Feminist Biblical Interpretation: History and Goals

These power structures are complicated by additional features, such as ethnicity and class, and they may change over time, so that a matrix of power exists that creates multiple intersections of social hierarchy, a concept referred to in scholarship as intersectionality.

My thanks to Eve Levavi Feinstein for her feedback in framing this description.

In its earliest iteration, the American suffrage movement included African American and white women, but the unity of the movement fractured over debates about the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, which gave African American men the right to vote. Some white suffragists invoked racially tinged arguments about “education” to advocate that white women were more deserving of the right to vote than were African American men. Discussions of the suffrage movement after this split tend to focus only on white women’s suffrage and their attainment of the vote with the Nineteenth Amendment. See Nyasha Junior, An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2015), 7–8, 11–13, and Martha S. Jones, “How the Daughters and Granddaughters of Former Slaves Secured Voting Rights for All,” Smithsonian.com (March 8, 2019).

Notably, New Jersey allowed women to vote in the first decades of its existence, before stripping them of this right in 1807. Wyoming was the first territory and the first state to allow women to vote, in 1869 and 1890, respectively.

Junior, Introduction, 19–20.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, The Woman’s Bible (New York: Prometheus, 1999 [1^st ed., 1898), I: 8.

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 15. Editor’s note: For further discussion of this passage from a feminist critical angle, see Raanan Eichler, “Gender Equality at Creation,” TheTorah (2015) and a response by Tamara Eskanazi, “Non-Gender Equality at Creation: The 'Other' Benefits of Partners,” TheTorah (2015).

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 19.

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 36.

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 102. Editor’s note: For contemporary pieces on Miriam from a similar lens, see Wendy Zierler, “Re-encountering Miriam,” TheTorah (2016); Tamar Kamionkowski, “Will the Real Miriam Please Stand Up?” TheTorah (2015).

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 117. Editor’s note: For modern feminist readings of this text, see Shawna Dolansky, “Why Can Women's Vows Be Vetoed?” TheTorah (2016); Francis Landy, “Can a Husband Annul His Wife's Nazarite Vow?” TheTorah (2018).

Stanton and other white suffragists were not the only ones to be turning to the Bible to argue for women’s rights in the nineteenth century. Though they did not create published works in the same fashion, many African American women were likewise offering insights on the Bible’s role in both the oppression and the potential liberation of women; see Junior, Introduction, 39–54, on early African American women’s biblical interpretation. Notably, African American women began to fight for and achieve voting rights for women in municipalities like Chicago as a result of the leadership roles that they won the right to take on in their churches; see Jones, “How the Daughters.”

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 13. Neither did Stanton spare the New Testament, arguing that woman’s “inferior position is more clearly and emphatically set forth by the Apostles than by the Prophets and the Patriarchs. There are no such specific directions for woman’s subordination in the Pentateuch as in the Epistles” (Stanton, Woman’s Bible, II: 113). Notably, the book also included a short section on Kabbalah, which praised the feminine aspects of its mystical conception of the godhead and sefirot.

Stanton, Woman’s Bible, I: 9.

Lori D. Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton: An American Life (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009), 174.

See Cullen Murphy, The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 22–23; Ginzberg, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 175.

For a critique of the idea of waves of the feminist movement and of the idea that no women were working for women’s rights in the decades between the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment and the rise of feminism in the 1970s, see Junior, Introduction, 7–9.

Margalit Fox, “Mary Daly, a Leader in Feminist Theology, Dies at 81,” The New York Times (January 6, 2010).

Mary Daly, Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women’s Liberation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1973), 45.

Daly, Beyond God the Father, 47.

Daly was fired from her position at Boston College—a Catholic institution—after the publication of her first book, The Church and the Second Sex (1968). The move sparked protests and Daly was ultimately rehired and remained at Boston College until she retired, though the relationship between Daly and the college was uneasy. See Murphy, Word According to Eve, 51.

Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978). Trible’s groundbreaking article “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 41.1 (1973): 30–48, set the stage for her work in God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. It is noteworthy that the article appeared in a journal devoted more generally to religious studies and more open to feminist interpretation, rather than in the more conservative and biblically focused Journal of Biblical Literature.

Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984).

J. Cheryl Exum, “Second Thoughts about Secondary Characters: Women in Exodus 1.8–2.10,” in A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, ed. Athalya Brenner (FCB 6; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 77. The first article, “‘You Shall Let Every Daughter Live’: A Study of Exodus 1.8–2.10,” is reprinted in the same volume and was originally published in 1983.

Exum, “Second Thoughts,” 78.

Exum, “Second Thoughts,” 81.

Exum, “Second Thoughts,” 83. Numerous additional feminist biblical scholars could be mentioned here, starting with Phyllis Bird (b. 1934), whose work drew directly on Trible’s, but in the interest of brevity, I have selected these few illustrative examples. For more on the history of feminist biblical interpretation, see Murphy, Word According to Eve, and Sarah Shectman, Women in the Pentateuch: A Feminist and Source-Critical Analysis, HBM 23 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2009), 9–54.

See, for example, Marc Zvi Brettler, “On Becoming a Male Feminist Bible Scholar,” Bible Review 10 (Apr 1994): 44–45; Shelomo Dov Goitein, “Women as Creators of Biblical Genres,” Prooftexts 8 (1988): 1–33, translated by Michael Carasik from, “נשים כיוצרים סוגי ספרות במקרא,” in נשים בתנ"ך: והשתקפותן באגדה, בשיר, בספור, במסה, ובמחקר [Women of the Bible: Legends, Stories, Essays, and Concordance], ed. Israel Zmora (Israel: Mechavrut le-Saphrut, 1964), 519–551.

See Ovidiu Creangă, ed., Men and Masculinity in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond, Bible in the Modern World 33 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2010); Ovidiu Creangă and Peter-Ben Smit, eds., Biblical Masculinities Foregrounded, HBM 62 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2014).

Editor’s note: see Carol Meyers, "The Shunammite Woman and the Patriarchy Problem," TheTorah.com (2017).

See Carol Meyers, Rediscovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), esp. 180–87.

Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 81.

Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 95.

Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 91.

Meyers, Rediscovering Eve, 101.

Athalya Brenner-Idan, “An Afterword: The Decalogue—Am I an Addressee?,” in A Feminist Companion to Exodus to Deuteronomy, ed. Athalya Brenner-Idan, FCB 6 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1994), 255–258; Athalya Brenner-Idan, “The Decalogue: Are Female Readers Included?” TheTorah (2016).

Editor’s note: This observation serves as the basis for one of the landmark books offering a Jewish feminist theology: Judith Plaskow, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective (New York: Harper and Row, 1990).

David J. A. Clines, “The Ten Commandments, Reading from Left to Right,” in Interested Parties: The Ideology of Writers and Readers of the Hebrew Bible, JSOTSup 205; Gender, Culture, Theory 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995), 26–45.

The term hermeneutics of suspicion derives from the work of Paul Ricoeur and means, at its simplest, not taking the text at face value. Given the androcentric nature both of the Bible’s composition and of its interpretation historically, feminist interpretation depends significantly on this type of hermeneutics.