Re-Claiming Biblical Women: Feminist (Jewish) Re-Readings of Hebrew Narratives

Abstract

In the last three decades, biblical feminist scholarship has proliferated in ways that could not have been imagined by the early practitioners of this theory, myself included. Not only have a number of manuscripts, diction aries, reference works, commentaries, and companions been published, but increasingly feminist criticism has become an acceptable, if not normative, approach among several other leading contemporary approaches to the field of Bible Studies. Hardly a female character in the Hebrew Bible has evaded a contemporary interpretation. The proliferation of monographs in the field has further spawned a diversity of approaches and theories adding to the question of gender the analytic categories of class, nation, race, and culture. Critical approaches taking aim at biblical ideologies of ethnocentrism, monotheism, and androcentrism have routinely been questioned and debated by reconstructive and appropriative approaches, influenced largely by femi nist theological readings, notably Womanist, Latina, Lesbian, and Post colonial readings, which often consider biblical women as models of empowerment rather than embodiments of patriarchal thinking. Jewish scholars have been active in the field of biblical studies, though little has been done to elaborate a theoretical articulation of a distinctly Jewish femi nist approach to the Hebrew Bible. These two books may signal an interesting development of a specifically Jewish feminist scholarship on the Hebrew Bible, though neither one of the authors explicitly identifies her reading in such terms. Schneider's book pays special attention to the double meanings of consonantal Hebrew, taking the grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and Masoretic blocking of the Masoretic Text of Genesis?(parashot rather than later sequencing of chapters).