112 - Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women's Lives in the Hebrew Bible

Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women's Lives in the Hebrew Bible
By Mieke Bal, ed.
Sheffield, Almond Press, 1989. 243 pp. $42.50.

This book is a stimulating collection of papers written largely by participants in a 1986 Harvard Divinity School seminar on the ideology of gender as it is often imposed upon biblical texts. The eleven authors draw upon newer literary theory and particularly the important work of Mieke Bal, a feminist literary critic who uses deconstruction as a tool for undermining male-dominating interpretations. Bal contributes an insightful introduction to her perspective as well as a paper on the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter in Judges 11. The other authors come from a wide background: biblical studies, anthropology, family therapy, history, women's studies, and social work with battered women. Each author treats a particular biblical narrative or section with a small number from the ancestral narratives of Genesis and a greater number from the book of Judges, especially Judges 4 and 11.

The collection as a whole is tied together by a central conviction: every reading is an interpretation inevitably shaped by the reader's own social and cultural context. Bal writes, "What is wrong with biblical scholarship is not that its readings are male-oriented, but that they are not recognized as readings, hence, that they are put forward as claims to objective truth, positive knowledge, exclusive insight." Those interested in the function of the Bible as a norm in communities of faith will want to say something more than that. Yet what they say will need to take account of the perspective put forward by Bal and others in Anti-Covenant.

Dennis T. Olson
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, N. J.