Abstract
Gender bias in leadership is an egregious yet common reality in the societal mores of male-dominant cultures. Contentious ecclesial debates about gender bias pit prejudices against female leadership roles when girded by biblical tropes engaged to disparage female character and leadership behavior. Sexualized imagery in the textual narrative is misappropriated to libel females who are leading change with ethical and behavioral competencies lauded in their male counterparts. In the politically charged context of recent national elections, the newly installed Vice President of the United States was publicly labeled a “Jezebel” to connote a racially and sexually derisive trope calling into question a woman’s scruples in private spheres as well as disparaging her agency. As I refer to Tamura Lomax’s extensive analysis of this trope, I examine in this article the hermeneutical misappropriation of Bathsheba imagery, wherein the behavior of biblical figure King David is normalized as the beloved of God while Bathsheba is villainized. The presumptive insinuation is that women use sexual guiles to advance careers, social station, or positional power. Judgmental inequities in contemporary and biblical examples raise an urgency to counter negative gender/power tropes from the Bible to the boardroom.
Introduction: Shall we ever overcome the Eve syndrome?
In the politically charged context of recent national elections, the newly installed Vice President of the United States was publicly labeled a “Jezebel” as a racially and sexually derisive trope calling into question a woman’s scruples in private spheres as well as disparaging her agency. Public news coverage of recently installed Kamala Harris as Vice President of the United States has refueled the debate about gender bias in the political sphere as well as a larger issue of patriarchal marginalization of women in religious leadership praxis. When Southern Baptist pastor, Tom Buck, publicly labeled Harris with a Jezebel epithet, the media frenzy ensued as recalcitrant male defenders, including clergyman Steve Swofford, defended the linked biblical portrayal to the unsuitability of women in power. 1 Gender bias in leadership is a common yet egregious reality of societal mores in male-dominant cultures. Contentious ecclesial debates about gender bias against female leadership roles are girded by biblical tropes engaged to characterize female leadership behavior.
Sexualized imagery in the textual or cultural narrative is misappropriated to libel females who possess ethical and behavioral competencies that are lauded in their male counterparts. Yet, women as change agent leaders are threatening to some, either cast as aggressive overachievers or emasculating provocateurs. Womanist ethicist Emilie Townes asserts that the typology of Sapphire is a trope symbolizing emasculating bossiness attributed to Black women who exercise agency, while Black feminist Tamura Lomax critiques how pejorative labels aligned with sexualized biblical tropes are used in churches to disparage, and thereby attempt to diminish, the intellectual capabilities and leadership competencies of Black women who are poised to lead change.
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Accordingly, Lomax analyzes the biblical and cultural jezebel as a trope with verbal connotations: Verbes/words/signs turned sign-vehicles inscribe individuals and collectives with preferred [sic] meanings that are negotiated, received, consented to, resisted, and/or appropriated. Meanings, then, are not innate. They are contrived—on both conscious and unconscious levels, through the consistency of signification on signs and presentations.
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Like Lomax, Shanell Smith notes that sexual improprieties in churches are more often presumed to be the female’s fault, resulting in traumatic female silence rather than the expulsion of the abuser. 4
In effect, I contend that what one witnesses from the Bible to the boardroom are leadership double standards in cultural and ecclesial climates in which unethical practices of rogue behavior and biased genderism breed toxic silence about disparity issues. 5 “We are responsible to confront the leadership double standards or inequities and raise awareness of operational power in relational systems.” 6 Contemporary leadership practices, justified by biblical interpretation, may reinforce an ideology of patriarchal egotism that fosters negative gender bias. As one example, countless women most likely can recall childhood Sunday or Bible school lessons that invoked Eve’s name as the cause of humanity’s fall and removal from the divine paradise of Eden. Still, I recall that my church instructors attributed little or no culpability to Eve’s human helpmate, Adam, with whom God directed transcendent instruction and explicit warning. Moreover, the Genesis text expressly states that the male was present with the female while both were subjected to tempting deceptions, symbolized by a serpent. 7 Yet, females have had their agency, in the form of initiative or assertiveness, called into question by associations with an Eve or Jezebel trope.
Bathsheba: A hermeneutical study
A patriarchal hermeneutical lens is used to interpret an already male-dominant biblical text. The skewed gender bias becomes evident in the portrayal of females as silent images of acquiescent docility or silent cooperation as commanded but misconstrued as signifiers of faith. Stephen L. McKenzie’s interpretive expose of the David and Bathsheba story is another example of gender bias in a biographical account of a biblical figure, King David. 8 McKenzie connects text sources in 2 Sam 11–12 and 1 Kgs 1–2 to draw his conclusion: “The text makes clear that she slept with David at her optimal time of conception. This suggests the possibility that her seduction of David and the conception of his child were planned. They were steps by which she might secure her future and advance herself.” 9
McKenzie’s version has no regard for gender and class mores of Ancient Near Eastern culture and misapplies an interpretive technique that perpetuates gender bias through negative female stereotyping. McKenzie’s indictment of Bathsheba as plotting female seductress is highly suspect and must be critiqued to deconstruct this example of interpretive ideology. I examine the ideological underpinnings of 2 Sam 11–12, utilizing Gale Yee’s feminist perspective of extrinsic (socio-historical) and intrinsic (rhetorical) analysis for “decoding” ancient texts 10 as well as findings from other anthropologists and biblical scholars. Addressing McKenzie provides a timely opportunity to caution against the inappropriately negative female gender bias fostered in the academy and churches today. Alas, McKenzie is not alone in a misogynistic hermeneutic that is transportable into a gender-biased pedagogy.
Gale Yee, in Poor Banished Children of Eve, employs ideological criticism in her sociohistorical and textual study to examine how shifting ideologies were reflected in biblical gender portrayals during particular periods of Israel’s history.
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Yee’s study of Israel’s ideology begins in the pre-monarchic period of tribal-familial formation in Canaan during the late Bronze Age (
Womanist biblical scholar and theologian, Renita Weems, analyzes Hebrew texts to demystify biblical imagery and interpretation that portrays violence against women or casts socially marginalized women as villains to repel or fascinate the male audience to a way of thinking.
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As professionals in varied settings, ministers must be critically aware of peculiarities in the use of metaphoric imagery and its potential impact on a diverse audience. Weems notes, Readers are affected by what they read. Metaphors can distort . . . can kill . . . can oppress . . . but with the help of newer methodological approaches, we are able to press beyond mere interpretation to criticism, to attempt, as much as possible to step outside the sublime ideology of the text, to understand where the text gets its power and to find ways to challenge as much as possible the power it has over us. . . . Our criticism does not intend to destroy the Bible—rather, it is to help find ethical ways to read intelligibly and responsibly.
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Feminist scholars, such as Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, employ a revisionist strategy to deconstruct, rather than acquiesce to, patriarchal perspectives as a normative hermeneutic. She adopts a hermeneutic of suspicion that is wary of “the interpretive tendency to be unequivocally judgmental” of the feminine gender role.
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Again, Yee notes, The Bible continues to be used to legitimate sinful realities. As biblical scholars, we are obligated ethically to challenge and confront socioeconomic and religious systems that make it impossible for the majority of our families, congregations, and nations to experience the shalom that the Scriptures promise.
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In each analysis, scholars make the argument that ethical dilemmas arise when the use of the Bible as a moral and spiritual guide is skewed by exegetical interpretations that perpetuate patriarchal presuppositions of male superiority and female inferiority without challenge. The ability to render a holistic theology of a good and just God is thwarted if present-day interpretive strategies fail to engage rhetorical methods attuned to all that are marginalized by race, class, culture, and gender.
Male monotheism and the dualizing of gender metaphors
To appreciate Yee’s textual study, searching the origins of a monotheistic patriarchal ideology that Yee analyzes is useful. Feminist scholar Rosemary Radford Ruether examines cult worship of Ancient Near East culture, including Egyptian and Canaanite deistic cults that reasoned human existence with natural chaos.
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The Canaanite world from which the patriarchal cult (Hebrew) evolved was one in which “Goddess and God are equivalent, not complementary images of the divine . . . . Gender division is not yet the primary metaphor for imaging the dialectics of human existence.”
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Nomadic herding societies may be a social origin of male monotheism, with god imagery of Sky-Father (a form of storm god imagery, crucial elements of nature, i.e., weather and seasons), instead of female gardening roles. “Nomadic religions were characterized by exclusivism and an aggressive, hostile relationship to the agricultural people of the land and their religions.”
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Accordingly, the social hierarchy of patriarchal rule was formed in a religious system of male monotheism not present in paired God and Goddess imagery: God is modeled after the patriarchal ruling class and is seen as addressing this class of males directly, adopting them as his “sons.” They are his representatives, the responsible partners of the covenant with him. Women as wives now become symbolically repressed as the dependent servant class. Wives, along with children and servants, represent those ruled over and owned by the patriarchal class. They relate to man as he relates to God. A symbolic hierarchy is set up: God-male-female. Women no longer stand in direct relation to God; they are connected to God secondarily, through the male. This hierarchical order is evident in the structure of patriarchal law in the Old Testament, in which only the male heads of families are addressed directly. Women, children, and servants are referred to indirectly through their duties and property relations to the patriarch.
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Ruether also posits that the Hebrew creation story in Genesis is an example of gender order that gave the woman a negative identity. “Male monotheism becomes a vehicle of a psychocultural [sic] revolution of the male ruling class in its relationship to surrounding reality.” 23 Israel’s female elite was excluded from the hierarchy of priests, and Ruether asserts, “In Hebrew religious development, male monotheism does not by any means, succeed in simply supplanting the older world of Gods and Goddesses . . . . Rather it imposes itself on this older world, assimilating, transforming, and reversing its symbol systems.” 24
Ramifications for expository analysis
Textual symbolization familiar to the ancients helped to nuance and legitimate the ideology behind the David and Bathsheba story, but it now requires a contemporary investigation. Brueggemann also pointedly notes that the Bathsheba-Uriah-David narrative is an articulation of ideological purpose with Bathsheba and Uriah as the backdrop to David’s immoral leader-power evolution. 25 Yee’s study of the Hebrew text explores the negative “symbolization of woman” as evil, sinful, and deadly, as gender symbols “interconnect” with the ancient context of a sociohistorical climate. A gender-focused ideological investigation of the selected text includes an extrinsic and intrinsic analysis of “economic class, race, ethnicity, and colonial status in four periods of ancient Israel’s history.” 26 Accordingly, Yee describes ideology as values and beliefs communicated in “a symbolic/linguistic system used in human communication.” 27 Thus, values and beliefs as ideological ideals influence perceptions and behavior. Necessarily, the state’s ideological agenda was legitimization, not equalization or gender justice.
Legitimation is an ideological strategy that implies certain gender values are the only valid ones. “One significant way in which an ideology becomes legitimate is by universalizing and ‘immortalizing’ itself.” 28 Stereotyping uses value-laden adjectives to generalize about the whole gender. Compensation is an ideological gender strategy that devalues women by elevating certain general opportunities in the public sphere. Similarly, collusion is a secret agreement for deceitful purposes “related to the legitimizing strategy of ideology, when the dominant group attempts to secure a woman’s complicity in her own objectification.” 29 These strategies are evident when biblical characters are misappropriated in gender-biased tropes to typecast women negatively as in McKenzie’s version of Bathsheba.
Extrinsic analysis
Extrinsic sociopolitical history illuminates textual placement and its purpose, while intrinsic analysis focuses on the inherent message as an ideological production. There are different schools of thought on the dating of the Davidic court literature. Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman cite extra-biblical archeological research that places Yahwist Pentateuch writing in a later sociohistorical period in Judah’s court under King Josiah’s reform in the seventh century BCE. 30 Robert Coote and David Ord theorize the Hebrew text was formulated as early as 1100–1000 BCE, influenced by and in tension with extant cult ideologies as the Davidic court evolved. 31
Yee presents four periods of ideological influence on textual writing. The first two are relevant to this article. First, in the pre-monarchic period, an agrarian populace emerged from indigenous peoples of the region of Canaan, under the shadow of Egyptian authority. The tribal-familial modes of production were independent economic units sustained over centuries in the hill country. Second, the monarchic period evolved from a native-tributary mode of production. Accumulators of land became more prosperous, and increased socioeconomic stratification occurred as less prosperous masses were bound by debt tributes to their kinsmen. The ongoing threat of encroachment by antagonistic Canaanite king-lords may have expedited or provided the impetus for a centralized leader, eventual state formation, and a return to a tributary-taxation mode of production. 32
Sociocultural patterns of strongly localized kinship-based patriarchal and patrilinear “tribes” or clans were based on an ideological value system of honor/shame codes, tied to economics, sexuality, and gender behavior. “Biblical notions of honor and shame are (re)productions of an established male ideology.” 33 Throughout the Ancient Near East, women were a subclass with no formal power but linked to male-centered ideologies of behavior, fertility, modesty, and deference; hence, women held roles limited to household farming chores and family. If women held a modicum of informal influence, it was expressly within female gender circles since resistance to familial male authority could never be exerted publicly because male control of any conflict-indicating behavior “was ideologically encoded in the biblical text.” 34 Negative female tropes of Israel as whore and slut in the prophetic literature represented an ideology of gendered shame and fearful imagery as the antithesis of faithfulness, purity, and respectability.
With the rise of nascent elite ruling classes, gender limits were tightened and hierarchical ideology was imposed. Self-interest and power through landholdings increased class separation. Likewise, gender politics grew increasingly divisive and burdensome. Yee writes, “As society itself became more economically and politically stratified by the state, hierarchical relations among male and female family members intensified. The formation of the state particularly affects women and their men in the area of sexuality.” 35 Thus, emerging laws as found in Leviticus, edited later as Deuteronomy, prescribed gender/sexual roles by setting the death penalty for adultery to “encourage and intensify the marital bond at the expense of the kinship bond.” 36 Accordingly, an ideological strategy of an emerging localized monarchy was to legitimate its central authority through a system of formalized behavior codes. 37 Nevertheless, an ideology justifying independent monarchy usurped familial controls to centralize state control. Patron–client ideology (another honor-shame code of the elite) formed the dominant value system that is operative in the Old Testament; furthermore, K. L. Noll describes the institution of kingship as a manifestation of a patron–client relationship. 38 The patron king’s power over familial matters of matrimony stood in tension with honor-shame codes, legal precepts, and consequences of adultery, which help to situate the David-Bathsheba story. Yee contends that “while the adulterer himself incurs disgrace and condemnation in an affair, an implicit double standard exists in the biblical evaluation of a man who breaks wedlock.” 39 Having considered the extrinsic sociohistorical context, our analysis of intrinsic ideology inherent in the Bathsheba story is warranted.
Intrinsic analysis
An intrinsic analysis is attentive to the genre of the text for rhetorical and structural features that reveal ideological strategies of the text as well as absent voices (unconscious message); thus, Yee notes that gender roles in the Bible were used for redactive purposes. 40 Bathsheba’s role frames the succession narrative that Lawrence Boadt posits is in David’s story of trials with his sons as “seeds of his own evil, and served to justify Solomon as next monarchical heir to be crowned before Adonijah can seize power.” 41 The Yahwist narrator offers a series of honor-shame manipulations to display David’s accumulation of power as patron, and the result is obligatory deference/shame of others, as clients. To lose face, and property such as a wife, in the public sphere brought ultimate shame to the man’s life. These moves are strategic, including the challenging of Nabal and marrying Abigail (to control Hebron land and people), 42 usurping Saul for his wife Ahinoam (Jonathan’s mother) and marrying her, 43 and killing Uriah for Bathsheba.
Mieke Bal examines the semiotic and linguistic significance in the textual frames of 2 Sam 11 with literary criticism as a form of ideological criticism: “David is, within an actantial analysis, the subject of action. His lust sets the action in motion, and with the help of his servants (obligatory, not freely offered help), his power decides the positive fulfillment of his narrative program: to possess Bathsheba.”
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Aligning with biblical scholarship, Judith Todd notes that situation and motive are complex in Bathsheba’s instance, especially if biblical lineage aligns her in a family of means by identifying her father as Eliam, listed in 2 Sam 23.
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Eliam and Uriah were part of an elite circle of David’s army. Was it likely David knew of Bathsheba’s relation to both? One could surmise from 2 Sam 11:3 that David did learn the association upon sending someone to obtain her identity. Hearing who she was and whose she was, “This is Bathsheba daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah the Hittite,” David then sent messengers to get her since the Hebrew verb, laqah, means “to take” (v. 4, NRSV). However, in 2 Sam 11:4, the parsed tense has a more assertive meaning, “to take away or to take possession of, seize, capture.”
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If seized at the will of the chief leader or king, Bathsheba would have no recourse to resist; the power is unilateral. David saw her, inquired about her, and took her. Noll poses startling gender implications in the Yahwist portrayal of patron–client codes when Yahweh’s “voice” as divine patron to his client David admonishes his actions with Bathsheba (2 Sam 12:7b–8): Note, however, the morality of the patron-client structure, or, rather, its amorality. Yahweh asserts that he has delivered into David’s bed the wives of former patrons. . . . In sum, Yahweh is not angry at his client for coveting and taking another man’s wife. He is angry at David for coveting and taking the wrong man’s wife. . . . Later in his speech of punishment against David, Yahweh announces that David’s punishment will include the raping of David’s wives (2 Sam 12:11). In an ancient patron-client society, the patron’s wives are not people with their own dignity as autonomous individuals. Rather, the wives are “possessions” of the patron. If a patron falls from power, his possession becomes the spoil of another man, another patron. From the perspective of a patron-client worldview, the rape of David’s wives is thought to be “proper” punishment because David, not his wives, has sinned against the patron god, Yahweh. To be blunt, the ancient storyteller has depicted the god of 2 Samuel 12 as a god who sanctions the use of women as pawns of power politics and even commands the rape of women. In this sense as well, the patron god Yahweh differed not at all from other Iron Age patron gods. Although these narratives are not descriptions of real past events, the social and political world reflected in them was the real world of the Iron Age Palestinian highlands.
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Notably, the text locates David’s dishonor of Yahweh and not Bathsheba; however, Yee posits that while the Yahwist narrates “a specifically Judean ‘theology of resistance’ in his critique of the apparent self-deification of Jerusalemite kings, he did not intend the abolition of the monarchy.” 48 Bal’s study goes further to analyze the rhetorical significance in dialogues of David with Uriah and Joab that support the rhetorical/gender moves within the text. 49 In addition, Brueggemann surmises that the Torah community of the narrator would grasp the rhetorical and theological depth of the word evil to cast David’s unethical coverup with Yahweh’s judgment of the leader’s actions through Nathan’s condemnation. 50 In essence, the intrinsic analysis of Yee and others provides valuable perspectives, although Yee does not textually engage the subject story nor does she advocate for a gender-specific critique of pejorative characterization of female leadership roles. Rather, Yee discusses the Yahwist ideology exemplified in Gen 2–3 as her intrinsic analysis. Nevertheless, I contend that the findings are transferable to analyze McKenzie’s version of 2 Sam 11–12 and 1 Kgs 2. My aim next is to counter misappropriated gender bias by examining the maligned characterization of Bathsheba. I engage with the arguments of Yee and others to critique McKenzie’s negative interpretation and the gendered ideology present today.
Counter-narrating McKenzie’s Bathsheba story: Theoethical praxis considerations
Although McKenzie characterizes the Bathsheba story in 2 Sam 11–12 as “a fiction by Solomon’s apologist,”
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he links the Samuel text to 1 Kgs 1–2 and supposes the textual presence of two authors. “The difference is apparent in the portrayal of Nathan. . . . Second Samuel is a text written by prophets. . . . Our characterization of Bathsheba, however, must consider all the stories about her. If we reread the story of her adultery with her character in 1 Kings 1–2 as background, we see her in an entirely different light.”
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McKenzie does not account for the redactor’s intent in each account (intrinsic analysis) or the sociohistorical placement of each story (extrinsic analysis). To an extent, McKenzie blames David as an afterthought; still, the interpretive danger of McKenzie and others like him as interpreters of Scripture is the license taken with presumptive gender bias.
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Closer inspection of McKenzie’s interpretative reading reveals several ideological issues from his commentary: There is, first of all, the fact that she was bathing where the king could see her. He had a couch or bed on his roof and often took naps there. Bathsheba knew when and where he slept. The fact that he saw her bathing was no mere accident. It was no accident that she conceived. The text makes clear that she slept with David at her optimal time for conception. This suggests the possibility that her seduction of David and conception of the child were planned. They were steps by which she might secure her future and advance herself.
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McKenzie cites Deuteronomistic law in a footnoted comment to justify a point that “Bathsheba’s failure to cry out would indicate her complicity in the liaison.” 55 To deconstruct McKenzie’s gender bias, I identify six factors of gendered characterizations found in Yee’s intrinsic textual analysis. I then use these six factors in a womanist theoethical method of counter-narrative in the Bathsheba story to reconstruct praxis considerations.
The objectification of the female is a trope for gender and class relations that must be analyzed as part of the patriarchal literary production of the text. 56
A woman is introduced in the text to mediate gender/power conflict, often “as the ‘middle semantics’ that mediates fundamental contradictions in the story.” 57
Ideological manipulation focuses attention on the text rather than the underlying class and gender relationship it signifies. Yee states, “The class struggle is shifted to gender struggle, which is more predisposed to ideological manipulation during the monarchy, given the subordination of women to men even in a familial mode of production during the pre-state period.” 58
Legitimation of royal interests shifts to supersede other points of conflict. Hence, “the story simultaneously subverts local power authorities that threaten the state.” 59
Women more easily become the theological liability, either overtly or inferred in the text, as Yee notes, “In the politics of blame, the man, confronted by God with his transgression, diverts the crime to the woman.” 60
Women are often interpreted as being the perpetrator and, therefore, are condemned. 61
McKenzie also fails to recognize the centrality of honor-shame codes per Yee’s extrinsic analysis or use of Bathsheba as the “middle semantic” in class/ gender conflict per Yee’s intrinsic points 1–3. Per patriarchal law, Bathsheba is Uriah’s property. As a mercenary soldier Uriah, and his wife especially, is in a different class below the monarch (patron) and is subject to his desires and demands. In the ancient social reality, Bathsheba’s stepping out of her class and gender restrictions to seduce a King is unlikely. It is doubtful that Bathsheba could freely access the King unless access was initiated by the King or mediated by someone in the King’s court (for example, in Est 4:16, initiating audience with the King risked death). Any adulterous actions initiated or complied with could be punishable by death; thus, the state adjudication decision places the monarch in control. In other words, Bathsheba had no guarantee that David would “claim” her (see also the 2 Sam 13:10–17 account of the Amnon/Tamar interaction and rejection). The social rejection of Uriah as a consequence of shame, if the discovery of David’s ruse occurred, is also too large an issue to overlook.
McKenzie ignores an extrinsic factor of the female obligatory role in arranged marriages and ignores the redactor’s silence concerning any affection for David. In this situation of unequals, affection does not matter. Bathsheba is not in control of planning or averting a plot to kill Uriah. An intrinsic analysis of the Yahwist writer’s ensuing drama with Uriah and the dialogue of David’s plot with his chosen subordinates affirms Yee’s intrinsic points 3 and 4 to assert that royal interests are legitimated by ideological manipulation, shifting points of conflict.
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Yee’s description of collusion as an ideological strategy for deception is evident in the gender role of Bathsheba’s portrayal as a “legitimizing strategy” that objectifies or stigmatizes.
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McKenzie’s stance, however, reveals the troubling interpretive ideologies of stereotyping and collusion by linking an alleged premeditated assignation on the part of Bathsheba with an ultimate plan to have her child become king. Further leaps of misogynistic license appear in a second quote: It is worth recalling that marriages at the time were arranged and not made for love. The fact that she was married to Uriah did not mean she had any affection for him. Bathsheba’s scheme worked better than she could have imagined. It landed her in the royal household. Then she started working on her son’s future. Consider the name she gave him: Solomon. It means “his replacement.”
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Again, Bathsheba’s role or feelings in the matter are not the issue. Class-gender codes also indicate that Bathsheba would not be in a position to control or deny David’s advances; hence, her rejection of a monarch’s advances was impossible. In fact, she did “cry out,” using the same contact mode by which she was summoned: a plea via a servant. Successful delivery of the message signals David’s option to ensure access for future sexual purposes. Textually, Bathsheba’s role, as the “middle semantic,” intrinsically reflects the extent of monarchical power (David) over the military (Uriah) and any subject who the monarch chooses (Bathsheba). Moreover, an extrinsic analysis of polygamous class/gender roles would confirm that her survival is directly linked to patrilineage. Her identity is inextricably tied to birthing a male child. Her lifeline in the tumultuous sibling battle for power was her child’s succession to the throne. Women rarely had the ultimate decision in naming the child. David’s choice of the name “Solomon” is a Yahwist strategy, signified by Yahweh’s further re-naming him as Jedidiah, “beloved of the Lord” (12:25). McKenzie’s stance reveals his own interpretive ideology of compensation. 65
Finally, the fifth and sixth points of Yee’s intrinsic textual analysis are evident; that is to say, women are used as the theological liability and most often are interpreted as being the perpetrator. McKenzie is not alone in his portrayal of Bathsheba as a “provocateur.” Misguided interpretation is not solely the purview of men. Megan McKenna also portrays Bathsheba and David as co-conspirators. 66 Both overlook gender politics in the text’s sociocultural setting as well as the sociohistorical implications of the redactor’s theological aim. Both ignore reasons for a silent Bathsheba (except for one line she speaks: “I am pregnant”). She is not the main subject but a trope in the larger plot. Whether the Yahwist redactor placed attention on David’s immoral acts as a prophetic message (as McKenzie states) or to justify Solomon’s court, the ideological implications remain. When dark deeds come to light, women bear the brunt of the blame.
Yee’s extrinsic and intrinsic analysis demonstrates a sociohistorical and ideological basis for negative female gender portrayal. To this point, narrative strategies, such as spatial opposition, are evident along with oppositions of gender and class. As a counternarrative, Bal surmises that Bathsheba might have been bathing privately to purify herself after her menses and the ironic onset of a fertility cycle, according to Levirate law (Lev 15:19–24). Still, Bal contends, “Within the city, the palace and its elevated roof, whence the king perceives Bathsheba, contrasts with the house of the couple, where Bathsheba is focalized.” 67 Although McKenzie’s interpretative tropes highlight the existence of contemporary gender bias, I contend that male or female practitioners and scholars, as the biblical interpreters today, have an ethical responsibility to resist ideologies that could marginalize women or any group. Biblical analysts and preachers need to employ an informed, balanced hermeneutic in the future because the marginalized majority of women already in the pews need an encouraging word rather than misogynistic gender bias.
Contemporary implications of change agent leadership
My expository review in the prior section is relevant to ground an understanding of influential socio-ideological mores in Ancient Near Eastern religions based upon dominant hierarchical patriarchy evident in scriptural messaging and interpretation. My review also raises urgent leadership implications when power is abused for selfish agendas rather than approaching leadership as a sacred task. A hermeneutical consideration of contemporary appropriation is pertinent because religion and scripture are continually theologized as platforms to libel and justify exclusion. As a womanist scholar, I raise here some intersectional challenges for women in leadership, especially for Black women who are perceived to be triple threats or are labeled as a “triple minority” based on race, gender, and class. A womanist lens contextually examines critical ways to decenter and expose multiple oppressive hegemonic “norms.” Closer examination of intersectionality as an ethical analysis of bias reveals that women in leadership roles must grapple with sexism, racism, classism, gender identity, and religious doctrinal restrictions that privilege male leadership. On the one hand, in the publicly visible roles of organizational leadership, Black women are aware that we are afforded such opportunities often when the organization is struggling, and the failure then becomes associated with the woman in leadership. On the other hand, where women have competed and risen in prestigious roles and merited accomplishments, we also are aware of the whispered assumptions that she must have courted favors. Either instance signals devaluation of Black women’s respectability in the public sphere that extends to the academy and religious spheres as well.
The derisive issues raised at the start of the article highlight the current public refusal of Christian pastors to recant their label of a duly elected and experienced female leader as well as standing firm in their refusal to acknowledge her as a capable change agent. I have written that the term “change agent” is used “to signify the ways in which clergy and interfaith leaders could exemplify a public justice ethic as motivational catalyst.” 68 Furthermore, I argue that the term change agent “can be applied to synergistic leaders who guide change by speaking and acting against the systemic evils of injustice.” 69 Leading change engages adaptive strategies to facilitate innovation as an inclusive and collaborative process for proactive change rather than reactive crisis response. The development of leadership competencies is gender-neutral whether situated in religious or secular settings. Moreover, a womanist theoethical approach attuned to countering systemic oppression is adaptable by male or female leaders who authentically strive to unmask fallacies by deconstructing the unjust narrative and presumptions in public bias. In any event, positive social change cannot flourish in settings in which patronization, triangulated favoritism, or sexually abusive improprieties are allowed to fester without reform. 70 Despite research to the contrary, women are falsely presumed to possess less operative knowledge of the issues as well as less diagnostic and evaluative capabilities to navigate public and private systems.
Disparagement of female leadership perpetuates hypocrisy within our religious institutions, especially if double standards are tolerated within congregations that belie the moral messaging in public justice demands or in unity expectations as community bridge builders. Thus, it is crucial for male and female leaders to voice critique against the frequent allusions to biblical patriarchy in textual inferences, such as associating pastoral gender with the maleness of Jesus as head of the church, or the selective eisegesis of Scripture to claim that women should not lead. 71 Qualified female leaders are stymied in congregational traditions with a biased preference for male leadership rather than employing due diligence with an actual assessment of knowledge, skills, and behavioral practices as leader competencies. Experiential narratives of exclusion by so-called backroom power politics are documented within churches governed by denominational gender restrictions that are tolerated or largely ignored. Double standards must be challenged when trained, credentialed women are undermined in their legitimate efforts to fulfill leadership roles.
Summary: Leading change as sacred praxis regardless of gender
Change agent leadership is sacred praxis when an ethos of communal collaboration extends to valuing contextual experiences while respecting diverse views and intersectional identities. To affirm positive leadership development as sacred praxis requires a renewed commitment to standards that do not devalue female leadership strengths. Sacred praxis requires discernment attuned to manifestations of oppressive dynamics and the efficacy to expose biased practices in organizational systems and structures that impede trust and cooperation. “A womanist theoethic asserts that ignoring the diversity of God-given gifts of anointing is a blind and futile attempt to preempt God’s movement in the life of the church and the health of the community.” 72 In this discussion, analyses of negative tropes offer critical engagement of gender bias with application to the contemporary misappropriation of biblical labels to justify libelous diminution of female agency and leadership competencies. Males and females who are witnessing participants are culpable when they blindly support such claims. Despite the pejorative gender bias, women of diverse intersectional identities exhibit change agent leadership as sacred praxis in the public landscape. They are in roles as skilled and influential organizers of diverse coalitions or as fund developers spearheading communal mobilization with particular awareness of justice aims. They lead as teachers and preachers whether affiliated with the pulpit and pastoral roles within an institutional body or creatively independent capacities as trained consultants to guide change. Some women have forged milestones being elected bishops or appointed to top denominational positions, albeit with less frequency.
Notwithstanding the slow progression of females into leadership roles, the gendered biases of hermeneutical patriarchy are complicated further by racialized intersections of identity in religious claims against a Black woman’s suitability despite her election to the second-highest public office. The specter of racialized gender bias toward Black, indigenous, people of color is still a leadership obstacle as long as the dark deeds of discrimination are secreted or denied. Unjust agendas cloaked in religious tropes must be exposed and countered. Silence is not an option.
Footnotes
1.
Yonet Shimron and Emily McFarlane Miller, “Some Baptist Pastors are Calling Kamala Harris ‘Jezebel.’ What do they mean?” Religion News Service, January 29, 2021, https://religionnews.com/2021/01/29/southern-baptist-pastors-are-calling-kamala-harris-jezebel-what-do-they-mean/. See also Leonardo Blair, “JD Greear Urges Pastors Not to Call VP Kamala Harris ‘Jezebel,’ but to Pray for Her,” The Christian Post, February 4, 2021, 
.
2.
Emilie M. Townes, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 60–62. See also Tamura Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged: Loosing the Black Female Body in Religion & Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018), 20–21.
3.
Lomax, Jezebel Unhinged, 45. Although situated in the black church, Lomax’s analysis relevantly unveils the racialized trope in the public sphere, directed to cast black women under white and black gazes (79–81).
4.
Shanell T. Smith, Touched: For Survivors of Sexual Assault Like Me Who Have Been Hurt by Church Folk and For Those Who Will Care (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2020), 143–46.
5.
Valerie A. Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church in Black Lives Matter Times: Urgency for Action (Lanham: Lexington/Fortress Academic, 2020), 134–40.
6.
Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church, 134.
7.
Gen 3:6 (NRSV).
8.
Steven L. McKenzie, King David: A Biography (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 180–83.
9.
McKenzie, King David, 182.
10.
Gale A. Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve: Women as Evil in the Hebrew Text (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2003). Yee discusses biblical gender relations influenced by four “concrete social and historical conditions of the text’s production” (25) in her category of extrinsic analysis. As an intrinsic analysis, Yee examines how textual changes during each of these periods “rework the ideologies that produce it” (26).
11.
Yee examines four phases of production and change from familial bet’ab mode (nuclear family), to native tributary mode (independent monarchy), to foreign tributary mode (under colonial exile), and finally a slave-based mode (colonized Israel under Roman empire).
12.
Walter Brueggemann, David’s Truth in Israel’s Imagination and Memory, 2nd ed. (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2002), 4–5, 33–36.
13.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 48.
14.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 7.
15.
Renita J. Weems, Battered Love: Marriage, Sex and Violence in the Hebrew Prophets (Minneapolis: Augsberg Fortress Press, 1995), 10.
16.
Weems, Battered Love, 111.
17.
Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, But She Said: Feminist Practices of Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 39–41.
18.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 165.
19.
Rosemary Radford Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). In ch 2, “Sexism and God Language: Male and Female Images of the Divine” (47–71), Ruether reveals a long and rich culture of Sumerian, Babylonian, and Canaanite worship symbols and the evolution to male monotheism.
20.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 52.
21.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 53. Ruether also engages the work of E. O. James, The Worship of the Sky God: Comparative Study of Semitic and Indo-European Religion (London: Athlone, 1963).
22.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 53. In the chapter notes (p. 270n9), Ruether credits Phyllis Bird, “Women in the Old Testament,” Religion and Sexism: Images of Women in Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 48–57.
23.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 54.
24.
Ruether, Sexism and God-Talk, 54–56. See also 1 Sam 28:7–25 (the medium of Endor) and 2 Sam 14 (the wise woman of Tekoa).
25.
Brueggemann, David’s Truth, 50–57. Brueggemann notes the decisive actions associated with David and the intentional identification of a silent Bathsheba only as the wife of Uriah or mother of Solomon (57).
26.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 4, 25. Yee further links her extrinsic and intrinsic analysis of ideologies in Gen 2–3 to demonstrate the interconnection between social and economic interests, class, and gender relationships (60–79).
27.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 17.
28.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 15.
29.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 17.
30.
Israel Finkelstein and Neil Silberman, The Bible Unearthed (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 284.
31.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 60. See also Robert Coote and David Ord, The Bible’s First History (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1989), 28–30.
32.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 31–32, 62. See also Robert Coote and Keith Whitelam, “Emergence of Israel: Social Transformation and State Formation following the Decline in Late Bronze Age Trade,” Semeia 37 (1986): 107–47. The third and fourth periods occurred during exile and after Babylonian/Persian occupation, as characterized by Roman colonialism.
33.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 42.
34.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 49.
35.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 65.
36.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 65. Yee references Stulman’s study of the Deuteronomic code and its restrictions. See Louis Stulman, “Sex and Familial Crimes in the D Code: A Witness to Mores in Transition,” JSOT 53 (1992): 47–64.
37.
38.
K. L. Noll, Canaan and Israel in Antiquity: A Textbook on History and Religion, 2nd ed. (London: T&T Clark, 2013).
39.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 47–48.
40.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 27, 67. Yee refers to the Yahwist text as “an ideological artifact that arises from and refers back to a tributary mode of production” and as “a myth of origins transmitted by a sector of the dominant class.”
41.
Lawrence Boadt, Reading the Old Testament: An Introduction (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1984), 232–34. “The story of Saul and David in Books 1 and 2 Samuel is closely tied up with the task of repelling the Philistines” (46). Like Coote et al., Boadt states that the Davidic court history in 2 Sam 9 - 1 Kgs 2 was written earlier than a seventh-century court of Josiah. He places this Yahwist composition during the reign of Solomon between 960–930 BCE.
42.
Jo Ann Hackett, “1 and 2 Samuel,” in Women’s Bible Commentary, ed. Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe, exp. ed. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1998), 98.
43.
Hackett, “1 and 2 Samuel,”, 98. See also Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 47.
44.
Mieke Bal, Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 29. Bal provides criteria for evaluation of interpretations including plausibility, adequacy, and relevance (13). While Bal’s hermeneutical goals differ from Yee’s, Bal is useful in her recognition of gender politics and portrayals of power.
45.
Judith A. Todd, “Can Their Voices Be Heard? Narratives about Women in 1 Samuel 16 through 1 Kings 2” (PhD diss., Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, 1990), 250.
46.
Frances Brown, S. R. Driver, and Charles Briggs, Hebrew and English Lexicon (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1968), 542.
47.
Noll, Canaan and Israel, 214. Noll also discusses patron/client roles of YWYH in 1 Samuel, considering the Saul/David saga to the David /Bathsheba saga (212–15).
48.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 68. “Nevertheless the Yahwist remains a particular voice within the dominant class, expressive of its values on the whole” (186n46).
49.
Bal, Lethal Love, 20–36.
50.
Brueggemann, David’s Truth, 56–60.
51.
McKenzie, King David, 181.
52.
McKenzie, King David, 182.
53.
McKenzie, King David, 183. McKenzie also states, “The recognition of Bathsheba’s role in the story of 2 Samuel 11–12 does not in any way excuse David’s actions or minimize his culpability. He abused his power to satisfy his lust.”
54.
McKenzie, King David, 182. See also McKenzie’s reference to Larry Lyke, King David with the Wise Women of Tekoa (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997), 209n6.
55.
McKenzie, King David, 182, citing Deut 22:23–27.
56.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 77.
57.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 78.
58.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 78.
59.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 78.
60.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 78.
61.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 79. Yee also credits appropriation of her title theme from a Marian prayer (191).
62.
Likewise, McKenzie ignores that David’s action to “bring her into the palace” after her period of mourning signals that she did not immediately reside nor had placement to demand residence in the monarchical ranks.
63.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 17.
64.
McKenzie, King David, 182. Notably, McKenzie draws from two male authors, see 209n7.
65.
Yee, Poor Banished Children of Eve, 16–17.
66.
Megan McKenna, Not Counting Women and Children, Neglected Stories from the Bible (Maryknoll: Orbis, 2000). “There are two people involved in this conception, David and Bathsheba. Many people who read this story want the story to say that David raped Bathsheba and thus Bathsheba had no choice in the matter. . . . But note that Bathsheba responds to her pregnancy by telling David. She knows—and David knows—that her husband, Uriah, is away on campaign (for David) and there is no way she could be carrying Uriah’s child. So she aligns herself with David” (113).
67.
Bal, Lethal Love, 23.
68.
Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church, 6.
69.
Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church, 30–31; see also 70–71.
70.
Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church, 134–40.
71.
See Frederick Douglas Haynes III and Ralph Douglas West, “Pastors, Will You Speak Up When a Black Woman Is Demeaned?” Baptist News Global, February 11, 2021, . See also Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church, 198 and 233n62, examining certain Apostolic pastoral claims against support for women in public and church leadership.
72.
Miles-Tribble, Change Agent Church, 144.