Margins, Methods, and Metaphors: Reflections on A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible

Abstract

One of the most ambitious contributions to the field of feminist biblical exegesis to date is the eleven-volume Sheffield series, A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible. The series, which includes over two hundred articles, is not intended to cover the field in its entirety. It does provide, however, a useful and stimulating guide to some of the highways, avenues, side streets, and even dead ends of feminist biblical criticism. This review article attempts to describe this road map, with special attention to the assumptions, methods, and results of current feminist biblical interpretation as represented in this series.

Introduction

Each year, the publishers' exhibits at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature recall Kohelet's observation that "of the making of many books, there is no end" (12:12). One area where the activities of writers and publishers are most evident is that of feminist biblical criticism. An ever-increasing flood of articles, monographs, and anthologies testifies not only to strong interest in feminist biblical criticism, but also to its growing complexity and diversity. Even seasoned participants in the field can have difficulty in discerning its contours, let alone keeping up with the literature.

The most ambitious contribution to the field to date is the eleven-volume Sheffield series, A Feminist Companion to the Hebrew Bible.¹ The series does not intend to provide comprehensive coverage of the field or the texts, but more realistically, to offer a sample of current critical voices (11:14, 9:20). As a self-described "companion to," rather than "commentary on," the Hebrew Bible, the series does not mirror the biblical text in either order or focus. Beginning with the Song of Songs (1), and extending through Genesis (2), Ruth (3), Judges (4), Samuel/Kings (5), Exodus through Deuteronomy (6), Esther/Judith/Susanna (7), the Latter Prophets (8), Wisdom Literature (9), and the Hebrew Bible in the New Testament (10), the series draws attention to those biblical passages, characters, and issues that have been the main focus of feminist biblical criticism. The final volume, entitled A Feminist Companion to Reading the Bible: Approaches, Methods and Strategies, reflects on the earlier volumes, maps out future directions, adds elements that were largely absent from the earlier volumes (such as multicultural perspectives), and broadens the focus to texts adjacent to the Hebrew Bible, such as the Septuagint, ancient Near Eastern sources, and rabbinic literature (though not patristic sources).

Taken together, the over two hundred articles do not constitute a template for the field as a whole, nor do they claim to do so. What they do provide is a useful and stimulating guide to some of its highways, side streets, and dead ends. This review article attempts to describe this road map, with special attention to the assumptions, methods, and results of current feminist criticism as represented in this series.

Assumptions

Athalya Brenner's introduction to the first volume, A Feminist Companion to the Song of Songs, defines the task of feminist biblical criticism as "reading the Bible as a woman" (1:11).² According to Brenner, male and female biblical scholars alike tend to "read as men," having internalized the norms of androcentric scholarship in which the male focus and patriarchal worldview of the biblical text is paralleled in the practice and history of biblical exegesis. Perhaps the most fundamental of these norms is the belief in and commitment to scholarly objectivity. In common with other current approaches to biblical studies³ and to other academic disciplines,⁴ the series challenges the possibility and even, for many, the desirability of objectivity, that is, what Carole R. Fontaine refers to as the "fiction of unbiased interpretation" (preface, 11:12).

This challenge underpins a number of assumptions that are shared by most articles in the series. One is the inescapable impact of the interpreter's social location(s) upon her or his approaches to and exegeses of the Bible (cf. Sharon Ringe, "An Approach to a Critical, Feminist, Theological Reading of the Bible," 11:156). Some contributors articulate those identity markers that in their view shape...