129 - Women as Interpreters of the Bible

Women as Interpreters of the Bible
By Patricia Demers
New York, Paulist Press, 1992. 181 pp. $12.95.

The Women's Bible Commentary
Edited by Carol A. Newsom and Sharon H. Ringe
Louisville, Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992. 396 pp. $20.00.

That the title of Patricia Demers' book is misleading sets the stage for several of its problems. The book is not about women as interpreters of Scripture, not as interpretation is understood by contemporary biblical scholarship. A more helpful title might have been, "How women used the biblical tradition," for the work is not about women exegetes, but how women used Scripture in other forms of literary endeavor. For example, Demers (a professor of Renaissance and children's literature) describes how the medieval visionaries incorporated "biblical texts and allusions in their descriptions of visionary experiences," how the Renaissance "exegetes" used "biblical imagery," and how the governesses of the nineteenth century used allegory "in which biblical narratives, characters, and motifs are prominent."

After a brief, and very general, chapter on what it means to "interpret," the book examines chronologically medieval visionaries, women of the Renaissance, and those who wrote children's literature in the last century (the strongest section of the book). Chapters one, five, and six discuss feminist hermeneutics, but two, three, and four are not clearly related to them.

Reading the study, I was annoyed that Paulist Press had not rendered Professor Demers the service of a judicious and severe editor, one who, for example, would have asked for whom the book was primarily intended. Too little background information is provided for the general reader, and the scholar will find the material thin. A vast amount of secondary literature is quoted, but there is not much by way of original contribution as chapters bump along without the sense of arriving at a destination.

The book is not without merit. It can serve as an introduction to fascinating women like Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim, Hildegard of Bingen, Catherine of Siena, Marie Dentiere, Jane Lead and others. Alas, it does not advance our understanding of women in the technical task of biblical exegesis.

The Women's Bible Commentary takes us further along those lines and is a book which deserves to be not only on the shelf of the serious student, but in the church library. Edited by women well known in Old and New Testament scholarship, it assembles a collection of female

130 - Women as Interpreters of the Bible

biblical scholars who make it their task to comment on books of the Bible that are already in their arena of expertise. So far as I know, it is, indeed, the "first comprehensive attempt to gather some of the fruits of feminist biblical scholarship on each book of the Bible."

The introduction admits that this is not intended as a general or complete commentary; it proceeds by providing an overview of each book of the Bible followed by commentary on passages selected because they either focus on women or are of special interest to women. General articles on feminist hermeneutics and on women in the biblical worlds are most helpful, especially the essay on extracanonical writings, until recently an overlooked source of information "ripe for harvest" by feminist scholars.

As with any collection of essays, these are uneven. And within the community of women biblical scholars there will be healthy (and perhaps heated!) discussion of some of the readings. But no one will go away from the volume with her or his old assumptions about biblical texts intact. Who would have thought to bring the plight of abused women to bear on the reading of Hosea or to have faulted the logic of marriage in the household code in Ephesians? The challenge and pleasure of this work is its tendency to upset expectations about familiar books.

Newsome and Ringe are to be commended for bringing together such a collection of scholarship and for groundbreaking work. It is greatly to be hoped that we shall see other commentaries of this sort in the near future to further the task of empowerment "that comes from reading the Bible as a woman in the company of women."

Bonnie B. Thurston
Wheeling Jesuit College
Wheeling, WV