The Women’s Bible Commentary provides a new set of answers to an old and crucial question. Throughout Christian and Jewish history, whenever the meaning of a biblical text has been disputed, behind the issue of what it “really” means lies a more fundamental question: Who gets to decide what it “really” means? That’s the Hermeneutical Issue of Power, or what I call the HIP question. Down the centuries, the answers to it have often been a matter of life and death.
You might think that the struggles against witch burning, and the struggles to make the Bible widely available, have been won. And in one sense you would be right: nowadays witches are mostly undisturbed, and Bibles can be had by the carload, essentially free, in practically every language you can think of and many you can’t. Yet despite this seeming variety, a survey of the churches and academies would show that those answering the HIP question, across denominations and cultures and from time immemorial until just a few years ago, have had one characteristic in common: they have been almost exclusively male.
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The Woman’s Bible is a fascinating but little-known tome. Women were scarce in the theological guilds then, and the few there were didn’t dare associate themselves with the extreme views of such a publication. Its commentary is perforce sketchy and uneven. But Stanton persevered, and early in the work she acerbically sums up the results of her group’s efforts thus: “The Old Testament makes woman a mere afterthought in creation; the author of evil; cursed in her maternity; a subject in marriage; and all female life, animal and human, unclean. The Church in all ages has taught these doctrines and acted on them, claiming divine authority therefor. . . . This idea of woman’s subordination is reiterated times without number, from Genesis to Revelations; and this is the basis of all church action.”
And examine it these women do. They find plenty to deplore and lament, much of which has been ignored or even perversely celebrated in most earlier, male-dominated commentaries. This goes beyond the easy stuff: the witch burning, and the fact that when a daughter was born in Israel the mother was ritually unclean for twice as long as when she delivered a son (Lev. 12). Not to mention Paul’s outburst against women speaking in church (1 Cor. 14).
Yet overall the Women’s Bible Commentary writers don’t follow this path, above all because as misogynistic as much of the Bible is, misogyny is not all that’s in it. There’s a good deal that’s prowomen, if one knows how and where to look for it.
But the egalitarian aspect of Christianity soon faded, first from early Christian practice, and then from Christian writings. This decline into sexism was no accident, Women’s Bible Commentary scholars insist. They trace with some rigor a pattern of retrenchment and growing repression. In fact, The Women’s Bible Commentary lays out something of a Gospel According to Feminists, and in considerable detail.
Nonetheless, Jewish and Christian communities that absorb the insights abounding in The Women’s Bible Commentary will undoubtedly wind up a lot different from what they are now. My suspicion is that the feminist religion represented here will be profoundly subversive of hierarchy, doctrinal fixity, and received liturgical language and rituals, all of which are dear to partisans of the male status quo.
