Women and the Bible

PERHAPS A RUMOR or impending persecution lay behind it, as several scholars have speculated. Perhaps the reason for concealment was something else entirely. We can never know why twelve ancient codices and a fragment of a thirteenth came to rest where they were found. The place was a rugged curtain of cliffs rising above the valley of the Nile River, near where today there is a village called Nag Hammadi. The time was the late fourth century or early fifth century A.D. For whatever reason, someone, perhaps a monk from the local monastery of St. Pachomius, took steps to preserve some holy books—Coptic translations of works that had originally been written in Greek, works of the kind that had been denounced as heretical by Athanasius, the archbishop of Alexandria. The words of the prophet Jeremiah may have played through the mind of the person hiding the codices: “Put them in an earthenware jar, that they may last for a long time.” For it was in an earthen jar, hidden in a cavity under a rock at the base of the cliffs, that the papyrus manuscripts were eventually discovered.

The Nag Hammadi library, as these texts have come to be called, was brought to light in 1945. By the early 1950s, after feuds and transactions of Levantine complexity, almost all of the Nag Hammadi collection was in the safe but jealous hands of the Coptic Museum, in Cairo, which for many years proved exceedingly particular about whom it would allow to study the documents. It was clear very early, however, that the codices, which contained forty previously unknown works, would offer unprecedented access to the world of the Gnostics, a variegated group of Christian communities, active as early as a century after the time of Jesus, that diverged sharply from the emerging Christian orthodoxy in many ways— one of them frequently being the prominence, both in theology and in community life, of women.

Elaine Pagels was a doctoral student in religion at Harvard University during the late 1960s, when mimeographed transcriptions of the Nag Hammadi library were circulating among American and European scholars. Her area of interest was the history of early Christianity. There were no women then on the faculty of Harvard’s program in religion, and the dean who accepted Pagels as a doctoral candidate had turned her down the first time she applied. In this field, he explained in a letter, women didn’t last. But now, after applying again, here she was, with the working knowledge of Latin and Greek that anyone dealing with early Christian texts requires, and the Nag Hammadi mimeographs caught her attention. Because the transcriptions were in Coptic, which is Egyptian written with the Greek alphabet and a few other characters, Pagels added Coptic to her repertoire (and also Hebrew) and got to work.

Sitting one afternoon recently in her office at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton, I spoke with Pagels about her Harvard years and other matters. Pagels, who is a professor in the religion department at Princeton University, works at certain times at the institute, which offers scholars a chance to pursue research without the distraction of teaching. It is a modern and spacious place, set impersonally among vast lawns. In Pagels’s office a photograph of her late husband sat upon the sill. A girl’s bicycle was propped against a wall. Pagels has two young children, and a demeanor that somehow manages to be calmer than her circumstances are.

“I discovered,” Pagels said, thinking back to her initial encounter with the Nag Hammadi materials, “as did the other graduate students, that our professors had file folders full of Gnostic texts of secret Gospels that many of them told us were absurd and blasphemous and heretical—but interesting. And I did find these texts interesting. And exciting. I think that perhaps my empathy for them had something to do with being a woman in an environment that was almost exclusively male. I found things among the heretics that were startlingly congenial.” Pagels became part of the team that would translate the Nag Hammadi texts into English and provide a critical apparatus for them.

Not until 1975, five years after completing a doctoral dissertation on certain aspects of the Nag Hammadi library, did Pagels have an opportunity to inspect the documents themselves. At various times during a stay in Egypt, Pagels would visit the small, unprepossessing room in the Coptic Museum where the Nag Hammadi library is kept, one day perhaps to examine The Interpretation of Knowledge, another to examine A Valentinian Exposition or The Gospel of Mary. The documents looked, she remembers thinking, like tobacco leaves. Each fragile page, each fragment, lies flat between sheets of hard plastic, the black lettering stark against a mottled golden background, the underlying weave of the crushed papyrus fronds plainly visible. The Coptic Museum was a place of columns and courtyards and quiet. The only interruption was caused by the cleaning woman, and Pagels and any other scholars present would continue working at their desks when she came in, lifting their legs as soapy water was spilled and spread beneath them over the stone floors.

In a book called The Gnostic Gospels (1979), which received wide attention when it was published and occasioned a sometimes bitter scholarly debate, Pagels took some of those fragments that lie flat between plastic and sought to give them dimension, set them in history, bring ancient sensibilities back to life. She described Gnostic groups who saw God as a “dyad” embodying both masculine and feminine aspects, and who explicitly invoked the feminine aspect in their prayers: “May She who is before all things, the incomprehensible and indescribable Grace, fill you within, and increase in you her own knowledge.” Some groups conceived of the third person in Christianity’s trinitarian God—a God consisting of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—to be female, and so rendered the Trinity, logically enough, as Father, Son, and Mother. Powerful feminine imagery and ideology suffuse many Gnostic texts, and this found parallels in the practice of a number of Gnostic groups, which permitted women to hold priestly office. Gnostic thought was disorderly and fantastical, and for a variety of reasons was spurned by Christian polemicists (although some elements seem to find echoes in the Gospel of John). But it preserves some early Christian traditions, and is valuable for its reflection of currents in popular religion that are only dimly reflected in the canon of sanctioned Christian works—currents important to an understanding of Christianity’s unruly beginnings.

Some of the Gnostics wore much intrigued by the Creation stories in the Book of Genesis. Pagels, too, became intrigued, and in 1988 she produced Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, a book more ambitious than The Gnostic Gospels. The Bible’s Creation stories—or, perhaps more precisely, the interpretation of the Creation stories that came to be accepted—form the basis for a view of humanity as existing in a fallen state, of woman as having led humanity astray, of man as being ordained to be the master of woman, and of sexuality as a corrupting aspect of human nature. And yet, as Pagels shows, this is not how the Creation stories were interpreted by many Jews and early Christians, and it is sometimes difficult to see how such conclusions came to be drawn. Pagels points to other traditions in Jewish and Christian thought: of the Creation stories as parables of human equality, men and women both being formed in the image and likeness of God; of the stories as evocations of God’s gift of moral freedom. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent traces the clashes of interpretation in the early Church, which culminated in the triumph of Augustine, whose harsh views on the subject would become those of much of the Western world— would help define Western consciousness—for a millennium and a half.

The point is, Pagels told me, early Christianity was a remarkably diverse and fractious religious movement, There were traditions within it that the evolution of a stronger, more institutionalized tradition would largely destroy. Acknowledging this fact has implications for our own time and for people who have often felt excluded or even oppressed by the dominant tradition. It has implications in particular for women. “The history of Christianity has been told from a single point of view,”Pagels said. “If that point of view is no longer tenable historically, then it enables people to develop other perceptions.”

THE WORK OF FLAINE PAGELS IS BUTONE MANIFEStation of a larger phenomenon: the rapidly expanding influence of feminist scholars in the study of Jewish and Christian history, and the reassessment of certain issues that has ensued as a result. The body of work that these scholars have produced is by now substantial. Virtually all of it has been published within the past fifteen years. Most has been published within the past ten. While the writing can at times be difficult—some scholars don methodology like chain mail—a strikingly large proportion, whether in specialized journals or in books, is written so as to be broadly accessible to readers outside academe.

The motivations, besides simple intellectual curiosity, that lie behind this work are not difficult to discern. There is the perception that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament deal with women unfairly in many spheres; the need to understand why they do; the suspicion that an alternative past awaits recovery. Among some scholars there is a conviction, too, that recovering the past could help change the present—for example, could help make the case for giving women access to positions in religious ministry and religious leadership from which they are now barred. Although half of all Christian denominations permit the ordination of women, as do Reform and Conservative Judaism, the issue remains a matter of strongly felt conflict. The work of feminist scholars, both individually and collectively, has been greeted in some quarters with impatience, irritation, dismissiveness, even contempt. But it has also established women’s issues as a permanent focus of biblical studies. That it has done so is one important element of the broader engagement of feminism with every aspect of organized religion.

A few years ago I set out to explore this branch of scholarship—to meet some of its practitioners and become familiar with some of their work. My focus was not on politics but on research. The people whose work is touched on here are drawn not from the sometimes airy or angry outskirts of the feminist biblical enterprise but from its solid scholarly core. They come from several religious backgrounds, represent several scholarly disciplines, and, as feminists, display a range of stances toward religion in general and the Bible in particular. Their work thus defies easy summary. My intention is to let it speak for itself.

The Patriarchy Problem

THE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT HAS AS YET HAD meager impact on some academic realms, but the realm of religion is not among the scarcely affected. Even if the convergence of feminism and religion has prompted developments on the fringes of popular culture which would strike some as bizarre (the proliferation of neo-pagan “goddess" movements comes to mind), the truly significant consequences have occurred closer to the mainstream of ministry and scholarship. Walk into the department of religion or the divinity school at any major university today and the bulletin board will paint the same picture: seminar after workshop after lecture on almost any conceivable matter involving women and religion. The influx of women into divinityschool programs has by now received considerable attention. So has the movement to adopt “inclusive" language, when appropriate, in translations of Scripture, and to correct mistranslations of Scripture that have served to obscure feminine references and imagery. This movement saw its most important victory in 1990, with the publication by the National Council of Churches of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. But much of the work being done by women in biblical scholarship and related fields—work that demands immense erudition—remains far less well known.

The Bible has always been a compelling object of study, both because questions of religious faith are inextricably involved and because it is a window—albeit one whose refractions may distort and occlude—onto much of human history. With respect to issues of gender the Bible is also, of course, highly problematic, to use a word that no feminist scholar I’ve spoken with can help uttering in a tone of ironic politeness. It is a central tenet of contemporary feminism that a patriarchal template governs the way people have come to think and behave as individuals and as societies. The Bible is no stranger to patriarchy. It is an androcentric document in the extreme. It was written mostly if not entirely by men. It was edited by men. It describes a succession of societies over a period of roughly 1,200 years whose public life was dominated by men. And because the Bible’s focus is predominantly on public rather than private life, it talks almost only about men. In the Hebrew Bible as a whole, only 111 of the 1,426 people who are given names are women. The proportion of women in the New Testament is about twice as great, which still leaves them a small minority.

As a prescriptive text, moreover, the Bible has been interpreted as justifying the subordination of women to men: “In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” “Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord.” “Indeed, man was not made from woman, but woman from man. Neither was man created for the sake of woman, but woman for the sake of man.” As a text that has been presumed by hundreds of millions of people to speak with authority, moreover, the Bible has helped enforce what it prescribes. There is no getting around the disturbing character, for women, of much of the Bible, short of an interpretive reading (a “hermeneutic,” to use the term of art) that may represent something of a stretch—short of what one biblical scholar has called an act of “hermeneutical ventriloquism.”

The subjection of the Bible to historical and critical scrutiny, a revolution in scholarship that began during the latter half of the nineteenth century, was undertaken almost entirely by men. It did not occur to these men that the way the Bible treats women—or, just as important, fails to treat women—might be a fit matter for study. The Society of Biblical Literature, which remains to this day the leading professional group in the field, was founded in 1880, and inducted its first woman member in 1894. But the relative handful of women who embarked on careers in biblical studies in the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth showed virtually no interest in women’s issues. As the historian Dorothy Bass, of the Chicago Theological Seminary, has shown, it was women outside academe who first pursued the matter: women like the abolitionist Sarah Grimké, in the 1830s, and, later, Frances Willard, of the Women’s Christian Temperance Uinion.

Their aims, initially, were two. The first was to identify and critically confront passages and stories about women which they deemed objectionable—the stories, for example, of Delilah, in the Book of Judges, and of Jezebel, in I Kings. The second aim was to seek out and elevate to greater prominence passages and stories about women which are positive and ennobling—for example, the remarkable image of Wisdom personified as a woman, in Proverbs, and the stories of Deborah, in Judges, and of the prophetess Huldah, in II Kings. Both these strands of the early feminist response to the Bible have survived, in increasingly sophisticated forms, down to the present.

The suffragist leader Elizabeth Cady Stanton made a contribution by means of that remarkable fin-de-siècle document The Woman’s Bible, the first volume of which was published in 1895. Though well into her eighties, Stanton oversaw a committee of female editors who scrutinized and critically glossed every passage in the Bible having to do with women. She came to the conclusion that little could be salvaged from Scripture which was fully compatible with the belief system of a rational modern feminist. None of the women who worked on The Woman’s Bible was a biblical scholar. Female biblical scholars refused to participate in the project, afraid, Stanton believed, “that their high reputation and scholarly attainments might be compromised by taking part in an enterprise that for a time may prove very unpopular.”

Female biblical scholars did not face up to issues of gender—did not, as Frances Willard had urged, “make a specialty of Hebrew and New Testament Greek in the interest of their sex”—in any significant way until the 1960s. One call to action came from a professor of biblical literature at Smith College, Margaret Brackenbury Crook, who in a book called Women and Religion (1964) took aim at the “masculine monopoly” on all important matters in all the world’s great faiths. She repeated the plaintive question of the biblical figure Miriam: “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” By the 1970s, of course, a generalized version of that question could be sensed almost everywhere in the culture. Departments of religion and divinity schools were merely two among the crowd of institutions that saw more and more women seeking access, bringing with them unfamiliar questions and ways of thinking.

Biblical scholarship is still a predominantly male endeavor, but inroads by women have been substantial. The female membership of the Society of Biblical Literature amounted to three percent of the total in 1970. It now exceeds 16 percent. The share of the student membership that is female—a harbinger, surely—is 30 percent. In 1987 the society elected its first woman president, Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, a theologian who at the time was a professor at Episcopal Divinity School, and who now teaches at Harvard. The joint annual meeting of the SBL and the American Academy of Religion today features a large number of sessions on women’s issues, chiefly by women but sometimes by men. “Prostitutes and Penitents in the Early Christian Church.”“Redeeming the Unredeemable: Genesis 22—A Jewish Feminist Perspective.” “Rape as a Military Metaphor in the Hebrew Bible.” The opening address at the AAR portion of last year’s joint meeting was given by Mary Daly, whose first two books, The Church and the Second Sex (1968) and Beyond God the Father (1973), were a source of inspiration to many women with an interest in religion. (Daly herself has ventured not only beyond God the Father but also beyond Christianity, and is by now well off the beaten track; she maintains an uneasy professorship in the department of theology at Boston College, a school run by Jesuit priests.) At the next joint meeting, this coming November, the SBL will install its second woman president: Phyllis Trible, of Union Theological Seminary.

IT WAS SCHÜSSLER FIORENZA’S WORK—MOST NOTABLY her book In Memory of Her (1983), to which I was introduced almost a decade ago in the course of research on a related subject—that drew me into the world of women whose academic lives revolve, one way or another, around the central texts of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Schüssler Fiorenza, a soft-spoken native of Germany, is the Krister Stendahl Professor of Divinity at the Harvard Divinity School. She is also a founder and a co-editor of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, one of several academic journals in the field with a focus on women. Schüssler Fiorenza is quick to acknowledge that coming to the United States, as she did in 1970, with a fresh doctorate in New Testament studies from the University of Münster, marked a turning point in her interests. The United States offered what Germany at the time did not: a strong and active feminist movement and a university system whose faculties—crucially, whose theology-department faculties—were open to women. Schüssler Fiorenza, in her own words, “began doing theology as a woman and for women.” Her writing has focused primarily on the role played by women during the conception, birth, and infancy of Christianity.

Historical reconstruction of the Jesus movement is risky and fraught. Among other things, as Schüssler Fiorenza reminded me during a conversation one afternoon, “within both Judaism and Christianity the patriarchal side won”— thus determining the lens through which interpretation would look. One must approach the texts with a “hermeneutic of suspicion,”to use a phrase that is by now a cliché in feminist biblical circles. The references to women that do exist in Christian works, Schüssler Fiorenza said, surely represent the tip of the iceberg, though unfortunately much of the part that is submerged now is likely to remain submerged forever.

And yet, she went on, there is some significant material about women to work with, if only we are not blind to it. The Gospels, she noted, are unequivocal in placing women prominently among the marginalized people who made up so much of Jesus’ circle. Women are shown as having been instrumental in opening up the Jesus community to non-Jews. After the Crucifixion it was the women of Galilee who helped hold together the Jesus movement in Jerusalem as other disciples fled. Women were the first to discover the empty tomb and the first to experience a vision of a resurrected Jesus. Jesus’ message was in part a radical attack on the traditional social structures of the Greco-Roman world—structures that limited the participation of women in the public sphere, and that the Jesus movement sought to replace with what Schüssler Fiorenza calls “a discipleship of equals.”

And after Jesus was gone? Christianity’s penumbral first centuries can be difficult to apprehend. The texts that would make up the New Testament—not to mention the many other texts that survive from Christian communities—were at this time being written, edited, and re-edited, each text created in the context of certain communities and to fulfill certain purposes. What emerges from Schüssler Fiorenza’s reading is a Christian missionary movement that in its initial stages “allowed for the full participation and leadership of women.” She notes in In Memory of Her that in the authentic letters of Paul, women are singled out by name and given titles the same as or comparable to those held by male leaders. Prisca, a traveling missionary, is described by Paul as a peer, a “co-worker.” Phoebe, in Cenchreae, is called a diakonos, a title Paul also gives himself.

Some scholars have in the past tried to explain away evidence like this, Schüssler Fiorenza writes, by arguing that when held by women such titles must have been mere honorifics. Or they have translated the titles differently. Diakonos, for example, which is usually translated as “minister,” “missionary,” or “deacon” when associated with men, has usually been downplayed as “deaconess” or even “helper” when associated with women. Scholars have also argued that people whose names are apparently female must actually have been men. Schüssler Fiorenza observes that the social mores of the time left ample room for women to wield authority in early Christianity. For one thing, the rituals of Christianity evolved in a network of churches based in homes, and within the home, women could claim important rights and responsibilities. Schüssler Fiorenza argues, finally, that early Christianity was built around a theology of equality; that Paul’s famous reiteration in Galatians 3:28 of the ancient baptismal formula—“There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus”—represents not a radical and temporary breakthrough in Paul’s thinking but an expression of broad and ordinary Christian belief. In Schüssler Fiorenza’s view, Galatians 3:28 is “the magna carta of Christian feminism.”

Schüssler Fiorenza is a theologian, and she has an explicitly theological agenda. In her approach to Scripture she aims to highlight themes of unfolding liberation and emancipation. But large portions of her work exemplify a strategy pursued by non-theologians as well: the attempt to pierce the veil of the sources, to discern what was social and religious reality in a distant time. This may involve textual scholarship—training attention on vocabulary, on rhetorical style, on whatever can be inferred about the editing process. It may involve the disciplines of archaeology and anthropology—coming at early Jewish and Christian life from the outside, and looking at what the physical record has to say. All this work presupposes a broad grounding in some very obscure aspects of history. The work can be frustrating in the extreme. The materials available are often meager, and the conclusions drawn sometimes precarious and insubstantial.

Elaine Pagels spoke about some of the endeavor’s hazards and intricacies and opportunities in one of our conversations. We had been talking about the issue of an author’s point of view. Pagels observed that in some instances the documentary record of certain suppressed opinions consists only of the surviving criticisms of those opinions. Before the discovery of the Nag Hammadi library, Gnostic thinking was a prime example: many Gnostic beliefs had been scathingly summarized in the writings of Irenaeus of Lyons, a second-century theologian and foe of heretics. Images of women can sometimes be made out in the same way. “We have to read the texts aware that the point of view may not reflect the whole social reality,” Pagels told me. “It will reflect the point of view of the people writing the texts, and the groups they represent. And generally women were not doing the writing. So we have to make a lot out of the few clues that are found.”

She reached for a comparison to bring home the nature of this situation. “Imagine,” she said after a moment’s reflection, “having to re-create the thinking of Karl Marx on the basis of a handful of anti-communist tracts from the 1950s.”

Salvage Operations

UNION THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, IN NEW YORK, occupies two city blocks along Broadway, in a neighborhood that might be thought of as upper Manhattan’s religion district. The Jewish Theological Seminary of America lies across the street to the northeast, taking up much of a third city block. Across the street to the southwest, taking up a fourth city block, lies The Interchurch Center, which houses scores of religious organizations: groups devoted to social work, missionary work, publishing, broadcasting. (The square, clunky structure is known as “the God box.”) And across the street directly to the west, occupying a fifth city block, is Riverside Church, long a bulwark of social activism with a mildly hallowed cast. Union is an example of the kind of liberal, nondenominational seminary whose student body in recent years has become increasingly female: almost 55 percent of its more than 300 students are women. It is a comfortable, reassuring place. The architecture is monastic, preserving outwardly in cool stone a way of life that no longer prevails inside.

In the library’s reading room, whose shelves hold the leather-bound classics required for exegetic work, and from around whose perimeter gleam the marbled pates of learned men, it is perhaps possible to believe that this is still the Union Seminary of Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. But in the hallways of the living quarters the tricycles and toys betray a changed demography. The omnipresent flyers announcing meetings also tell a story. “Hunger Strike Demanding Action for Peace and Reunification in Korea.” “Feminists for Animal Rights.” “Lesbian-Gay Caucus Sez Howdy.” These people, one senses, are busy, committed. They do not lack up-to-date agendas.

Phyllis Trible is the Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature. Her office at Union sits high above the quadrangle, under the eaves, and in it one can occupy a certain chair at a certain angle and almost be persuaded that the world outside the window is the world of Oxford or Cambridge. On a wall of Trible’s office hangs a photograph of a white-haired man in a dark suit and tie—James Muilenburg, who was a professor at Union when Trible was a student here, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and who taught the first class she attended at the seminary. “I’ll never forget that class,” Trible recalled one day. She speaks with precision in an accent shaped by her native Virginia. “He walked in with a stack of syllabi under his arm and he put them down on the table and started quoting Hebrew poetry: the ‘Sword of Lamech,’ in Genesis. And he dramatized the whole thing—took the sword and plunged it in. He asked us where that sword reappeared, and jumped to Peter in the New Testament. I was utterly captivated, and have never gotten over it to this day.” Trible is but one of several female biblical scholars I’ve met who, whatever problems being a woman may have caused them in academe, warmly acknowledge a close intellectual relationship with a male mentor.

Trible is the author of two books, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978) and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (1984), that would appear in anyone’s canon of feminist biblical studies. Even colleagues who have no affinity with Trible’s work—who differ radically in outlook—may acknowledge a debt. Ask graduate students in their twenties or established scholars in their thirties or forties how an interest was awakened in women’s issues and biblical studies, and the answer will often turn out to involve an article or a book by Trible.

It is important to recognize where Trible stands in a spectrum that ranges, as she explained to me, “from some fundamentalists who claim that they are feminists but say they have no problem with the Bible to those at the other extreme who are unwilling to concede the Bible any authority at all.” Trible is in the middle. She doesn’t forget for a minute, she said, that the Bible is a thoroughly patriarchal text. But she is hardly a member of the rejectionist camp. She believes that the Bible can be “reclaimed” as a spiritual resource for women. And in all fairness, she said, it must be pointed out that the Bible is sometimes not as patriarchal as translations would make it seem. This is not just a matter of exclusive language. Trible pulled down a copy of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, opened it to Deuteronomy 32:18, and read this passage: “You were unmindful of the Rock that begot you, and you forgot the God who gave you birth.” She said, “Those words ‘gave you birth’ are from a Hebrew term for ‘writhing in labor,’ so the translation, if accurate, is tame. But here is how the Jerusalem Bible translates it: ‘fathered you.’”

The work that initially brought Trible to prominence was a pair of journal articles in the 1970s on the two Creation stories in the Book of Genesis. These articles—the first ones written on the subject from a feminist perspective—were an attempt at reclamation. Trible argued that properly understood, the Creation stories, including the story of Adam and Eve, did not actually say what centuries of interpretation have made them say. For example, is woman to be considered subordinate to man, as some traditional interpretations would have it, simply because she was created after he was? If that is the case, Trible argued, then why are human beings not regarded as subordinate to animals, since Genesis 1:27 plainly declares that human beings were created after the animals were?

But that is almost beside the point, because it is a mistake, in Trible’s view, to think of the first human being, Adam, as male. She points out that the Hebrew word ’adham, from which “Adam” derives, is a generic term for humankind—it denotes a being created from the earth— and is used to describe a creature of undifferentiated sex. Only when the Lord takes a rib from ’adham to make a companion are the sexes differentiated, and the change is signaled by the terminology. The creature from whom the rib was taken is now referred to not as ’adham but as ’ish (“man”), and the creature fashioned from the rib is called ’ishshah (“woman”). In Trible’s reading, the sexes begin in equality. It is only after the act of disobedience occasioned by the serpent’s temptation, and the departure of ’ish and ’ishshah from their initial and intended condition, that the sexes fall out of equality. It is only then, in this disobedient state, that the man establishes his dominance. Oppression of women by men, then, is not what was meant for humanity, even if it is what we have come to. “Rather than legitimating the patriarchal culture from which it comes,” Trible concluded, “the myth places that culture under judgment.”

Much as one hears the polite word “problematic” applied to material in the Bible which some feminist scholars deem to be negative, so also one hears the polite word “optimistic” applied to interpretations that some feminist scholars deem to be too positive. Trible is not unfamiliar with the latter charge. Her response would be that “optimistic” is a term that makes sense only if one assumes that the relationship people have with the Bible is as with something dead. She thinks of the Bible differently—as if it were a pilgrim forging new relationships over time. There are ways, she believes, of articulating a conversation between feminism and the Bible in which each critiques the other.

I was familiar, of course, with how feminism might critique the Bible. I asked Trible what critique the Bible offers of feminism. She replied that there was sometimes a tendency to make too much of feminism, to put it on a pedestal, and that the Bible calls attention to that kind of propensity. “It warns,” she said,“against idolatry.”

TRIBLE’S SPECIALTY IS A FORM OF CRITICISM KNOWN as rhetorical criticism, which pays particular attention to a document’s literary architecture. During one conversation Trible walked me through some passages that, together, may offer an instance of a biblical woman’s falling victim to editorial manhandling. The passages tell the story of Miriam—the sister of Moses and Aaron, a woman who was perhaps considered by the Israelites to be the equal of her brothers, but of whom few traces survive in the Bible as it has finally come down to us.

We meet Miriam in the Book of Exodus. It is she who persuades Pharaoh’s daughter to raise the infant Moses— left in a basket among the rushes on the banks of the Nile —as her own, and to bring along Moses’ mother as nurse. Miriam is not at this point given a name; the woman who saves the infant’s life is identified only as his sister. And as the story of Moses proceeds, Miriam disappears—until the crossing of the Red Sea. Then, when the Israelites reach the far shore, Pharaoh’s armies having been destroyed, there is a song of rejoicing: the poetic Song at the Sea, sung by Moses and the people of Israel. It begins, “I will sing to the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; / horse and rider he has thrown into the sea.” No sooner has Moses finished than there comes a small fragment of text that appears out of place. The fate of Pharaoh’s armies is for some reason quickly retold, and then, with the Israelites once again safely on shore, we learn that “the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister,” begins to sing the very same Song at the Sea. She sings the first two lines. The text then moves on to other business.

Trible paused. There are several interesting things here, she said. One is that we learn for the first time that the sister of Aaron, who must also be the sister of Moses, has a name, and that it is Miriam. We also see that she is called a prophet and that this occurs at a place in the text well before the place where Moses is first called a prophet, though the precise meaning of “prophet” in the context of Exodus remains unclear. What this piece of text about Miriam represents, Trible said, is the dogged survival of an earlier version of the Exodus story. Indeed, she pointed out, scholars have argued that in the most ancient Israelite traditions the singing of the Song at the Sea was ascribed not to Moses but to Miriam. The role was only later shifted away from Miriam. (As an aside, Trible observed that the first work on the attribution of the Song at the Sea to Miriam dates back to the mid-1950s—and was done by men. She added pointedly, “I’m not one to say that you can’t use the previous generation of scholarship—not at all.”)

Miriam moves with the people of Israel into the desert, whereupon she disappears from the Book of Exodus. But she reappears later in the Bible, in connection with what seems to be a severe clash within the leadership, one from which Miriam emerges the loser—accounting, perhaps, for her diminished prominence. The reappearance occurs amid the jumble of the Book of Numbers, wherein Miriam and Aaron are heard to question the authority of their brother, asking the question that Trible and others ask more broadly: “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” The Lord does not punish Aaron, but Miriam is struck down with a skin affliction, possibly leprosy, for her rebelliousness, and later dies in the wilderness of Zin.

And yet there are signs that the memory of Miriam in the Israelite consciousness remains an active and uplifting one. Miriam has always been associated with water, Trible noted—remember the basket among the rushes? remember the Song at the Sea?—and the text immediately following the notice of Miriam’s death again brings up the subject of water. It reads, “Now there was no water for the congregation.” In standard editions of the Bible that sentence starts a new paragraph, as if the subject is suddenly being changed. Trible said, “Written Hebrew doesn’t have such breaks. The paragraph marking after the end of the Miriam story is artificial. It makes you miss the idea that what is happening is connected to Miriam’s death. Nature is mourning the loss of Miriam.” Henceforward in the Bible, Miriam reappears only in hints and fragments, as in this passage from Deuteronomy: “Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam on your journey out of Egypt.” But she survives in real life—in the form of the continuing popularity of the name Miriam. The New Testament, compiled more than a millennium after Miriam’s death, is populated with a multitude of women named Mary—the Hellenized version of the Hebrew Miriam. It is no coincidence, Trible has argued, that the Magnificat, the great canticle of Mary the mother of Jesus, borrows imagery directly from the Song at the Sea.

Miriam, Trible said, is only one of a number of apparently powerful women in the Bible who are alluded to almost in passing, the modesty of the references at odds with the importance of the roles these women seem to play. The references hint, perhaps, at the existence of a class of women in Israel whose history has in essence been lost, or can today be recovered only by means of the most delicate salvage, even then yielding mere wisps of insight. But that the references survive at all—that the editors believed some mention of these women had to be made—is itself suggestive.

“It shows,” Trible said, “that the stories just couldn’t be squelched.”

The Earliest Israelites

DURING PART OF ALMOST EVERY YEAR FOR THIRTY years Carol Meyers, a professor of religion at Duke University, has left behind the comforts of university life for the rigors of archaeological excavations in the Middle East. For the past five summers she and her husband, Eric, have led excavations at a place called Sepphoris, in Israel, a site with remains as recent as the Crusades and as ancient as the Iron Age. Sepphoris, near Nazareth, in Galilee, is said in Christian tradition to be the birthplace of Mary. This summer Carol and Eric Meyers are excavating an Iron Age site at Sepphoris, one that dates to the earliest years of the Israelite people.

I visited Carol Meyers not long before her latest tour of duty in the Middle East, and she began describing the conditions under which she and her colleagues worked there. We were in her Gothic office at Duke, and the crowded shelves around us held books like L’architecture domestique du Levant and Catalogue of Ancient Near-Eastern Seals in the Ashmolean Museum—the sort of books that elicit in me a vague yearning for baked earth and native porters. When you step off the plane in Israel, Meyers said, it is always a visual shock. Even with the achievements of modern irrigation— even in the rainy season—much of the landscape is forbidding: barren, rocky, thorny. And in the summer it is hot. And in the winter, as people abroad often do not realize, it is cold. There is wind and hail and sleet.

These conditions are at their most extreme in the hill country of Judea and Samaria and Galilee, where the Israelites first emerged, inhabiting the unforgiving uplands because the Canaanite city-states controlled the fertile bottomlands. In this marginal ecological niche, where water was scarce and soils were bad, the tribes of Israel clung to a tenuous subsistence. They terraced the hills to make fields. They built cisterns lined with slaked-lime plaster to hold water.

Precisely who the Israelites were and where they came from remain matters of debate, but their appearance in the Land of Canaan can be dated to roughly 1250 B.C. The period of the Israelite monarchy, the kingdom of Saul and David and Solomon and their successors, was two centuries away, and the demands of social organization tell almost entirely upon the family—or, more precisely, upon clusters of related families. There was no central government, no structured politics, no sense of a public domain.

In this inhospitable and tribalized world, Carol Meyers believes, men and women functioned in social parity. The books of the Bible that describe this period of Israel’s history—Judges and Joshua, primarily—do not necessarily show this to be the case, of course. Having achieved final form centuries later, they depict a society in which most of the important roles were played by men. But, as Meyers observed, there is frequently a big disjunction between a society’s public stance and the everyday social reality; and everyday social reality in ancient Israel has only recently become an object of scrutiny. In biblical studies as in many other kinds of scholarship, social history has been a latecomer, and it is in social rather than political history that women tend at last to emerge from the background.

That Carol Meyers developed an interest in biblical studies at all is an accident of history. When she was an undergraduate at Wellesley, in the mid-1960s, a course in the Old Testament and the New Testament was required for graduation. Wellesley’s insistence on biblical education, now long since dropped, had deep historical roots: Wellesley was a college where female biblical scholars had since the late nineteenth century found a congenial home. The first woman to present a paper at a meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature (1913) was a Wellesley professor, as was the first woman to publish a paper in the society’s Journal of Biblical Literature (1917). Meyers found herself drawn to the world of the Bible, and after a summer spent on an archaeological excavation in Wyoming, run by Harvard University, she knew that she wanted to combine biblical studies and archaeology. She began studying biblical Hebrew and then took up Akkadian, a Semitic language with many Hebrew cognates. In graduate school at Brandeis she was the only woman in most of her classes, and she had no female professors.

Needless to say, there was no such thing as feminist biblical studies. Nor did Meyers feel an inner tug in that direction. “It really was only once I began teaching at Duke,” she recalled when we spoke, “that I became aware of the need and of the potential for gender studies with respect to Scripture. It really wasn’t even at my own initiative—and I’m not embarrassed to say that. When I started teaching here, my colleagues said, ‘Listen, you have to put a couple of courses on our curriculum that are of your own design. Why don’t you think about doing some course on women and the Bible, or something like that?’ This was in the mid-seventies, and I was the only woman in the department. Of course I said yes. When I started trying to put such a course together, I found out that there was no material. No one had done any research on it; no one had written about it. And that’s when I started doing work myself.”

Much of that work is embodied in Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (1988), a book that draws on biblical sources and, more important, the insights offered by archaeology and social anthropology to reconstruct aspects of life in Israel before the dawn of monarchy and complex political institutions.

THE ECONOMIC FUNCTIONS OF MEN AND WOMEN at that time would have been separate and distinct, Meyers writes, with the men disproportionately responsible for tasks involving brute strength and the women responsible for tasks requiring technology or specialized skills or social sophistication: shearing wool and weaving cloth, processing and preserving food, teaching children, and managing a complex household whose membership, excavated floor plans suggest, usually went far beyond the nuclear family. In pre-monarchic Israel, as in primitive societies today where the household is the basic political and economic unit, women would have been central and authoritative figures.

Meyers observes further that the God of Israel, in sharp contrast to the gods of all other contemporaneous religions, was perceived at this time as asexual. Moreover, when God had to be described metaphorically, both male and female imagery was used. The prominence of God as father is a very late development in Israelite religion, Meyers argues, and makes only rare appearances in the Hebrew Bible itself (the term “father” is used in association with God just ten times).

The editors of the Bible have preserved traces of what Meyers believes was a relatively egalitarian regime. The Book of Judges, which reached its final form around the time of the Babylonian Captivity (586—538 B.C.), depicts life in Israel half a millennium earlier, and contains material that is very old. It brings to our attention an unusually large number of self-assured and powerful women. One of these, Deborah, is referred to as both a prophet and a judge. The “judges” in these earliest times were not magistrates but rather those few individuals among the Israelites whose authority extended beyond household and tribe and might be thought of as somehow national. Some scholars have even speculated that one portion of the Book of Judges, the so-called Song of Deborah, may have been composed by a woman. (Resolving such matters of authorship is at this point impossible. It should be noted that the recent and widely publicized Book of J, in which the literary critic Harold Bloom entertains the conceit that one of the authors of the Pentateuch, the so-called J source, was a woman, is not held in high regard by biblical scholars, whatever the truth about J’s identity may be. An earlier and more reliable book that speculates briefly on the same question is Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman.)

To Israelite women’s economic productivity—at least equal in importance to that of men—must be added the essential element of reproductivity. Meyers reads the Bible mindful of the precarious demographic circumstances confronting the early Israelites. “It’s wrong,” she said, “to impose our idea of the individual on a society in which that may not have been a driving force in human development. The ‘me-ness’ or the ‘I-ness’ of our own contemporary life cannot be superimposed upon another era. The demands of community survival meant cooperation and a sense that what people were doing was in order for the group to survive. I get annoyed at some feminist critics who don’t consider the social-history perspective. They see things like ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth’ as meaning that the sole purpose of a woman is to conceive children. And all her interactions with God or with her husband seem to be to bring that fact about. They say, ‘Well, a woman is just giving up her body for her husband.’ I would counter by saying that in an agrarian society large families are essential. And that the Israelites were settling into marginal lands that had never been developed before. And whether they would make it or not depended on a certain population base. So the injunctions for fertility—and remember, they are addressed to both men and women—can be seen as a way of encouraging something that was beneficial if not essential for community survival.”

It was a hard life. Infant mortality approached 50 percent. Excavations of burials show that female life expectancy, owing in part to the risks involved in repeated pregnancies, was perhaps thirty years, ten years less than life expectancy for men. Meyers told me that whenever she is on an archaeological dig in the Middle East, she inevitably begins to imagine herself as one of those women of ancient Israel. During an excavation Meyers is working the same remorseless terrain as did the Israelites 3,000 years ago, the two sexes side by side. The toil is unremitting and tedious, the environment dry and dusty. The days when scores of local laborers were supervised by aristocrats in pith helmets are long over. Archaeology is a complex enterprise, group-oriented in the extreme. Being a mother, Meyers for years had other responsibilities as well: young children for whom she had to care, on the site, even as the excavations proceeded.

Meyers’s research has now moved beyond the formative centuries of Israel to the Israelite monarchy, which was instituted under Saul around 1020 B.C. This is the Israel of the two books of Samuel and the two books of Kings, a unified monarchy until, after the death of Solomon, around 920 B.C., the country was partitioned into northern and southern kingdoms. Under its kings, political structures in Israel became increasingly centralized and urban centers became increasingly important. A market economy grew up alongside the subsistence one. During this period, too, at least in urban settings, the position of women relative to men became more unequal— came more to resemble the kind of society we see in the Bible. It is hard to know how closely the situation in, say, Jerusalem reflected life elsewhere. Jerusalem, Meyers explained to me, was always an anomaly. After the Assyrians overran the Northern Kingdom, in 721 B.C., the population of Jerusalem the capital of the Southern Kingdom, was swollen by refugees. The city grew to be ten times as large as the next largest city in Israel. Its inhabitants no longer had ties to the land, and women no longer had a central role in economic life. There was poverty and chaos and great social stratification. There were large numbers of foreigners. There was something called public life, and it was in the hands of men. This is the time and the place in which much of the Hebrew Bible was fashioned. No wonder, Meyers said, that it is androcentric.

And yet, Meyers went on, some 90 percent of the people of Israel continued to live in agricultural villages in the countryside. She is cautious about applying the label “patriarchal” either too broadly or too loosely. Often the social patterns that prevail in the city are quite different from those that survive in the country. The term “patriarchy” may be legitimate in some places and times and not in others. Who knows what this nineteenth-century construct even means when applied to a pre-modern society like that of ancient Israel? “It does a disservice,” Meyers said, “to a complex piece of literature, the Bible, and to a society that existed for a thousand years, and changed and grew.”

Our gaze is deflected, too, Meyers said, by the very focus of the Bible on public life. On the relatively rare occasions when it affords a glimpse of private life, a patriarchal society is not always what we see. The Song of Songs offers such a glimpse. It contains much archaic material, and is especially noteworthy for the amount of text written in a woman’s voice, and in the first person. Some of the terminology is suggestively feminine, and even hints at female authority. For example, whereas in most of the Bible the standard term for a household is bet’ab, or “father’s house,” the term used in the Song of Songs is bet’em, or “mother’s house.” Indeed, there has been speculation that the Song of Songs was written by a woman.

Regardless of the author’s sex, the love poetry in the Song of Songs expresses an emotional bond not between a master and a subordinate but between equals.

Patrons and Presbyters

“DO YOU KNOW WHAT A ‘SQUEEZE’ IS?” UNDER other circumstances I might have confidently given a reply, but after several hours of conversation with Ross S. Kraemer, a fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Judaic Studies, I had a feeling that the answer would be unexpected. We had met in Philadelphia, where Kraemer lives, and we talked over lunch and during a drive through town (interrupted by calls to a housekeeper on the car phone). Kraemer spoke about the Greek cult of

Dionysus, which, though little attention has been paid to the fact, was in its ecstatic rites the province of women. (A study of the cult of Dionysus had been the nucleus of her doctoral dissertation at Princeton.) She spoke about Mary Magdalene, one of the women who figured most prominently in the circle around Jesus, and noted that, commonplace public assumptions notwithstanding, nowhere do the New Testament writings identify her as a prostitute. (The tradition may have been developed deliberately as part of an attempt to diminish Mary’s stature, particularly in comparison with that of the Apostle Peter.) She spoke about the ancient “purple trade” —the trade in expensive purple-dyed fabric, the participants in which could be presumed to enjoy a certain affluence. This information bears on a woman named Lydia, a “dealer in purple cloth” from the city of Thyatira, who appears in the Acts of the Apostles and is an example of the kind of independent woman of means who seems to have played an especially active role in early Christianity.

A squeeze is a mold of an ancient inscription carved in marble or other stone, obtained by coating the hard surface with a pliable substance—latex has supplanted papier-mâché as the medium most commonly used—and then peeling it off. Epigraphers, as those who study inscriptions are called, typically have a selection of them in their possession, along with files of photographs and transcriptions. The subject of squeezes had come up when Kraemer began describing the types of sources auxiliary to the Bible on which scholars can rely in the study of women and ancient religion. As time moves forward from primitive epochs, the sources become more plentiful. They include works of art and works of history and literature. They include a diverse array of documents involving women: for example, letters, tax receipts, wet-nurse contracts. And they include large numbers of inscriptions and fragments of inscriptions from buildings and monuments. Kraemer pointed to the work of one colleague whose analysis of Greek and Latin epigraphical evidence led her to conclude, contrary to the prevailing scholarly consensus, that at least sometimes Jewish women occupied prominent leadership roles in the ancient synagogue.

That the sources become more plentiful suggests a Mediterranean world that was becoming more complex. By the end of the sixth century B.C, the monarchic period in Israel had drawn to a close. The Israelites had endured a half century of exile in Babylon and then been allowed to return to their homeland. During the several hundred years that elapsed before the birth of Jesus, this homeland would be ruled by Persians, by Greeks, by Romans. The entire region would feel the influence of new economic and cultural systems.

This is also the period when, in the Temple precincts of Jerusalem, the Hebrew Bible gradually cohered into the form in which we have it now, a collection of thirty-nine canonical texts, some of them incorporating material of great antiquity passed down through the ages more or less verbatim. (I remember Carol Meyers’s once pointing out that the enormous stylistic variety of the Bible’s Hebrew is one characteristic that eludes translation.) The canon of the Hebrew Bible was closed—no books would subsequently be added—toward the end of the first century A.D. By then the Romans had razed the Temple in Jerusalem, and the sacred texts of a new religious force, Christianity, were in the process of being compiled.

HOW EGALITARIAN WAS THAT NEW RELIGIOUS force? More important (and borrowing the title of an influential and controversial 1971 article by Leonard Swidler, a professor at Temple), was Jesus a feminist? Such questions unfailingly stir up a range of scholarly responses. I asked Ross Kraemer to talk about those questions, and the conversation gravitated naturally to the work of Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza. Kraemer acknowledged the enormous debt that everyone owed Schüssler Fiorenza, acknowledged that her work had been groundbreaking in providing a new but also comprehensive and coherent way of view ing the Jesus movement and its context. But she added that she was less, well, optimistic than Schüssler Fiorenza. “I’m not as optimistic not so much in terms of her recovery of what she thinks women in early Christianity did, what roles they played—I think she’s likely to be right about a lot of that. Where I would part company is with her argument that the earliest theology of Christianity is intentionally egalitarian and feminist. I’m really not persuaded of that, though I think that Christianity in many communities may have had egalitarian consequences. Elisabeth wants to locate the intent in Jesus himself. It’s not so much that I think she’s wrong as that I’m simply not convinced we can know that she’s right. It’s very hard to argue that we know anything about what Jesus really thought, and the few things that any scholar would be willing to attribute to Jesus himself with any confidence don’t address this particular issue.”

The difficulty is that the Gospels and other early texts are encrusted documents, layered accretions formed out of a mixture of sources and motivations. On women’s issues as on other matters, they may be surer guides to the communities in which they were formed than to the community around Jesus that they ostensibly describe. Kraemer used the various Resurrection stories and the part played by women in those stories to illustrate the pitfalls. All four Gospels depict women as having been the first to discover the empty tomb of Jesus, and in two of the Gospels, Jesus first appears after the Resurrection to Mary Magdalene. This would certainly seem to make a point about the position of women in the Jesus movement, some scholars say, and would also bolster a claim to female authority in Christian affairs—at the time of Jesus or later. Others note, however, that the account of the Resurrection in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, which was written at least twenty years before the Gospels existed in written form, makes no mention of Mary Magdalene or indeed of any women, and it makes no mention of the empty-tomb tradition.

What is going on? One possibility, of course, is that in his account Paul is deliberately ignoring a tradition he is fully aware of—perhaps so as not to deflect emphasis from the authority of men (and himself). This could suggest that the process of diminishing the authority of women in Christianity began at a very early date. If that is the case, the survival of the women-at-the-empty-tomb tradition in the Gospels—decades after Paul—suggests its sheer durability. Thus we should perhaps take at face value, after all, what the Gospels have to say about the prominent position of women in the Jesus movement.

But wait: What if Paul was unaware of the empty-tomb tradition? What if, indeed, it arose after Paul—arose, as some have ventured, in conjunction with a growing belief among Christians in the prospect of a physical resurrection of an uncorrupted body after death, a belief that Paul himself would have regarded as crudely simplistic, whether applied to Jesus’ Resurrection or to a more general resurrection of the dead? If the tradition did arise after Paul, Kraemer argues, then casting women as the first to see the empty tomb might have subtly helped to explain why it took so long for the good news about the physical Resurrection of Jesus to spread: because they were women, the original witnesses had been afraid to divulge what they knew, or had been widely disbelieved. In either case, of course, the result is an implicit denigration of women.

The situation is something of a mess. As Kraemer points out in her book Her Share of the Blessings, the basic problem is that “early Christian communities, especially after the death of Jesus, experienced considerable conflict over the appropriate roles of women, and tended to retroject their positions about this conflict back onto the stories they told about the women who encountered the earthly Jesus.”

Her Share of the Blessings is a wide-ranging exploration of the role of women in Greco-Roman religions—pagan, Jewish, Christian—from about the fourth century B.C. to the fifth century A.D. The comparative approach Kraemer takes has great advantages, allowing her to see how structures in one realm may have influenced those in another. If she believes that, for whatever reason, early Christianity was more egalitarian in terms of gender than it later became—and she does—it is not only because of the interpretation she accepts of early Christian writings. She knows also from looking at the larger context that it was not unusual for women to hold cultic office in pagan religion, not unusual for them to play the role of patron. In light of the social mores of the time, the emphasis in much of early Christianity on sexual asceticism would also have served to enhance female independence: it offered free women a radical new option, a door to open other than the traditional one of marriage and childbearing and domesticity. Another force conducive to egalitarianism was the expectation among many early Christians that the present earthly order would soon pass—that the Lord was about to return in glory. In such a climate attachment to social structures that were plainly “of the world” was considerably lessened. Did women serve as priests? The formal establishment of a priesthood in Christianity came very late, Kraemer writes, but a diverse body of evidence shows that women in early Christianity held the title presbytera, and that people who held this title performed all priestly functions: they taught, they baptized, they blessed the Eucharist.

There are, of course, tensions. One cannot read very far into the writings of Paul without becoming aware of his inner conflict when it came to questions of gender and sexuality. George Bernard Shaw once characterized Paul as the “eternal enemy of woman.” In the epistle to the Galatians, Paul embraced an egalitarian formula, but in I Corinthians he showed himself to be clearly disturbed by the powerful and independent women in the Christian community at Corinth. He did not forbid the Corinthian women from prophesying, but he demanded that they cover their heads when they prayed in public, and he added a statement that defines women as subordinate to men. Is this last statement (along with some other problematic passages) a later interpolation, as some scholars believe? Perhaps. But tensions exist nonetheless, Kraemer writes, and they become deeper and more intolerable as Christianity moves further away in time from its origins, and moves closer to the contemporaneous social establishment.

Conflicting perspectives on women are apparent in later writings. One perspective is embodied in the apocryphal Acts of Thecla, probably written in the second century A.D., which celebrates the life of an ascetic female missionary supposedly sent out by Paul himself to teach and spread the word of the Lord. The Acts of Thecla, it must be said, has many decidedly odd elements (for example, Thecla is described as baptizing herself by jumping into a pool of hungry seals), but this text and many others like it enjoyed wide popularity. The other perspective is embodied, for example, in the epistles to Timothy, written in the second century, which contain some of the most stringent passages about women in the New Testament, passages that were then ascribed to Paul:

Let a woman learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.

This is the perspective that hardened when Christianity became the religion of the Roman state.

Women Who Lead

WAS JUNIA, WHOM PAUL, IN HIS EPISTLE TO the Romans, called “prominent among the apostles,” a man or a woman? What about the person named Jael, who is referred to in an inscription from Aphrodisias, in Asia Minor, as being the presiding officer or patron of a Jewish community there? These questions are not academic. They speak to issues of gender, status, and leadership.

Some would argue that Junia and Jael had to have been men. How, after all, could a woman be a Christian apostle or the presiding officer of a Jewish community, when we know that women were barred from such honors? This is the kind of reasoning that brings a note of both excitement and exasperation to Bernadette Brooten’s voice. Brooten is a professor of Scripture and interpretation at the Harvard Divinity School and the woman who made the study of Greek and Latin inscriptions which Ross Kraemer referred to. This fall she will join the faculty at Brandeis University. It is bad enough, Brooten said during a conversation one day, for women to be invisible in ancient Judaism and Christianity because men didn’t think to mention them or because they weren’t in a position to be mentioned. Must we also argue away the few women in plain sight?

Junia was a common female name in the ancient world, Brooten said. Several ancient religious commentators, such as Origen of Alexandria and John Chrysostom, assumed as a matter of course that the Junia mentioned in Romans was a woman. This assumption prevailed until the Middle Ages. Then a reaction set in. Paul reserved the title “apostle” for persons of great authority—people who had served as missionaries and founded churches. To a medieval mind, such people had to have been men. Junia underwent a change of sex. Later Martin Luther popularized a reinterpretation of Junia as Junius, an apparently masculine name—the diminutive, perhaps, as scholars would later speculate, of Junianius or Junilius. There is only one problem, Brooten said. The name Junias cannot be found in antiquity: not on documents, not in inscriptions. It does not exist as a name, diminutive or otherwise. All that we have is Junia, a common name for a woman—in this case, the name of a woman “prominent among the apostles.”

As for the name Jael, Brooten said, the only reason the question of gender has come up at all is that there is an important title attached to the name, and the name sits at the top of a list of other names, all of which are male. In less politically charged circumstances, this Jael would simply have been assumed to be a woman. Jael was—is—a well-known woman’s name. A woman named Jael is prominent in Judges. But scholars have hunted through Scripture and other ancient sources to see if they can find precedent for a Jael who is a man, because it seems to them so unlikely that this Jael could have been a woman. In some manuscripts of the Book of Ezra, as it appears in the Septuagint, they have found such a Jael. The name is in a list of male exiles who had married foreign women and were now repudiating them upon their return to Israel. The identification is highly tentative, however. The Septuagint is the Hebrew Bible as translated into Greek, and the transliteration of Semitic names from Hebrew into Greek is haphazard and inconsistent. What this means, Brooten went on, is that to take Jael as a man’s name one has to accept an instance that may be nothing more than an artifact of transliteration. One has to prefer this to the attestation of Jael as female in a major book of the Bible, the name being that of a well-known figure whose story was probably a staple of synagogue readings.

“All of which,” Brooten said, “raises several questions for me. How many women do there have to have been for there to have been any? And if it’s part of the marginalization of women that women are very rarely leaders to begin with, then even in those circumstances in which women do occur as leaders, they may be either perceived as not being women or perceived as not being leaders.” The note of frustration in Brooten’s voice gave way to something slyer as she summoned up an image of scholars one day confronting a document that referred to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and the members of one of her all-male Cabinets. It would be only a matter of time, Brooten said, before some scholar came along and pronounced Thatcher a man.

HARVARD DIVINITY SCHOOL IS ONE OF THE MANY divinity schools to whose revival an influx of women has contributed greatly. Applicants are plentiful, with women accounting for well over half the enrollment in the school’s various programs. Whatever this portends for the future, women as yet remain distinctly underrepresented among the school’s senior faculty.

Brooten joined the Harvard faculty in 1985. She had received her doctorate from Harvard a few years earlier, and in the intervening period had taught at Claremont. Part of her academic training took place in Tübingen, the cobbled and timbered university town in Germany whose name has long been associated with new departures in theology. She describes the German academic environment for women in much the same way Schüssler Fiorenza does. “German theologians,” Brooten told me, “will just say outright that they don’t want women.” Oddly, though, Tübingen is where Brooten took her first women’s-studies course: Leonard Swidler, on leave from Temple, happened to be a visiting professor there for a year, and offered a seminar on women and the Church. Brooten was one of two students who signed up for it. “In the university as a whole,” she recalled, “there was no interest in such things at all.”

Brooten’s office at Harvard has the dusky flavor of a Dickensian garret. Narrow pathways thread among tumuli of tables and books. Some of the books are old, spines worn to a dull sheen by centuries of palms. There is not even a computer to suggest the late twentieth century, though Brooten does use one at home. It is now standard in the field to have computer software that can print in Greek, Hebrew, and Coptic fonts. Computers have also made some kinds of research much easier for biblical scholars. For example, the great bulk of the writing that survives from antiquity in Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—not just works of literature but also snippets from tens of thousands of papyrus fragments and stone inscriptions—is now available on CD-ROM.

A capsule summary of the implications of Brooten’s earliest research might read like this: with respect to roles played by women, there was more differentiation within Judaism in the Greco-Roman world than many scholars acknowledge. This touches on a highly sensitive issue. Some scholars, particularly among those who want a liberalization of Christian church policies concerning women, have argued that if early Christianity fell short of an egalitarian ideal, the cause lay in part in the nature of the Jewish world out of which Christianity emerged. Thus, one argument runs, there might have been more women leaders in Christianity if only there had been more in Judaism. Looking at the matter another way, to the degree that egalitarianism did exist in early Christianity, it is sometimes presented as a sharp break from Jewish tradition. Often implicit, this kind of thinking amounts, in the view of some, to locating the origins of patriarchal misogyny in the Hebrew Bible and those who inhabited its shadow. That is perhaps stating the problem too unsubtly, but it exposes a place where the nerve is raw. Brooten’s view is that the spectrum of tolerable practice among Jews in ancient times was broad—just as it is in modern Judaism, just as it was and is in Christianity.

In her doctoral dissertation, later published in book form as Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue, Brooten considered nineteen carved inscriptions dating from as early as 27 B.C. to as late as the sixth century A.D., in which Jewish women are accorded official titles relating to the communal life of a synagogue—titles such as “head of the synagogue,” “leader,” “elder.” Titles like these, when applied to women, had long been interpreted as honorific rather than functional. “Rufina, a Jewess, head of the synagogue, built this tomb for her freed slaves and the slaves raised in her house”—these words come from a marble plaque, inscribed in the second century A.D., that was found in Smyrna. The traditional view has been that Rufina, the “head of the synagogue,” the archisynagogos, had no real functional authority and was in all likelihood merely the wife of the true archisynagogos. Rufina is seen to have the title, as Brooten wryly notes, “honoris causa.” In dense, meticulous arguments that cannot be reviewed here, Brooten mounts an assault on that view. She takes up the cases of Rufina and the eighteen other women, and exposes what she deems to be the flawed presuppositions and tortured reasoning necessary to conclude that their titles were not functional. Women leaders of the synagogue were, of course, never the norm and were perhaps always the great exception. But, Brooten states, it is wrong to see the emergence of women leaders in Christianity as unprecedented.

Brooten’s more recent work involves the writings of Paul, in particular his views on the proper place of women in society and where those views came from. One clue lies in Paul’s condemnations of same-sex love. As Brooten explains, in a discussion that draws not only on religious texts but also on ancient materials as diverse as medical and astrological writings, Paul was in this regard no more than a man of his time. Whatever the exceptions in practice, on the normative gender map of the Roman world some behavior is appropriately masculine and some appropriately feminine, and the line is not supposed to be crossed. In sexual relations between members of the same sex this distinction is violated. One man becomes “like a woman”; one woman becomes “like a man.” Underlying all this was a world view that, Brooten argues, saw the distinction between “active” and “passive” as more fundamental even than distinctions of sex. It was the basis of social order and social hierarchy. It was the origin of the tension in Paul. Forward-looking in many ways, Paul could not let it go.

“Paul was happy to work with women as colleagues, and encouraged them,” Brooten said. “So, for example, he mentions Junia, and he acknowledges Prisca and Tryphaena and Tryphosa and Persis and other women. He teaches with them, and he recognizes their prophecy, and he works with them as missionaries in the Roman world. On the other hand, while he was very willing to make a religious and societal break with Jewish tradition on points that were considered very central to Judaism, such as the issue of dietary laws and the circumcision of men, in order to permit Jew and Gentile to come together alike to accept Jesus as the Christ, with some customs concerning women he’s not willing to make that kind of break. For example, the issue of the hairstyling and veiling of women. And, indeed, at that very point in the text he describes Christ as the head of man, and man as the head of woman, which goes beyond tolerating a custom and gives a theological underpinning to gender differentiation. I see his position as essentially ambivalent. On certain issues—gender, slavery, Roman power—he is very much interested in maintaining social order. But what’s fascinating about Paul is that he experiments.”

Toward the end of a long conversation we lingered for a moment on the nature of that first-century world of which Paul was a part: a world that those who know it well describe as more alien from our own in its psychology and belief systems and outlook than we imagine. How confident do you feel, I asked Brooten, that we can span the gulf between these two cultures, ours and theirs—can reconstruct something trustworthy about the dynamics of then?

“That’s something I ask myself about all the time,” Brooten said. And then she laughed. “I’ve often had this thought: that I’ll die, and go to heaven, and Rufina will meet me, and I’ll greet her as archisynagogos. And she’ll say, 'Archisynagogos? Nah. That was just my husband’s title.’”

The Writing on the Wall

TO FOCUS ON THE WORK OF A HANDFUL OF scholars is necessarily to leave aside the work of scores of others. And there are, literally, scores. Their research by now covers just about every conceivable aspect of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. It has spread deeply into the fields of history and theology and literary criticism. I once asked David Tracy, the prominent Catholic theologian, what he thought would be the result of feminism’s encounter with religion, and he said simply, “The next intellectual revolution.” That assessment may sound overblown, but it isn’t. Phyllis Trible used the metaphor of a conversation between feminism and the Bible. Feminism’s larger conversation with religion touches every aspect of it, leaves no subject off the table. It engages doctrine, liturgy, ministry, and leadership, and it engages them all at once.

Scholarly work on women and the Bible faces certain inherent problems, certain inherent risks. In my talks with people in the field, the same worries were voiced by one scholar after another. A fundamental one has to do with the distinction between deriving an interpretation from a text and reading an interpretation into a text. It is one thing for a contemporary personal agenda—a desire, say, to see women enjoy a position of full equality in religious institutions—to direct one’s research focus. Agendas of one sort or another frequently drive scholarship. But can’t they also get out of hand? Another concern is an issue raised by Bernadette Brooten: the sometimes facile comparisons made between Christianity and Judaism. This has already begun to stir animosity outside the field of biblical studies, as evidenced by an eloquent recent essay in the Jewfish bimonthly Tikkun.

The range of scholarly output on matters involving women and the Bible has been enormously diverse. As in any academic endeavor, the work has been of uneven quality. Much of the research remains tentative and preliminary, and there are severe limits, given the sparseness of what is likely to be the available evidence, to what can ever be known with certainty. The most we can hope for, Bernadette Brooten has written, is “a quick glimpse through a crack in the door.” What has been accomplished thus far? One achievement is simply the staking out of ground. Several decades ago no one was particularly concerned—indeed, the thought rarely occurred to anyone—that the entire academic biblical enterprise was based on what was known about men’s lives, was one that generalized from men to all humanity. Those days are gone. Another achievement has been a new emphasis on the sheer variety of thought and practice which sometimes existed wdthin ancient religious groups. Scholars who perhaps went searching after some lost Golden Age —driven by the “earlier-is-better” bias that seems to be a characteristic of human thought—have stumbled into worlds that are more confused and complex than they may have anticipated, worlds that are in that sense not unlike our own. Yet another achievement is simply this: leaving aside the specific details, scholars have gone a long way toward bringing women in biblical and early Christian times into sharper relief. They have also shown how meaning has been shaded by the lacquer of interpretation. A good distillation of much of the research on women can be found in The Women’s Bible Commentary, edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe.

Perhaps the most important lesson offered by the work of feminist biblical scholars comes in the form of a reminder: that in religion, as in other spheres, circumstances have not always been as we see them now. Evolution occurs. Some things, it turns out, are not sacred. This point may be obvious, but with respect to religion, especially, it is frequently overlooked—and, in fact, sometimes hotly denied. Whatever one believes about the nature of their origin, the handful of immutable precepts at any religion’s core are embedded in a vast pulp of tradition, interpretation, and practice. And that pulp bears an all-too-human character. It is variously diminished, augmented, scarred, sculpted, and otherwise shaped by powerful human forces in every society and every time period through which it passes. Sometimes the change occurs slowly and almost invisibly. Sometimes it happens quickly and right before one’s eyes, as I believe it is happening now—the proliferation of feminist scholarship on the Bible being both consequence and cause.

I write these last words on the day of my daughter’s first communion in a denomination that still restricts the role of women, and I write them in the expectation that with respect to the position of women, matters will not remain— will simply not be able to remain—as in some places we see them now; in the expectation, to employ a biblical turn, that the present way’s days are numbered. □