1 of 2

How the Other Half Lived

By Elesha Coffman, associate editor of CHRISTIAN HISTORY

Early church father Tertullian called women "the Devil's gateway … the first forsaker of the divine law." Jerome, another early giant, wrote, "Is it not to women that our Lord appeared after His Resurrection? Yes, and the men could then blush for not having sought what the women had found." Obviously, Christian attitudes toward women have been all over the map for a long time, and much recent scholarship has taken on the task of tracking these attitudes, as well as pursuing pathways never before explored. The resulting "new landscape" rounds out our understanding of history, though sometimes we have to scramble over the scholars' ideological berms to get a good view.

Christian ideas about women, like Christian ideas about pretty much everything else, begin with Scripture. Yet only between 5 and 8 percent of the people named in the Bible are female, only two books (Ruth and Esther) are named for women, and, according to traditional assessments of authorship, no portions of Scripture were written by women. But this does not at all mean the Scriptures yield no information on the subject, as evidenced by the breadth and heft of the recent book Women in Scripture: A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, and the New Testament (Houghton Mifflin; Carol Meyers, general editor).

The bulk of this book is divided into three sections: "Named Women," "Unnamed Women," and "Female Deities and Personifications." The first section, with 206 names, represents the most extensive such list ever made. The second section includes close to 600 entries, both for specific unnamed women (Wife of Noah, Woman Who Anoints Jesus) and, predominantly, for groups of unnamed women (Israelite Wives, Women in Illicit Sex, Wife of One's Youth). The entries in both sections are helpful for highlighting characters who might otherwise be skipped over, for exploring the way translation choices have influenced the way we see these women, and for explaining relevant socio-cultural issues. For example, in the entry on Leah, we learn that she might not have been "dull-eyed" (as rendered in the RSV, NEB, and elsewhere) but "soft-eyed" or "cow-eyed" (possibly a positive reference to her fertility, and a reinforcement of her name, which means "cow"). We also get an inside look at polygamy and understand why, when Leah really wanted something, her best bet was to team up with Rachel: "When co-wives unite in purpose, husbands must comply."

For the most part, entries in these two sections are light on agenda and long on explanations of ancient marriage laws and customs, childbearing, property transferral, food provision, and ideals of beauty—concepts that shaped the woman's world. Agenda looms larger in entries on major figures like Eve and Mary; the author of the first suggests that God's first human creation might have been androgynous, and the author of the second argues that Luke's nativity narrative purposefully and maliciously un-empowers Mary.

The third section, on deities and personifications, is more charged as it questions why negative things like enemy cities and wickedness are identified as female, describes how the Earth functions as mother, and probes God's feminine side (though the author stops short of suggesting that we call God "Mother" and also admits that "ancient Israelites would have not understood our contemporary interest in the sex or gender of God"). Overall, Women in Scripture greatly helps us see the biblical era through women's eyes, though I got very tired of the persistent hints that most Bible translators are closet misogynists.

next page... |  1 of 2

share this page

RSS Feed   RSS Help