"Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible," edited by Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel (Fawcett Columbine, 351 pp.; $12.95, paper). Reviewed by Phyllis Alsdurf, coauthor of "Battered into Submission" (InterVarsity).

If women who are not biblical scholars read the Bible as creatively and imaginatively as they would any other book, what interpretations would emerge? Wrestling with that question led Christina Buchmann and Celina Spiegel to compile the 28 essays that make up "Out of the Garden: Women Writers on the Bible."

"We were surprised to find out how many women had an essay on the Bible that they had always wanted to write," Spiegel said during a 1995 book-tour stop in Minneapolis. "And we were surprised at just how fearful women writers were to take on the Bible. They felt intimidated by it."

The authors sought women who were good writers and good readers to interpret the Bible as laypersons. Contributors were invited to choose any passage, character, or theme, whether or not the Bible was personally relevant in their lives.

"Our assumption is that there is no one way to read the Bible," Spiegel said, "so the pieces conflict with one another. The book brings a whole range of perspectives. We weren't trying to answer the question of how to read the Bible as a woman. There are all sorts of lively questions raised in this book that, as far as we know, have not been asked before. Its richness reflects the richness of the Bible."

The book's title was chosen to indicate an "openness on the subject," said Spiegel. "It looks both forward and backward, both at what women have taken from the Garden and where it has taken them."

Spiegel said she has been pleased at the enthusiasm expressed for the book. "People have thanked me for doing this," she said. "Women have seemed hungry for it. My experience in both Protestant and Catholic churches is that taking the Bible out of professional hands has been a really good thing. We can't let the professionals simply have it."

In the introduction, Buchmann and Spiegel question "whether it will ever be possible to read the Bible as one would any other book, simply for pleasure or to satisfy curiosity. Just thinking about the Bible makes many of us feel small or guilty. For women, especially, the Bible may be impossible to read independent of its authoritative claims, as its power over women has been two-fold: religious and social."

SISTER MILLER

Unwilling to abandon the Bible's authoritative claim on my life, I have concluded, nonetheless, that the pews in many evangelical churches are populated with more than their share of women who have had an equivalent of what I call my "Sister Miller" experience: a rite of passage, often not-so-subtly reinforced from the pulpit, that can make a woman gun-shy about approaching Scripture—or, worse, tempt her to look for spiritual nourishment elsewhere.

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Sister Miller was my junior-high Sunday-school teacher, whose unhappy task it was to interest a rowdy bunch of reluctant students in Bible study. A formidable task to be sure, the difficulty of which was compounded by Sister Miller's theological bent. Curiously enough, she was convinced that the problems of the world all harked back to Eve. It was Eve who was at the root of all the sin in the world, she claimed.

"Eve caused Adam to sin," she would expound to us girls, all sitting on one side of the room while a chorus of gleeful boys gloated on the other. This would, for some reason, lead to a diatribe on appropriate dating conduct and the girl's responsibility to make sure things didn't go "too far." No Sunday-school class was complete without Sister Miller's stern admonition as we departed: "Girls, remember what happened to Clarise." Clarise, of course, was a teenage mother who had attended our church before her fall from grace.

Ah, yes, remember what happened to Clarise. In 30 years, I've never forgotten that, or what Sister Miller had to say about Eve and sin. All of which has had more impact than I care to admit on how I, a daughter of Eve, read the Bible.

This collection is the fruit of an attempt to discover what happens when women approach the Old Testament with no holds barred. It combines biblical commentary with imagination. Applying creativity to the text, the writers use the imagination—freely and wildly, at times—to plumb the depths of possibility that are latent in Scripture.

In this salad bar of essays, Jewish and Gentile writers ask the kind of unrestrained questions that can come from those who do not labor under the weight of heavy theological proscriptions. For the most part, contributors operate outside the confines of a theological system that holds Scripture to be authoritative. Among the questions they pose are these: What might have been the reasons that Lot's wife looked back? What motivated Pharaoh's daughter to adopt Moses? How did the world look through Delilah's eyes? What does the Queen of Sheba's encounter with King Solomon tell us about her? Is Vashti, daring to say no to being used as a sex object, more of a heroine than Esther?

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Several of the essayists wonder about the sketchy figures of Scripture—predominantly female—and embroider their own versions of these untold stories. The result is a midrash of sorts, one that spins out creative interpretations of biblical dilemmas that long have haunted women.

Novelist Norma Rosen, for instance, defines midrash as "alternative drafts of a Bible story. It still insists on its right to imagine what might have been, as if each character continued to possess countless possibilities beyond its Bible definition." She uses this device to reconstruct the impact of 20 years of barrenness on Rebekah.

Clearly, privileging the imaginative can lead one into a morass of feminist double-speak that stretches the biblical text to unrecognizable lengths. For instance, University of Connecticut law professor Anne C. Dailey offers a radical reassessment of Solomon's role in deciding the fate of the baby claimed by two women. When one of the women tells Solomon to cut up the child, "her words dare him to take responsibility for his own threat." Solomon relies on the sword for "silenced rather than open speech," Dailey says, while the woman challenges such a "show of violence, her judgment grounded in self-respect and courage."

Others, however, make personal application of biblical passages by weaving in autobiographical accounts that only highlight the contemporary potency of Scripture. Memoirist Patricia Hampl discovers in the story of Jonah a fitting parallel for a personal lesson in compassion. Novelist Louise Erdrich feels an affinity with Koheleth (the speaker in Ecclesiastes), who addresses "people in tough binds, people with vendettas, a bone to pick, no dog to kick, the sour-grapers, the hurt, those who've never shucked off their adolescent angst. In general tones the preacher speaks to the bummed-out."

Kathleen Norris, author of the acclaimed memoir "Dakota: A Spiritual Geography," approaches the Psalms as a poet reading poetry, reflecting on the impact of her experience of daily reading and singing the Psalms during a year with the Benedictines. She concludes that the Psalms "cannot be removed from a communal context," and that in them "the mundane and the holy are inextricably united."

By giving an impressionistic look at the Old Testament as seen through the eyes of an array of accomplished writers, "Out of the Garden" opens new doors of inquiry that could stimulate future exegetical analysis. Books of this sort, while not resting on a firm foundation of biblical authority, can be instructive for those of us who may have stunted our ability to ask the "what if" questions of Scripture.

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Perhaps it is that fear of sliding down the slippery slope into irreverence and even heresy that keeps us from loosing our imaginations on the Bible. One can't help wondering, however, what may have been lost in our attempts to rein in that realm of possibility. After all, the imaginative is also our Father's world.


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