Cullen Murphy - The Word according to Eve: women and the Bible in ancient times and our own

Copyright 1998 by Cullen Murphy

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

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The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

Murphy, Cullen.

The Word according to Eve : women and the Bible in ancient times and our own / Cullen Murphy,
p. cm.

A Peter Davison book.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-395-70113-9

1. Bible and feminism. I. Title.

BS 680. W 7 M 87 1998 220.8'3054dc21

98-18015 CIP

e ISBN 978-0-544-74889-7
v1.0715

FOR

Anna Jane Murphy

Anna Marie Murphy

Joan Byrne Murphy

Mary Bodnar Torres

THESE ARE THE GENERATIONS...

Genesis 10:1

Foreword

T HE BIBLE IN MY HOME , our family Bible, was bought by my great-great-grandfather, Robert Murphy, nearly a hundred and fifty years ago. The first words written in it record his marriage, on June 9, 1852, to Ellen Costello, in Clifton, New York. The book is in remarkably fine condition, as only very old items can be, and the very dignity of its agingthe gentle foxing of the paper; the velvet dustiness of the leather; the mild pungency of the aroma, like that of sandalwoodlends to it an aura of timeless comfort.

This is the kind of Bible that comes to mind when we think of the words the good book. It is the kind of Bible that we want for graveside obsequies and for swearings-in, the kind from which we expect to hear nondenominational intonations of The Lord is my shepherd and Blessed are the pure in heart and Love thy neighbor as thyself, and whose prose may be savored for its expressive economy and its lapidary beauty. This family Bible is, as much as anything else, an artifact, a symbol of our civilization. As a physical object alone it can exert an emotional power quite distinct from what the words inside it may convey.

And then, of course, there are the words. It is a truism that those parts of the Bible which are most frequently encountered, and most readily apprehended, through the medium of Jewish or Christian religious rituals provide only a wan version of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament as a whole, and only the dimmest sense of the Bibles volatility and intensity: the swiftness of its judgments, the peremptoriness of its anger, the cold purposefulness of its attention span, the impatience of its disdain for euphemism.of prayer and parable, psalm and song, myth and revelation, it is also a document that cannot fail to register in the minds of modern readers as profoundly alien, the product of a world and of sensibilities that in many ways are manifestly not our own.

This is nowhere more the case than with regard to women.

The Bible is famous for being the worlds most overstudied bookoverstudied by male scholars and commentators, that is to say. It has not, however, been overstudied by women. Indeed, until recently, it was studied by female scholars hardly at all, let alone by female scholars who were interested specifically in what the Bible had to say about women. This has changed, to put it mildly, owing in large measure to the influx of women into fields of study from which they once were virtually absent and effectively barred. Today the Bible is being confronted not only by women who are theologians, who bring to the task an overtly religious perspective, but also, and more pertinently from the point of view of this book, by women who are biblical scholars, linguists, historians, archaeologists, and literary critics. The research of this latter group by now covers just about every conceivable aspect of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, from religious law and leadership to the economics of household life, from women exploited as servants and slaves to women exalted as prophets and queens, from the most brutal depictions of rape and murder to the most sublime seductions of romantic love.

These scholars are posing questions such as the following: In the inhospitable and tribalized world of early Israel, could women have been central and authoritative figures, despite the contrary picture usually painted by the Bible? Do certain passages in the Bible, together with the evidence of archaeology, preserve traces of what may have been a more egalitarian social regime than we might have imagined? Does the theology of the creation stories really mean that woman must be considered subordinate to man, as centuries of interpretation would have us believe? Might it even be incorrect to think of the first human being, Adam, as a male? How and where did women exercise the role of prophet, and what did exercising that role signify? In the New Testament, can the case be made that some of the female disciples of Jesus occupied a leadership status equal to that of the male disciples? If they did, how did their status come to be played down? Was feminine religious imagery more pervasive in early Christian times than we have tended to acknowledge? Can we ever know whether parts of the Hebrew Bible or New Testament were written by women?

I once asked David Tracy, the prominent Catholic theologian, what he thought would be the result of feminisms encounter with religion, and he said simply, The next intellectual revolution.

In the course of its existence, which covers the larger part of three millennia, the Bible has been implicated in four intellectual revolutions of enduring and civilization-shaping consequence. The initial revolution is the one that gave impetus to the Bible in the first place, the formation of an intertwined people and book that set the Israelites apart from the rest of the ancient world in their conception of human character and destiny in the eyes of a unitary, indivisible God. The second revolution occurred within Jewish religion and produced what would come to be called Christianity, along with an additional set of texts, the New Testament, with its organic connections to the Hebrew Bible. The third revolution occurred within Christianity during the Reformation, and its manifold consequences included, for some believers, an exaltation of Scriptures authority and also broader access to the very words of Scripture, in the form of printed Bibles that the faithful could read in their own languages, fostering literacy throughout the Western world. The fourth revolution, under way since the Enlightenment, was instigated by advances in scientific discovery and historical investigation that offered Reason to counter the Bibles authority as an explanatory or descriptive text and therefore perhaps also its authority as a prescriptive one.

Is feminism truly the Bibles fifth intellectual revolution? That assessment may sound overblown, but in all likelihood it is not. Feminisms larger conversation with religion, brought about both by issues of faith and by issues that know no faith, touches every aspect of it, leaves no subject off the table. Feminism engages doctrine, liturgy, ministry, and leadership, and it engages them all at once.

There is obviously no single canonical version of feminismthe movement fractures and calves with an enthusiasm reminiscent of the left in the 1930s, and with the same sense of injury and righteousness and the same level of noiseand thus there is no single take on the Bible or any of its parts by scholars who look at biblical issues from a feminist perspective. Some are historians of a purely secular bent, who seem to care little for religion considered on its own terms but who are seized by the idea of women and religion as a historical reality and an intellectual problem. They want to understand how women in the Christian and Jewish traditions came to be consigned to an inferior statusone thinks of Thomas Aquinass definition of woman as