The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times And Our Own (review)

The Word According To Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times And Our Own by Cullen Murphy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998, 302 pp., $24.00 hardcover.

According to Cullen Murphy, feminism's encounter with the Bible is nothing short of revolutionary. His strategy in documenting the unfolding of this revolution is to focus on the revolutionaries, that is, people who critically analyze the Bible from a feminist perspective.

After a foreword and an introductory chapter, the ten chapters of Murphy's book tell the stories of academics (most of whom are women) who have made a feminist study of the Bible a central part of their life and work. The list of those he discusses reads like a Who's Who in feminist biblical scholarship: Phyllis Trible, Carol Meyers, Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Elaine Pagels, Amy Jill Levine, and many more.

Perhaps the most distinctive aspect of this work is Murphy's focus on the contexts within which these scholars do their work, the difficulties they've encountered, and something of their personal lives and interests in addition to their professional accomplishments. These inclusions may not be so surprising since Murphy is a journalist, the current managing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. The Word According to Eve is an immensely readable book, full of reports on real-life incidents that humanize and dramatize what could otherwise be a rather dry and dull academic exposition. It also illustrates one of the central tenets of feminism: that the personal is the political.

The scholars whose lives and work are documented in this book are a rather diverse group. Although practically all of them had some sort of grounding in a Jewish or Christian religious tradition as they grew up, it was articulated in communities as diverse as Catholicism, Southern Baptist, Episcopalian, conservative Judaism, and evangelical Christian. While the religious affiliation was rather nominal for some of these scholars, it was serious and committed for others. Their academic approaches to the Bible are also diverse, utilizing perspectives and methodologies gleaned from disciplines such as history, archaeology, literary studies, theology, comparative religion, and sociology.

These academics also share several commonalities. Most of them are from the United States, and even those few from Europe have studied and worked at times in the United States. Indeed, Murphy mentions several times a certain uncongeniality in Europe, primarily Germany, toward feminist approaches to the Bible. Feminist biblical scholarship remains, by and large, a North American phenomenon. Another, perhaps obvious, commonality is that these scholars have all retained some sort of investment in the Bible. They have not denounced the Bible as so hopelessly patriarchal that they have turned their backs on it.

Indeed, if these scholars are working on a revolution in biblical studies, it is most assuredly a revolution from within. Although mention is made of goddess-worship, Wicca, and radical theologians such as Mary Daly, this book is not concerned with these people and movements. The Word According to Eve is a report of an insider revolution. Cullen Murphy has interviewed scholars who have succeeded in academia, despite the odds, but all of the women are white and have a Eurocentric background. None of them speaks from a standpoint of African American women, women of the Third World, or poor and working-class women. Although there are such women in biblical studies (e.g., Kwok Pui-Lan, Renita J. Weems), they are not present in this book, an indication, perhaps, of how difficult it remains to break into the highest echelons of academia and of how invisible non-dominant viewpoints remain.

Even though Cullen Murphy organizes this book around the life-stories of feminist biblical scholars, he also clearly and skillfully discusses many of the topics central to a feminist consideration of the Bible today. Some of these have a direct bearing on the life and practices of Jewish and...