The year�s surprise �it� girl is the star of a mega best seller, a hot topic on campuses and rumored to be the �special friend� of a famous and powerful man. Yet she�s still very much a woman of mystery. For close to 2,000 years, Christians have known her as Mary Magdalene, but she was probably named Miriam, and came from the fishing village of Magdala. Most people today grew up believing she was a harlot saved by Jesus. But the Bible never says that. Scholars working with ancient texts now believe she was one of Christ�s most devoted followers, perhaps even his trusted confidante and financial backer.
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Today, there are female Biblical scholars at dozens of institutions, and at least two universities�Harvard and the Claremont Graduate University in California�offer degree programs on women in religion. These scholars have produced a new dictionary called �Women in Scripture,� a woman�s study Bible, and feminist commentaries to various books of the New Testament and early Christian literature. �There are increasing numbers of resources concerning Biblical women that are making their way into libraries, classrooms and bookstores,� says Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. �They�re no longer just cleaned up or romanticized stories, but rigorously historical, imaginative, cross-cultural collections.� These insights are also filtering out into popular culture with a slew of literary interpretations of women�s Bible stories in the wake of Anita Diamant�s 1997 best seller, �The Red Tent,� including many about Mary Magdalene.
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Perhaps the most striking protofeminist text in Scripture is the Book of Judith, wholly devoted to a heroine who saves Israel. �She�s like Wonder Woman, only Jewish,� says Vanderbilt�s Levine. Judith�s moment comes as Israel is being threatened by a neighboring power. The male Jewish leadership prepares to surrender, but Judith, a beautiful and pious widow, has another plan. Dressed in her alluring best, she enters the enemy�s camp. The general, Holofernes, becomes infatuated and plans to seduce her. But when she is alone in his chambers, Judith decapitates Holofernes and takes his head home in her food bag. The enemy flees. All of Israel, including Jerusalem and its temple, are saved, and Judith, whom scholars see as a personification of Israel, returns to her previous life.
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Tamar has to deceive the most powerful man in her life in order to get what she deserves. Her Biblical sisters have had to wait thousands of years for their day in the sun, but their voices, too, are finally being heard. No one is trying to claim that the women of the Bible were anywhere near as powerful as the men in their world. But neither were they weak and passive. Perhaps they were just misunderstood. And ignored. Take the story every Sunday-school kid has heard about how Jesus fed a multitude of 5,000 with just five loaves of bread and two fish. What the Bible really says is that there were �five thousand, not counting women and children.� In other words, assuming there was a wife and at least two children for every man, Jesus actually fed 20,000 people. Why didn�t the man who recorded this tale capitalize on the opportunity to make Jesus� miracle seem even more impressive? It seems that women and children were simply too unimportant. �The amazing thing is that there are any women at all in the ancient texts,� says Deirdre Good, professor of New Testament studies at General Theological Seminary. As the scholarly debate continues, one thing worshipers might keep in mind is how often these marginalized characters prevail and are entrusted to deliver the Word of God. From Eve to Miriam to Mary, they were all players�and are , in our unfolding spiritual drama.
"God's Woman Trouble" deals with feminist biblical scholarship. Excerpt:
One important goal set by feminist scholars such as Prof. Carol Meyers of Duke University is to uncover the roles and status of women in ancient Israel. Already, some have found�surprise!�that then, as now, women exerted considerable, sometimes controlling, power within the household, despite an officially patriarchal culture. Others, however, are in quest of a grander holy grail: proof that sometime before the institution of kingship, there was an ideal era when Israelite men and women lived as public equals. But without a lot more archeological evidence, the real world behind much of the Hebrew Bible will never be recovered. �We just don�t have the information about some historical periods,� acknowledges Susannah Heschel, associate professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth, �so there is a temptation to resort to fantasy.�
That temptation especially bedevils those who employ �historical imagination� to fill the Bible�s gaps. For instance, the Book of Exodus calls Moses� sister Miriam a �prophet,� leading some feminist scholars to imagine that �the party of Moses��presumably males�suppressed stories of her prophetic acts so that none survived in the written scrolls. But the desire to plug the holes in the Bible is itself gender inclusive. In the first century B.C., male Jewish writers went farther: they created prophecies for Miriam because, like nature, they abhorred vacuums in their sacred texts. �Misrepresenting what the Bible says has a very distinguished history, going back to the third or fourth century B.C.E.,� notes Harvard professor James L. Kugel, an expert in the history of Biblical interpretation. �So perhaps we ought not to get too self-conscious about modern feminist distortions.�
Finally, there is "Decoding �The Da Vinci Code�", a brief FAQ on the nonsense in this preposterous novel.
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