal or textual meaning, and instead read the Bible from outsider social locations in an effort towards liberation from these oppressive interpretations. Indeed, queer biblical and theological scholarship since Stonewall has resulted in a proliferation of queer readers globally and empowers LGBTQ+ Christians to struggle for inclusion or create alternative Christian churches where they find a safe place to practise their faith.

Our project of queering the Bible expresses what medieval historian Carolyn Dinshaw articulates as ‘a desire to make relations with the past, juxtaposition from the present to touch across time’. She claims, ‘queers can make new relations, new identifications, new communities with past figures who elude resemblance to us but with whom we can be connected partially by virtue of shared marginality, queer positionality’ (Dinshaw 1999: 39). Shore-Goss explores how queer imagination and suffering identifies with the dangerous memories of Jesus’ passion and death. LGBTQ+ imagination identifies with the dangerous memories of Jesus, and this empowers a retrieval of Jesus as queer, as one of us (Shore-Goss 2021: 47–70).

While many of the chapters in this second edition ‘touch across time’ to be in conversation with biblical characters and contexts, there are also chapters that challenge the notion of fixed identities and meanings with regard to biblical texts. In the words of Teresa Hornsby and Ken Stone,

The time of meaning is what distinguishes queer scholarship from what we would call ‘mainstream’ scholarship. Queer scholars understand that meaning is fleeting; what is true is only true right here, right now, then gone. (Hornsby and Stone 2011: xii)

This notion of time in queer scholarship is part of the impetus in publishing a second edition of the QBC. A lot has happened in queer biblical scholarship since the publication of the first edition of the QBC, and so we include here in this second edition updates to some of the original chapters and new voices from around the globe.

There is also a playful side to queering the Bible. In her ‘Introduction’ to Take Back the Bible, Mary Ann Tolbert observes ‘how creatively and even joyously queer readers of the Bible reclaim some of its texts by destabilizing them, playing with them, laughing at them, allegorizing them, tricking them – all wonderfully inventive strategies …’ (Tolbert 2000: ix). Tolbert’s description of ‘tricking’ is aligned with South African biblical scholar Jeremy Punt’s claim of queering a biblical text as ‘outwitting’. He argues outwitting inverts the word’s meanings by recovering insult to move a reader from stigmatized or socially ascribed shame to claimed pride (Punt 2020: 77). Gerard Loughin writes,

‘Queer’, then, seeks to outwit identity. It serves those who find themselves and others to be other than the characters prescribed by an identity. It marks not by defining, but by taking up a distance what is perceived as the normative. The Term is deployed in order to mark, and to make a difference, a divergence. (Loughlin 2007: p. 9)

Queer biblical readers outwit, mischievously subvert, use camp humour, or trickery of the standard textual interpretations, grounded in an uncritically perceived stable heteronormative and cisgender cultural constructions (Mollenkott 2000: 12–22; Stuart 2000: 23–34). Mollenkott quotes Hebrew scholar Carole Fontaine, ‘Those who find themselves disadvantaged, on the outside, in the margins as it were, make use of trickery, when the power-brokers simply will not listen, when the center forgets the margin – well, then, a trick may be in order’ (Fontane 1998: 10). There are activists, scholarly and clerical tricksters – all with differing skills and strategies of revealing that there are many sexualities and gender variances in the biblical text that do not fit straight-jacket binaries of gender and sexuality. Queer outwitting focuses on these privileged cultural categories, organized into systems of power deployed as ‘politically’ natural, normal, and right.

There are parallels between queer strategies of outwitting between mischievous queer nuns, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence and professional queer religious scholars and clergy. The Sisters function as popular activist, trickster clowns, using social parody or shocking iconoclasm to complicate and critique cultural cisgender codes and heteronormativity (Wilcox 2018; Shore-Goss 2013: 97–120). Queer religious scholars and clergy skillfully and artfully outwit heteropatriarchy and its gender codes of presumptive stable biblical interpretations (Punt 2020: 75–7; Loughlin 2007). They outwit stabilized gender identities and normative heterosexuality used to read biblical texts. We practise ‘exegetical activism’ (Moore 2001: n.10) or queer biblical activism (Greenough 2019: 107–26) that disrupts heterornormativities and cisgender constructions.

Lesbian womanist theologian, Pamela Lightsey affirms, ‘Scripture is not only a written instrument but also a way of life for many African Americans, queers included. We turn to the Bible for comfort, guidance, and nurture’ (Lightsey 2015: 41). Despite the Bible being used against African Americans, ‘Scripture has a beautiful way of touching our lives and of helping us survive and thrive in the midst of oppression and the vicissitudes of life’ (Lightsey 2015: 41). God is not limited to the Bible, but experience in life and reason. Lightsey quotes a Facebook conversation with Dr Mitzi J. Smith who observes: ‘God … was before, and transcends the Bible. How do you give the same authority to God that you give to the Bible?’ (Lightsey 2015: 45). God is greater than the Bible. Smith speaks today: ‘The notion that God is larger, parallels Meister Eckhart’s notion of God rid of god’ (Sermon 87, Farley 2020: 5). Lightsey frees up heteronormative restrictive notions of God and frees God to be experience in queer lives:

We understand that everything about God has been recorded by humanity and that therefore God stands within and outside the text. We love the Bible for its ability to touch our lives in deep ways, we love its metaphorical and poetic language, we seek out daily its deeper meaning for our lives, but we understand that the Bible is not God. (Lightsey 2015: 45)

Queer Christian womanists, and many queer Christians, displace the smaller, restrictive notions of God in interpreting the Bible. God still is speaking today. Queer folks have discovered that God is not a ‘small god’ of exclusivist Christianity and its exclusive weaponization of the Bible but a God of radical inclusive compassion. The outsider God may be discovered in outside experience, in outside LGBTQ+ experience among other outsiders. God is found in an inclusive radical love that threatens and shatters an imprisoned and smaller god. Not only Lightsey, but many queer scholars, clergy, and faith activists threaten a small god with prophetic displacement of a greater God of compassion. Many of the contributors in this volume outwit and displace the small god, both judgemental and wrathful, with a more compassionate and radical inclusive God for LGBTQ+ folks.

In addition to historical reconstruction, our queer readings tap into our own queer differing personal and contextual experiences: coming out, queer pride and popular culture, humour and outsider imagination, to witness to a radical loving and inclusive God. Our experience of God as larger allows us to employ our skills of outwitting, teasing out the gaps, contradictions, elisions, and cultural assumptions of textual heteronormativity that brings assumptions of race, ethnicity, cisgender, and heterosexuality in their interpretations. These heteronormative and gender textual assumptions presume universal and stable notions across history while queer readers understand the social constructions imposed upon biblical texts and their failures in what Dinshaw describes as making relations across time. Queer reading disrupts heteronormative and cisgender attempts to silence the different voices and non-normalcy in the text. We bring critical questions of our lives to the text.

For example, the contributor for the Pastoral Letters in the Second Testament in this second edition puts on Paul in drag, and then writes in his name to justify the acceptance of Roman masculine ideologies that denigrate women, slaves, weak and effeminate males as un-men. He ignores Paul’s affirmation of the baptismal creed in Galatians 3.28 that removes boundaries between male and female, slave and freed, Jew and Greek. ‘The Pastor’ plays down the death of Jesus, the Pauline hymn of Jesus as slave (Philippians 2.5–11). It raises a question for the contributors. Are these letters really scripture? Mexican gay scholar Manuel Villalobos Mendoza makes the point that the author deliberately has been seduced by Roman patriarchal ideology of masculinity and has made such an accommodation. The radical message of Paul and Jesus was sacrificed for a Roman masculinist or what Joseph Marchal describes as Romosexuality (Marchal 2020: 4–12, 19; Mendoza 2014: 219–34).

In a talk (2019) addressed to the Open and Affirming Movement Conference of the United Church of Christ, Nigerian the Revd Jide Macaulay, founder of the House of the Rainbow, called for an African Queer Bible Commentary. Our hope is that this edition moves to empower other global queer contexts to create such commentaries as resistance to colonizing, heteronormative, and cisgender Christianities and instead dreams of decolonized, justice-loving, and inclusive Christianities. This work is important for our liberation as well as the liberation of our colonizers. Miguel De La Torre claims, ‘Reading the Bible from the margins is as crucial for the salvation of the dominant culture as it is for liberation of the disenfranchised’ (De La Torre 2002: loc.183).

Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) was a key text in developing queer theory and queer scholarship. It has influenced queer readings of the Bible that challenge conventional notions of gender, promote gender performativity, and destabilize heterosexuality as a fixed identity from which to read and interpret scripture. We completed the work of this commentary during a time in the history of humanity when individualism, fixed borders, and static identities were exposed by the Novel Coronavirus. In commenting on the global pandemic, Butler (2021) writes:

This sense of the interdependency of the world, strengthened by a common immunological predicament, challenges the notion of ourselves as isolated individuals encased in discrete bodies, bound by established borders. Who now could deny that to be a body at all is to be bound up with other living creatures, with surfaces, and the elements, including the air that belongs to no one and everyone?

Some of the contributors to this second edition were directly impacted by Covid-19 and all of us struggled with access to research facilities during times of lockdown. Because we believe the work of queering biblical texts moves us beyond individualism towards an interdependency that creates a world where all belong equally, we were able to persevere during a time of global pandemic to finish our project. We are grateful to SCM Press for their patience and graciousness.

Bibliography

Butler, Judith, 1990, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, New York and London: Routledge.

Butler, Judith, 2015, Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press.

Butler, Judith, 2021, ‘Creating an Inhabitable for Humans Means Dismantling Rigid Forms of Individuality’, Time, 22 April.

Carter, Warren, 2000, Matthew and the Margins: A Sociopolitical and Religious Reading, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Carter, Warren, 2010, John and Empire: Initial Explorations, New York: T&T Clark.

Crossan, J. D., 2007, God and Empire: Jesus Against Rome, Then and Now, HarperSanFrancisco.

De La Torre, Miguel, 2002, Reading the Bible from the Margins, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Dinshaw, Carolyn, 1999, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre and Postmodern, Durham: Duke University.

Farley, Wendy, 2020, Beguiled by Beauty: Cultivating a Life of Contemplation and Compassion, Louisville: John Knox/Westminster Press.

Fontaine, Carole R., 1988, ‘Tricksters in the Bible’, The Witness, July/August, pp. 8–10.

Greenough, Chris, 2019, Queer Theologies: The Basics, London: Routledge.

Guest, Deryn, 2005, When Deborah Met Jael: Lesbian Biblical Hermeneutics, London: SCM Press.

Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 1984, The Power of the Poor in History, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Hornsby, Teresa J. and Stone, Ken, 2011, Bible Trouble: Queer Readings at the Boundaries of Biblical Scholarship, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Howard-Brook, Wes, 2010, Come Out My People! God’s Call Out of Empire and Beyond, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Howard-Brook, Wes, 2016, Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected (second–fifth centuries), Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Lightsey, Pamela R., 2015, Our Lives Matter: A Womanist Queer Theology, Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications.

Lim, You-Leng Leroy, 2002, ‘How the Bible Tells Me to Hate Myself’, in The Crisis in Asian American Spiritual Leadership, Semeia 90–1, 215–322.

Loughlin, Gerard, 2007, Queer Theology: Rethinking the Western Body, London: Wiley-Black.

Marchal, Joseph A., 2019, ‘On the Verge of an Introduction’, in Joseph A. Marchal, ed., Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, pp. 1–61.

Marchal, Joseph A., 2020, Appalling Bodies: Queer Figures Before and After Paul’s Letters, New York: Oxford University Press.

McKnight, Scot, 2019, Reading Romans Backwards: A Gospel of Peace in the Midst of Empire, Waco: Baylor University Press.

Mendoza, Manuel Villalobos, 2014, When Men Were Not Men: Masculinity and Otherness in the Pastoral Epistles, Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press.

Menéndez-Antuña, Luis, 2018, Thinking Sex with the Great Whore: Deviant Sexualities and Empire in the Book of Revelation, New York: Routledge.

Mollenkott, Virginia, 2000, ‘Reading the Bible from Low and Outside: Lesbian nad Gay People as God’s Tricksters’, in Mona West and Robert E. Goss, eds, Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, Cleveland: The Pilgrim Press, 13–22.

Moore, Stephen D., 2001, God’s Beauty Parlor: And Other Queer Spaces Around the Bible, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Nest Collective, 2015, Stories of Our Lives: Queer Narratives from Kenya, Nairobi: The Nest ARTs Company.

Punt, Jeremy, 2015, Postcolonial Biblical Interpretation: Reframing Paul, Studies in Theology and Religion 20, Leiden: Brill.

Punt, Jeremy, 2020, ‘Queer Bible Reading in Global Hermeneutical Perspective’, in Susanne Scholz, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 65–80.

Quero, Hugo Córdova, 2015, ‘Queer Liberation Theologies’, in Miguel De La Torre, ed., Introducing Liberation Theologies, Maryknoll: Orbis Books.

Shore-Goss, Robert E., 2013, ‘The Holy Spirit as Mischief-Maker’, in Robert E. Shore-Goss, Thomas Bohache, Patrick S. Cheng, and Mona West, eds, Queering Christianity: Finding a Place at the Table for LGBTQI Christians, Santa Barbara: Praeger, pp. 97–120.

Shore-Goss, Robert E., 2021, ‘Queering Jesus: LGBTQI Dangerous Memories and Imaginative Resistance’, Journal for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies 2 (2), Spring, pp. 47–70.

Stuart, Elizabeth, 2000, ‘Camping Around the Canon,: Humor as a Hermeneutical Tool in Queer Readings of Biblical Texts’, in Mona West and Robert E. Goss, eds, Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, The Pilgrim Press, pp. 23–34.

Sugirtharajah, R. S., 2005, The Bible and Postcolonial Explorations, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thatcher, Adrian, 2008, The Savage Text: The Use and Abuse of the Bible, London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Tolbert, Mary, 2000, ‘Foreword’, in Mona West and Robert E, Goss, eds, Take Back the Word: A Queer Reading of the Bible, The Pilgrim Press, pp. vii–xi.

White, Heather R., 2019, ‘How Paul Became a Straight Word: Protestant Biblicism and the Twentieth Century Invention of Biblical Heteronormativity’, in Joseph A. Marchal, ed., Bodies on the Verge: Queering Pauline Epistles, Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, pp. 289–310.

Wilcox, Melissa, 2018, Queer Nuns: Religion, Activism, and Serious Parody, New York: New York University Press.

Acknowledgements

The editors would like to thank the staff at SCM Press for their support for this ambitious project. We thank David Shervington in particular for being such an enthusiastic supporter of the commentary, for his patience and understanding when deadlines needed to be renegotiated and for prompt, efficient correspondence at all times. It has been a pleasure to work with such a commissioning editor. We also thank the staff who helped see the manuscript through to publication, in particular Mary Matthews, Hannah Ward and Christopher Pipe for whose careful work we are indebted.

The editors also want to thank the contributors for their perseverance through the COVID pandemic and those who struggled with COVID illness and worked hard to make this volume possible. Your creative voices and faith help take back the Jewish and Christian scriptures from fundamentalists and White Nationalist Christianity, who weaponize the scriptures against many of God’s people.

We also want to remember Ted Jennings, who began his work on revising 1 and 2 Thessalonians for this volume and passed away. His numerous queer publications strengthened the LGBTQI+ Christian movement. And we remember the untimely passing of Marcella Althaus-Reid into queer sainthood, whose spirit hovered around us and other contributors during this project.

Mona West would like to thank the Eremos Center for Contemplative Life for providing a space of healing and service after a painful career transition. Many thanks also go to my spiritual director, Sharon Dunn, whose presence kept me grounded as I discerned the next steps in my professional journey. I want to thank the Revd John Fowler and Revd Karen Thompson for their friendship and support as I found a new place of ministry which allowed the energy and focus needed to complete this second edition of The Queer Bible Commentary. I want to acknowledge St David’s Episcopal Church in Austin, Texas, where I now serve and their commitment to the full inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in the church. I also want to express my humble love and undying gratitude for my spouse of twenty-five years, Deb Elder, who has been my biggest fan and supporter, taking care of our home and pets when I have travelled to present papers and workshops at conferences or spent hours at the computer writing. Without her steadfast love and presence I could not have written a word.

Robert Shore-Goss would like to thank the United Church of Christ, its Open and Affirming Program of Churches, as well as all affirming and LGBTQI+ inclusive churches, Kittredge Cherry and her Facebook group Queer Biblical Studies and Theologies for encouragement and allowing me to canvas for replacement contributors. The Queer Bible Commentary builds upon the past and resent work of LGBTQI+ biblical and theological scholars, queer clergy and Jewish and Christian queer activists, whose vision empowered queer people of faith to reclaim their biblical inheritance and perceive a God who was greater than religious hatred. I dedicate all the merit accrued from this liberating volume to you, resistant queer readers, clergy and scholars. Finally, I want to thank my husband the Revd Dr Joseph Shore-Goss for a wonderful journey in sharing your love, spiritual passion, dreams of justice and colouring outside the lines. You, along with the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, taught me the strategic value of social parody, camp resistance and radical inclusion. Joseph, your love and support were invaluable during the months of the COVID pandemic when I doubted this second edition would ever happen. During the frustrating moments of editing and indexing, you cheerfully encouraged me along. And, of course, my two canine companions, Friskie and Troy, who sat at my feet while working on the commentary! And finally the Spirit – the ultimate mischief maker and trickster who continues to colour outside the ecclesial boundaries and exclusions.

Acknowledgements for Scripture Translations

Except as otherwise stated, scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible (NRSV), copyright 1989 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations in the chapters for Joshua and the book of the Twelve Minor Prophets, except as stated, are from the Jewish Publication Society (JPS); and in the chapters for Leviticus and Psalms are from the New Jewish Publication Society, Tanakh (NJPS).

In The Pastoral Letters, scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV), copyright 1946, 1952 and 1971 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the USA. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Translations in the chapters for 1–2 Samuel, 1–2 Kings, Job, Jeremiah, Lamentations, Ezekiel, Romans, 1 and 2 Thessalonians, and Hebrews are by the authors, except as stated; and in the Introduction and Deuteronomy chapter are as stated in situ.

Abbreviations

Part 1: The First Testament

Genesis

MICHAEL CARDEN

Introduction

Overview

As the name implies, Genesis is a book of beginnings. It relates the origins of Israel and the world. It does so through a connected series of stories about the great ancestors, starting with the first humans at creation and ending with the family of Jacob/Israel. As a book of origins, Genesis is concerned with explaining why things are the way they are now, both in a broad and in a more specific sense. In its creation stories, it provides an understanding of the relationship of the divine, creation and humanity. In the stories of the family that would become the people of Israel, Genesis locates Israel’s part in that relationship.

As the book of beginnings, Genesis serves as the introduction to the Pentateuch, the five books of Moses, and clearly anticipates what will unfold in the Pentateuch (Gen. 15.12–16). While Genesis opens with a strong affirmation of the goodness of the created order, there is an underlying tragic vision within the book. Once upon a time, humans were in unmediated communion with the divine, but through human action, the divine and human realms are separated. This pattern is repeated in the family stories of Israel’s origins. Abraham, Sarah and Hagar live in a world that intersects very tangibly with the divine realms. At the end of Genesis, not only is the divine world separated from humanity in general but it is only glimpsed in dreams by Israel’s ancestors. In another way, too, this tragic but aetiological quality manifests at the conclusion of Genesis. The greater part of the family saga of Israel’s ancestors relates how they come to and mark their presence in the Land of Promise. However, Genesis ends with them outside the Land. Not only does this foreshadow the end of the Pentateuch where Israel remains outside the Land, but also the end of the Hebrew scriptures as a whole, which close with Israel no longer sovereign in the Land and scattered among the nations.

Historical and cultural locations

We do not know when, where, or by whom these stories were composed and collated to form the book of Genesis and consequently incorporated into the Pentateuch. Scholarship has long regarded the stories of Genesis 1–11 – Creation, Eden, Flood, Babel – as mythological, classifying them as the primordial history. Nowadays, too, the family sagas of Israel’s ancestors in Genesis 12—50 are similarly considered to be myth. These ancestral stories are set in the late third millennium BCE; however, no archaeological or historical evidence has been found for the events and characters in these stories. Furthermore, despite the very ancient setting of these stories, most scholarly opinion would see both their composition and collation into Genesis as taking place in the late first millennium BCE during the periods of the ancient Persian or Hellenistic empires in the Middle East, which preceded and succeeded Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE).

Seen from this perspective, the composition of Genesis and the Pentateuch can be located as part of major religious movements then occurring in the ancient eastern Mediterranean world. The first millennium BCE was marked by the rise and fall of empires and the resulting intermingling of cultures and religions. The Persian empire was the first to bring together under one rule these diverse cultures. Established under Cyrus the Great in 559 BCE, at its peak the empire would stretch from Egypt and the Balkans in the west to Afghanistan and Central Asia in the east.¹ Questions of universalism and diversity, the One and the Many, come to the fore, together with the allied questions of justice, good and evil, suffering and death. It is this interaction of Babylonian, Palestinian, Assyrian, Egyptian, Syrian, Persian and Greek religious ideas that lies behind the composition of both Genesis and the other Hebrew scriptures. (For a very good analysis and overview of questions of Bible and history see Thompson 2000.)

We do not know in which context the author/s of Genesis understood the text to be read or performed and we do not know the identity of the community or communities to which it is addressed. Clearly part of the agenda of Genesis is to provide foundation for a community based on shared descent from the ancient ancestors. However, given the sheer diversity of Second Temple Judaism, it could be argued that Genesis and the Pentateuch have been crafted for use by multiple communities. Support for this argument can be further evinced by the fact that Genesis and the Pentateuch exist in three recensions, not one – the Masoretic text, the basis of the Hebrew scriptures; the Septuagint or Greek version, still normative in Eastern Orthodoxy; and the Samaritan. Versions of all three have been found at Qumran as well as others that became defunct in the early Christian era. So it is clear that as far back as we have evidence, Genesis has existed in plural form and we have no way of determining which, if any, of these versions has priority. Furthermore, the existence of the extra-biblical or pseudepigraphal scriptures suggests that Genesis may well have had to compete with other accounts of the past to provide foundations for communities claiming an Israelite identity.

Perhaps it is this indeterminate or open quality of Genesis that led Western biblical scholarship from the late nineteenth century to reconstruct both Genesis and the rest of the Pentateuch so it would conform more readily to Western bourgeois expectations. Known as the Documentary Hypothesis, this reconstruction was pioneered by Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918). Employing this approach, biblical scholars divided the contents of the Pentateuch into four primary sources, determined in part by the form of the name of the deity that was employed. These were the J or Yahwist source, the E or Elohist source, the D or Deuteronomist source and P the Priestly source. Having identified these sources, scholars then dated them according to the biblical account of the history of ancient Israel. Thus J was dated to the time of the united monarchy in the tenth century BCE, E to the ninth century BCE northern kingdom of Israel, D to the southern kingdom of Judah in the seventh century BCE, while P was dated to the exilic or post-exilic period of the fifth century BCE. The problem with this colonialist approach to the text was that it was too uncritically accepting of the biblical account of Israelite history. Archaeological research in Israel/Palestine has failed to substantiate the bulk of the biblical account and, as these four proposed sources are dependent on the veracity of that history, archaeology has also undermined this Western reconstruction of Genesis and the Pentateuch.

Nevertheless, these Western scholarly constructions suggest that Genesis was written to address an audience of diverse communities. Within the diversity of ancient Judaism, Genesis and the Pentateuch would become authoritative as the Torah of Moses. If the authors of Genesis did shape the text to address a variety of communities, then that necessity would account for the fact that Genesis and its stories have become authoritative not only for Jewish people but also for Christians, Muslims and others. However, despite this authoritative status, there was not the rigid, literalist approach to reading in the ancient Jewish milieu that is found in Christian and Islamic fundamentalist groups today. Ancient Jewish communities had an active folkloric relationship with these stories. The biblical narratives are often full of gaps, and Jewish readers and interpreters, from the very earliest times, have not been afraid to fill those gaps and expand and develop the biblical stories. By the practice of midrash, Jewish people have retold and expanded these stories and continue to do so. Consequently, these expansions themselves become part of authoritative scripture. The Rabbinic Sages say that everything one finds in scripture, every interpretation, was originally revealed to Moses on Sinai. The meanings of scripture are infinite – it is through reading, interpretation and midrash that they are uncovered.

Sexuality in Genesis

As the product of an ancient and alien culture, it should come as no surprise that the world of gender and sexuality encountered in Genesis is very alien to that particularly dominant in Western cultures today. While some Genesis narratives have become crucial in contemporary Christian debates on sexuality and gender, the erotic world of Genesis makes a sharp contrast to the conservative Christian ‘family values’ being promoted as essential to Christianity today. Whereas Western gender and sexuality systems are constructed around a series of binaries – female/male, homosexual/heterosexual – Genesis comes from and reflects a world in which gender and sexuality are constructed as a hierarchical continuum. This hierarchy is one based on penetration. Men are the ones who penetrate and they stand at the top of the hierarchy. Below them are women and below women are eunuchs, female virgins, hermaphrodites. At the bottom are the monstrous – penetrated men and penetrating women. This gender/sexuality system overlapped with other hierarchies. Outsider foreign males and slaves could be subject to penetration by insider males and masters without loss of status to those men who penetrated. Male rape could thus be employed against defeated prisoners of war explicitly to deny them their male status.

Nevertheless within this hierarchy, male–female reproductive sexuality was privileged. Family (but not the nuclear family) was crucial to the ancient world, and reproductive sexuality was understood in agricultural terms of seed and soil. The male sows the seed and the female is the field in which the seed is transformed and from which it is then brought forth (Delaney 1991: 30–6). Associated with this understanding is the practice of endogamous or (patrilineal) close-kin marriage. As Carol Delaney observes, ‘women are land … fields and daughters are tended and the fruits of this labour are to be kept within the group’ (1991: 102). This monogenetic ideology of procreation, and corresponding endogamous marriage systems, are a feature of Mediterranean/ Middle Eastern cultures from prehistory. However, it is important to note that Rabbinic Judaism held to a duogenetic or even trigenetic theory of procreation whereby both female and male and even the deity contributed to procreation.

If women are like fields, then, just as a man can increase his holdings in land, so, too, with women. Polygamy and concubinage are a feature of the ancient world from which Genesis came. While economic factors might mandate monogamy for many, there is no opprobrium attached to polygamy. However, while a man might accumulate many fields, a field can only have one owner. Women are bound to one man to raise up children for him. A man is not bound to one woman and is free to sow his seed within or without marriage. Nevertheless, he must recognize the proprietorial rights of other men over their women. Adultery is always a crime against the husband, not the wife.

It needs to be stressed that the world of Genesis and the worlds that shaped it did not share contemporary notions of heterosexual, bisexual, homosexual. Homoeroticism, same-sex love and desire certainly did exist but were understood very differently. For the ancient world, males were penetrators, and as long as they conformed to that role there was no shame. Shame and stigma were associated with the penetrated male, while the penetrating female could be viewed as especially monstrous. Eunuchs and hermaphrodites were accepted but subordinate to males and females. Virgin women also occupied a similar subordinate ambiguity in the hierarchy. Likewise, a particular ambiguity applied to boys, who occupied a transitional space between the world of women and that of adult men. Pederastic desire could be accepted, but tensions arose from the fact that boys were proto-men. Class and ethnicity were crucial. A slave boy and/or a foreign boy could be a legitimate object of sexual desire and penetration. In classical Athens desire for a boy of one’s own class and ethnicity could be legitimate provided no penetrative sex was involved. While girls as proto-women were already legitimate objects for penetration and desire, as proto-women they were ‘valuables’ to be ‘transacted by others’ (Delaney 1991: 78).