Outside Insiders and the Future of Feminist Biblical Studies

Although I did not originally participate on the panel from which most of these essays come, I was grateful to be asked to participate in this conversation about the future of feminist biblical studies. I thank Dora and Susanne for framing this discussion and for raising important and stimulating questions in their essay. Reading and responding to their comments is a valuable exercise that works toward creating a collegial and intellectually focused community of feminist biblical scholars.

Like Dora and Susanne, I begin with a personal introduction. I teach Hebrew Bible at the Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS) in New York City. I teach undergraduate and graduate students, as well as rabbinical students. Although my students come to school with a range of religious perspectives and practices (there are non-Jews, for example, in the graduate school), as an institution, JTS serves and represents the Conservative Movement—a branch of Judaism that interprets, integrates, and adapts traditional texts and practices within a contemporary context. The commitment to balance tradition with change and to make religious practice and belief relevant and honest has made the academic study of religion an integral part of the curriculum at JTS.

Reading Dora and Susanne's essay, I realize how much I benefit from the environment in which I teach. Not only because serious academic inquiry is valued at JTS but also, and more to the point, because what I teach in particular as a feminist biblical scholar is sought after. When I first wrote my response to Dora and Susanne as part of the panel for the 2008 American Academy of Religion and Society of Biblical Literature (SBL) conference, I was teaching two electives—one that studied metaphors in the Hebrew Bible and one that examined the roles and representation of biblical women. The women course had more than twice the enrollment of the metaphor course. Although anecdotal, this is my consistent experience: Bible courses offered at JTS that focus on women have terrific enrollment.

Why are feminist biblical studies popular at JTS and not at Dora's seminary? The answer, I think, has to do with the commitment at my institution to make traditional texts relevant. My students inherit a tradition rich with texts, which, for many who do not have a traditional education, are alien to them in both form and content. Although they see themselves as rightful heirs to these texts, they feel like outsiders working their way in. As my students struggle to understand and to relate to these texts, that process comes to define them.

Also, my students want more than access to these texts. They want to be both modern readers and active heirs, participating in the millennia-old tradition of Jewish Bible study. Centuries of Jewish Bible scholars worked to understand the rhetoric, meaning, and context—even the grammar—of the Bible's laws and narratives. My students participate in these traditional modes. This is how my students become legitimate Jewish readers, bringing their liberal, critical, and feminist perspectives. Though I cannot speak to this firsthand, I wonder whether their progressive counterparts in Christian seminaries experience the same confidence and legitimacy.

Feminist biblical studies thrives in this context. Biblical women may at times be powerful, but they also are marginal—and often, to contemporary readers, disturbing. For my students, who are defined by their struggle as contemporary readers of traditional texts, this is a wonderful thing. In many ways, feminist biblical studies serves as the site of their struggle. The questions of feminist biblical scholarship are familiar, legitimate, and relevant to them. More important, these questions enable them to engage deeply with the material.

I describe my students not because they are inherently unique. Rather, they are the product of a liberal religious environment where texts can be sacred and challenged—where the ongoing commitment to an intellectually rigorous and relevant religious tradition demands that they study and challenge sacred texts critically. They have the pleasure of being outside insiders—inheritors and adapters of a religious tradition. As Susanne notes, one of the great tensions within biblical studies is between the academy and...