Abstract
Luise Schottroff and Marie-Theres Wacker (eds),
Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature
, Eerdmans: Grand Rapids, MI, and Cambridge, UK, 2012; 1055 pp.: 9780802860972, £53.00/$80.00 (pbk)
Feminist biblical interpretation has truly come of age and this book is a sign of that maturity. A translation from the original German, this compendium of articles provides a commentary on every book of the Bible – and that is according not just to one canon, but incorporating some books that are extra-canonical to the Jewish and Protestant canons. This is an attempt to be inclusive. All the contributors are female and many are German or from Britain or North America. A few come from further afield – East Asia and Latin America, but this book was first written just as the ‘post-colonial’ trend in biblical studies was influencing feminist criticism to look beyond the academy. I do wonder why it has taken so long (14 years) to translate this work into English – in this day and age there seems little excuse for such delay. But this book clearly proved itself in German-speaking circles and so it was felt a good idea to bring its fruits to the wider world. It resembles the Women's Bible Commentary (a North American product) in many ways, giving a feminist exegesis of each book in turn and, rather than attempting a wholesale discussion of each, slanting each entry towards feminist concerns which often involve the anti-feminist slant found in ancient androcentric texts. Some entries have a particularly liberationist flavour. The book also states the importance of methodology, arguably in a more theoretical way than in the Women's Bible Commentary. The plurality of method that has become the keynote of feminist interpretation is represented here. There are over a thousand pages to this volume. Some entries are written by two authors. For each biblical book, a subtitle is used to indicate the direction in which the article is going. The entries are accessible and do not require knowledge of original languages. There is an emphasis on bibliography which is provided for each entry.
For this review I decided randomly to select three entries – one from the Old Testament, one from the Apocrypha and the other from the New Testament – to give readers a taste of the book. The entry on Ruth by Ina Johanne Petermann (Barmartha), a parish minister and academic writer, has the subtitle ‘Between a women's book and a men's story’. This brings out well the tension of Ruth, on the face of it a women's story but cleary not feminist propaganda and ultimately about the ancestry of the male line leading to the birth of King David. The dictum ‘woman thinks, man provides but God is at the wheel’ is an appropriate summary of what is going on here. In this entry there is a commentary on each chapter of Ruth, the book being short, but this is not the case for longer books. Rather, selected texts are drawn out as and where pertinent to the method. The Ruth entry is an interesting and balanced treatment.
From the Apocrypha, the Testament of Job is covered by Lucia Sutter Rehmann, Professor of New Testament in Basel. This is a book not often treated from a feminist perspective. Arguably Job's wife in this tale (Sitidos who later changes her name to Dinah) has had a bad press by being too closely aligned with Job's wife in the biblical tale. Here it is argued that actually she is a rather different figure, deeply loyal to her husband and very much a victim of circumstance. Her lowest point is a rape scene after which she changes her name and experiences a kind of ‘resurrection’ as a character. Job's daughters are also brought out in this treatment – they are female prophetess figures, claiming justice and feature as strong women in the text. This is a fascinating treatment of a little-known book.
Finally I looked at Elsa Tamez's treatment of Romans where she brings out the liberating aspects of the text. She is Professor Emerita at a university in San José, Costa Rica, and so brings a wider, liberationist perspective to the text. She sees Paul as an apostle who does not marginalize women and Romans as a treatise about a righteous and just God who takes the side of the outcast; she plays down Paul's cultural comments that seem to contradict this stance; she argues that a feminist reading needs to be more contextual and less doctrinal and abstract and she draws parallels with today; she stresses the patriarchal culture of the text and the hierarchical society of the day in which women were victims of injustice and stresses the meaning of ‘grace’ as God's justice being available to all; and she makes the point that discernment sometimes means towing the line and limiting one's freedoms which was the position of many women of Paul's day. This is another creative, original and fascinating stance on the text. This perspective certainly seems to draw out a new set of questions for each text and is a very useful resource for preachers and teachers alike.