Re-Claiming Biblical Women: Feminist (Jewish) Re-Readings of Hebrew Narratives

RE-CLAIMING BIBLICAL WOMEN: FEMINIST (JEWISH) RE-READINGS OF HEBREW NARRATIVES Esther Fuchs University of Arizona fuchs@email.arizona.edu A review of Sarah: Mother of Nations. By Tammi J. Schneider. Pp. xii + 146. New York: Continuum, 2004. Paper, $24.95. and I Am...Biblical Women Tell Their Own Stories. By Athalya Brenner. Pp. xviii + 228. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005. Paper, $13.00. In the last three decades, biblical feminist scholarship has proliferated in ways that could not have been imagined by the early practitioners of this theory, myself included. Not only have a number of manuscripts, dictionaries , reference works, commentaries, and companions been published, but increasingly feminist criticism has become an acceptable, if not normative, approach among several other leading contemporary approaches to the field of Bible Studies. Hardly a female character in the Hebrew Bible has evaded a contemporary interpretation. The proliferation of monographs in the field has further spawned a diversity of approaches and theories adding to the question of gender the analytic categories of class, nation, race, and culture. Critical approaches taking aim at biblical ideologies of ethnocentrism, monotheism, and androcentrism have routinely been questioned and debated by reconstructive and appropriative approaches, influenced largely by feminist theological readings, notably Womanist, Latina, Lesbian, and Postcolonial readings, which often consider biblical women as models of empowerment rather than embodiments of patriarchal thinking. Jewish scholars have been active in the field of biblical studies, though little has been done to elaborate a theoretical articulation of a distinctly Jewish feminist approach to the Hebrew Bible. These two books may signal an interesting development of a specifically Jewish feminist scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, though neither one of the authors explicitly identifies her reading in such terms. Schneider’s book pays special attention to the double meanings of consonantal Hebrew, taking the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and Masoretic blocking of the Masoretic Text of Genesis—(parashot rather than later sequencing of chapters). Hebrew Studies 47 (2006) 396 Review Essay Brenner’s book includes original midrashim on biblical women, notably silenced and marginal characters. Though much has been written on the Hebrew Bible, not enough has been done to differentiate between those who work on the “Old Testament” and those who work on the Hebrew Bible. Though both scholars come at the text from distinctly different perspectives , they each contribute in their own very different ways to what I consider to be a new, under-valued development within the broader context of feminist criticism. There are two ways to reclaim the text, one is to re-read the text and find in it a sympathetic portrayal of women, and another is to transcend the text and seek in creative, or midrashic imagination the voice of the woman who is suppressed and silenced. In Sarah: Mother of Nations, Tammi J. Schneider develops this latter approach to the Hebrew Bible, an approach that has been theorized as “depatriarchalizing” the Bible by Phyllis Trible in the late 1970s. This approach has been used by such commentators as Tikva Frymer Kensky, Ilana Pardes, and Tamara Eskenazi, who emphasize the centrality and importance of female characters in the text and the various ways in which their characterization highlights their significance in the overall story of Israel as a people . Schneider seeks to reconstruct the role and rehabilitate the character of Sarah, the first matriarch of Israel, through a detailed reading of the various Genesis texts that invoke her. She does this by connecting apparently unrelated stories about Lot, Hagar, and Isaac to the story of Sarah and by juxtaposing Sarah’s overall characterization to that of Abraham’s. In her introduction she summarizes her thesis as follows: “What I make clear in this study is that Sarah is as much chosen by the Deity as is Abraham” (p. 5). Schneider takes the terms of the biblical narrative at face value, and does not seem to confront some of the major feminist challenges to the concepts of genealogy, election, and the valorization of female procreativity. Nor does she place herself within a context of feminist interpretation (though she does see herself as a feminist scholar). She seems to collapse the boundaries between feminist critique and male traditional scholarship, and her...