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Feminist Biblical Interpretation
By Katharine Doob Sakenfeld

"Then drew near the daughters of Zelophehad the son of Hepher, son of Gilead, son of Machir, son of Manasseh, from the families of Manasseh the son of Joseph. The names of his daughters were: Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. And they stood before Moses, and before Eleazar the priest, and before the leaders and all the congregation, at the door of the tent of meeting, saying, Our father died in the wilderness; he was not among the company of those who gathered themselves together against the Lord in the company in Korah, but died for his own sin; and he had no sons. Why should the name of our father be taken away from his family, because he had no son? Give to us a possession among our father's brethren. Moses brought their case before the Lord. And the Lord said to Moses, 'The daughters of Zelophehad are right; you shall give them possession of an inheritance among their father's brethren and cause the inheritance of their father to pass to them. And you shall say to the people of Israel, 'If a man dies, and has no son, then you shall cause his inheritance to pass to his daughter.' (Numbers 27:1-8; cf. also chap. 36.)

ACCORDING to the overall framework of the Pentateuch, the story of the daughters of Zelophehad (Numbers 27 and 36) is set in the Plains of Moab, across the Jordan River from Jericho. Though the setting is a territory eventually to be claimed for some Israelite tribes, the people are still "in the wilderness, awaiting the land" in the theologically symbolic sense that they have not yet crossed the Jordan River.

Likewise, feminist biblical interpretation is "in the wilderness, awaiting the land" in at least three respects: first, those engaged in feminist biblical study have left the security of a known world of scholarship with its recognizable debates and rules, and find themselves in an environment

Katharine Doob Sakenfeld is Professor of Old Testament and Director of Ph.D. Studies, Princeton Theological Seminary. She is a member of the National Council of Churches' Commission on Faith and Order and of the Revised Standard Version Bible Committee. She is the author of Faithfulness in Action: Loyalty in Biblical Perspective (I 98 5). This essay is a slightly modified version of an inaugural lecture, the full text of which appeared in The Princeton Seminary Bulletin, 9 (198 8) 3.

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where there is far less certainty or ordinary source of sustenance. Second, "wilderness" symbolizes a context of living in continuing hope for "land," a hope not just for space but for place within the scholarly community and within the church, a hope not yet fully realized. And third, "wilderness" represents also for feminists a place of dissension and dispute along the journey, even as it did for Israel of old.¹

In this essay, I want first to illustrate the character of the dispute over interpretive method as I see it in feminist interpretations of biblical texts about women, and then to identify some key element ' s of the ongoing discussion that must be addressed if we are to move ahead. For the first part of this task, the illustration, we will consider the story of the daughters of Zelophehad and three alternative interpretive efforts, each one of my own devising, that seek to exemplify three main approaches in feminist exegesis. I have chosen this story in part because of my own longstanding interest, but also because it is not well known or much written upon, so that we may all bring a bit less baggage to the discussion. To the extent that the three interpretations represent "ideal types," they are probably subject to questions associated with that genre. Nonetheless, I hope the device will be heuristically useful.

I

Here then is the first interpretation. The five women, Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, show remarkable initiative in approaching Moses with their legal problem. As unmarried women whose father has died, they represent those in the community with the least power and the most to lose. Yet they dare to challenge God's own spokesperson Moses and implicitly to suggest that God's own decrees given through Moses may have overlooked an important point. Although there are other biblical narratives in which someone appeals for justice, the appeal is usually based on what is known of God's will, rather than presenting a challenge to it. And the women do not approach Moses privately; they make a challenge in the most public arena possible.

The event takes place at the entrance of the tent of meeting, God's own sanctuary and the locus of divine appearance, in the presence not just of Moses but also of Eleazer the priest, the leaders, and all the congregation. Everyone is listening. "Give to us a possession among our father's brothers!" In their presentation to Moses, the women cleverly use the one point of appeal that will surely be the most telling in their

¹ Elaine Showalter has highlighted the theme of "wilderness" in its feminist dimension for the study of literature in her essay "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness," originally published in Critical Inquiry 8 (Winter 1981); reprinted in E. Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 243-270. Showalter adapts the theme from the title of Geoffrey Hartman's Criticism in the Wilderness: The Study of Literature Today (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980). Hartman, in turn, based his title on Matthew Arnold's use of "wilderness" in his essay "The Function of Criticism in the Present Time," available in The Complete Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H, Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-1977), Vol. 3, pp. 258-90.

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effort to acquire property rights, bringing forward the point that their father's name might be lost from the roster of Israel. Allusions in the previous chapter of Numbers to the sonlessness of Zelophehad (26:33) and to the proportional distribution of land "according to the number of names" (26:52) have set the stage for this claim. Even so, the boldness of the five women, their insistence on not being cast aside economically within the land of promise for lack of agricultural land, and their astuteness in pursuing their goal catch the reader's attention in the opening scene.

Moses then consults the deity, and hears Yahweh's declaration that the daughters of Zelophehad are right and that they shall be given their father's inheritance, as an inheritance among their father's brothers. Moreover, the ruling is generalized to show that in future cases where there is no son, daughters shall always have precedence over other male relatives. The text does not record explicitly Moses' announcement of the divine decision to the five women and the listening community, but we may imagine the rejoicing of Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah and the murmur of varied reactions from the leaders and the populace. At least the women were not punished for daring to question Moses, as his sister Miriam had been earlier (Num. 12). Women's boldness had actually led to a new ruling from God, a ruling allowing inheritance rights.

The sequel of this event is narrated in Numbers 36. The male relatives of the five women now approach Moses, and in the presence of "the leaders, the heads of the ancestral houses of all the Israelites," they remind Moses of the previous divine ruling and point out the problem they have with it. If the women marry outside their own tribe, the land they have inherited will not remain within the allotment of Zelophehad's tribe; even the jubilee will not serve to rectify this change of landholding. Note that in this sequel the place of the meeting is not specified and the audience consists only of the (male) heads of ancestral houses. Not the tent of meeting nor the priest nor the congregation is mentioned. And Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah are conspicuous by their narrative absence in this scene.

Immediately Moses commands the Israelites "by the word of the Lord" that the daughters of Zelophehad must marry within their own clan, so that the land will stay within the tribe; and again the ruling is generalized to all such cases. Here, in contrast to the narrative of chapter 27, what the narrator reports is Moses' speech of command to the Israelites, not Yahweh's speech of command to Moses. The women themselves are completely invisible, and the deity is present only by indirection. In fact, the solution of restricted marriage appears quite abruptly, since (unlike the daughters) the male relatives have not themselves suggested a possible resolution for their complaint. Moses' pronouncement that "the tribe of the Josephites is right" must pertain only to the legitimacy of their complaint, not to any proposed solution.

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The story concludes (vv. 10-12) with the notice that Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah "did as the Lord commanded Moses." The narrator's effort to say that "they all lived happily ever after" only highlights the painful realization that the gain for women in one sphere led only to restriction in another sphere of their existence. The story as a whole is a story of great celebration of women who inherit the promise, and of their own initiative in securing their future. Yet the story ends on a more somber note of reminder of the limits of those gains.

II

Now a second interpretation. Although the two parts of the story of the daughters of Zelophehad both concern women and land, the narrative content and features of the storytelling suggest that the two parts have rather different concerns at center stage. In each case, the focal concern is a problem faced by a male in a patriarchal culture. The first story (chap. 27) is told to address the concern of men who are anxious about the meaning of life and death in the face of the tragedy of having fathered only daughters, but no sons. Not only the land inheritance scheme, but also and even more important, the carrying on of the family name, was understood to be dependent on male offspring. The problem is introduced already in the brief allusion to Zelophehad's sonlessness in chapter 26. Now the narrator places the concern of every such Israelite man into the mouth of his daughters: "Why should the name of our father be taken away from his family, because he had no son?" Although this was doubtless a more existential concern for the male Israelite, it is not unreasonable to suppose that the daughters themselves participated in and assumed this cultural perspective. Certainly the narrator would have assumed that the daughters assumed it.

The proposed solution to the problem of preserving Zelophehad's name is not self-evident to a modern, highly mobile, Western reader, although the intimacy of tie between family name and ancestral homestead may still be part of the ethos of some farm families and a few others. The text simply presupposes a connection between land and name, and the narrator presents a story to show that when women inherit their father's ancestral property, the man's name is thereby preserved. Although the basic narrative structure relates how a new case law came into being, the larger implied purpose of the case law allowing women's inheritance, as the narrative presents it, is the preservation of the father's name.

The second part of the narrative, chapter 36, again centers on a man's concern in a patriarchal world, but the problem in focus here is different. Here the narrator gives attention to economic interests as they manifest themselves in an agricultural economy. The content of the story focuses primarily on the inheritance legislation; the issue of the father's name disappears. Zelophehad's male relatives state their concern in theological categories, in their focus on the maintaining of tribal allotments that

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the reader knows are to be given out in accord with Yahweh's instruction, and in their allusion to the jubilee as the time when all allotments are to be returned to their original status. But the specific legislation announced by Moses in response to their theological concern, even though its rationale preserves the theological theme of tribal allotment, in fact restricts the marriages of Zelophehad's daughters and of all such women much more narrowly, to a woman's own clan (RSV "family") within her ancestral tribe.

Despite the more overtly theological claims of chapter 36, the sacral features of chapter 27 (the tent, the priest, the congregation, God's address to Moses) are all missing here. The place is not specified, and those who hear the complaint to Moses are those whom an ancient Israelite might expect to be present in matters of economic dispute, the heads of the ancestral houses (the next unit smaller than a clan). From an economic and sociological perspective, it is certain that possession of arable land would make any woman in Israel extremely desirable as a marriage prospect. What an excellent "dowry" for a woman to offer in an agricultural economy! Here the story presents a theological basis for reducing such a woman's marriage options and for reducing the range for squabbling among eligible males. The invisible daughters are little more than pawns in a potential land dispute. The narrator's concluding report of the obedience of Mahlah, Tirzah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Noah to Moses' command tells the reader not only that "the plan worked," but also that the entire second generation was finally obedient in every detail and thus paradigmatic for the desired behavior of all future generations.² The paradigm allows for the possibility of change in (or supplementation of) the rules, but it emphasizes the necessity of perfect compliance once a decision has been rendered. Decision-making is represented as Yahweh's, but is culturally attached to the male power figures of the community.

III

Finally, a third interpretation. Numbers 27 and 36 are two stories of indeterminate age, although most scholars would attribute both texts in their present form to the exilic period or later. Joshua 17:3-6 records the allotment of territory to Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah and alludes to the narrative of Numbers 27, but scholars are unable to locate their territory precisely or even to determine with certainty whether they were historical figures remembered from an early period. Whatever the background of the tradition, the Numbers texts function now mainly to support certain case laws concerning inheritance, on the one hand, and marriage, on the other, that had importance for nascent Judaism in the postexilic period. The separation of the two texts by eight

² On the two-part division of Numbers into a first generation of disobedience and a second generation of full obedience, see D. Olson, The Death of the Old and the Birth of the New: The Framework of the Book of Numbers and the Pentateuch (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985).

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chapters of intervening material (itself very disparate) suggests that they represent two different authors, redactors, or contributors (depending on one's view of how Numbers came to its present shape). This perspective is confirmed by the kinds of difference in detail and structure noted in connection with the first interpretation given above, kinds of shifts that it seems unlikely a single author would have made. These two texts offer the possibility of at least four insights into the place of women in Judean culture of the postexilic period. The question of the chronological and geographical extent of the validity of any of the following observations would have to be carefully evaluated.

First, chapter 27 may suggest that ordinary women were permitted direct access to the male authority structure to make appeal in their own right; it was not necessary for a man to make this appeal on their behalf. The story of the two harlots who appeared before Solomon with their dispute over motherhood of an infant may also be cited in support of this possibility (I Kgs. 3:16-28). These stories do not, however, enable us to assess whether such direct access was routine for all women or whether it was exceptional. Our knowledge of the culture generally suggests that women were normally under the protection and authority of some male figure throughout their lives, so we might expect that women would routinely make appeal through these males. On that assumption, these stories could be memorable accounts of women who violated the norm. Or it might be the case that orphans and harlots were not under the protection or authority of any male relative and were therefore in a special class of women for whom direct access was allowed. The problem merits further gathering of evidence, including cautious use of Ancient Near Eastern literary remains.

Second, Numbers 27 suggests that at least for the period of the text or later, Judean women were able to inherit and possess property under limited and prescribed circumstances. This statement presumes that the legislation recorded here was actually in effect, that is, that the text does not represent just a proposal that never gained actual acceptance in the community. The words "inherit" and "possess" are used advisedly, in avoidance of the verb "to own," which is not part of the Hebrew vocabulary generally. Were there other means by which women could come into control of property (specifically land, not goods, in this case)? We should be careful not to argue from this text that there was no other way, even though our tendency is to assume that women were rarely in control of real estate. Were there restrictions on what such daughters could do with the land they inherited or possessed, by comparison to sons or other male relatives who received land in the same way? Chapter 27 does not address the issue, but chapter 36 is specifically concerned with one such limitation.

Third, Numbers 36 suggests that at least for the period of this text (chap. 36) or later, daughters who inherited property in the absence of sons had to keep the property fairly closely within the family circle; patrimonial property rights were preserved by an intra-clan restriction

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on the women's marriage options. In considering the relationship between marriage and property in the period, it is important to avoid overgeneralization. The text refers only to the daughters' "inheritance" (the inherited land), not to any other real or material property associated with marriage. R. Westbrook's massive study, "Old Babylonian Marriage Law," reveals the remarkable complexity of legal issues surrounding marriage in one culture of the Ancient Near East.³ Even the incredible variety of contingencies known from the evidence in the Old Babylonian setting offers no precise parallel to the Zelophehad case; thus, we are warned once again against any incautious generalizing from the scanty biblical data.

Fourth, Numbers 36 might offer hints about marriage customs in the period of the text. Despite the implication of the RSV's translation of verse 6, the Hebrew of Numbers 36 does not provide any certain clues as to what role the women may or may not have had in selecting their marriage partners under these circumstances. We know very little of how marriage partners were determined in Israel, and this narrative does not help us gain access to that aspect of women's experience in the biblical period. But there is some evidence to be gleaned about the range of permissible marriages. There is considerable debate in the sociological literature concerning the exact structure and function of Israel's tribal system, and whether it continued to have a strong structuring influence for the whole community of Yahweh worshipers as late as the postexilic period is doubtful. But even if Numbers 36 represents a theological ideal, the emphasis on marriage within the clan in this situation does make clear that marriages in such cases were to be made"close to home," however the postexilic community defined such categories. Recent scholarship has shown that marriage between a man and his father's brother's daughter (the practical outcome of the Zelophehad case, 3 6: 1 0) was regularly permitted under the legislation of Leviticus 18 and 20,⁴ So that this story does not introduce a closer than normal exception to the rules of incest known from other preserved legislation.⁵

IV

Having presented these three interpretations, let me now suggest how I see them in relation to ongoing feminist work in biblical studies, especially in the Hebrew Scriptures, and indicate what areas of work I see called for by the current scene.

³ Doctoral dissertation. Yale University, 1982.
⁴ See Susan Rattray, "Marriage Rules, Kinship Terms and Family Structure in the Bible," Society of Biblical Literature 1987 Seminar Papers, ed. K. H. Richards (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1987), pp. 537-44.
⁵ Some scholars have used the story of Judges 21 to argue that tribal exogamy was the norm for Israel. This sweeping generalization seems unwarranted, since the fact that some tribes swore not to give their women in marriage to another shows only that marriage outside the tribe was permitted, not that marriage within the tribe was prohibited.

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First of all, very little of the content of any of the three interpretations forms a part of the published literature on these two chapters. The third interpretation contains the most material related to earlier scholarly work, but it remains distinctive in the form of its approach to the text, namely special focus on learning about the life and experience of ancient women. All three interpretations see the texts through new eyes and ask new questions.

At the same time, the three interpretations represent (albeit in a sketchy, non-technical way) three different approaches representative of much feminist publication in biblical studies. I would identify the first approach as a literary one, which focuses on the narrative as it is received as text, with interpretive constraints provided by the perceived literary design and by grammatical and syntactical elements. The work of Phyllis Trible is probably the best known illustration of this approach, and some of the work of Cheryl Exum⁶ and of Mieke Bal also fits generally into this type. Trible identifies her method as that of rhetorical criticism.⁷ As a type of literary study, this first interpretive method may be described as a "formal" literary approach.⁸

The approach exemplified in the second interpretation is also within the literary realm, but it concentrates much more on reading the text as a product of its own culture. Interpretive constraints of what would be imaginable or probable for speakers and hearers in a particular ancient patriarchal culture are thus to be given considerable weight in assessing literary design, as well as in deciding which textual clues to focus on and how to assess their significance and meaning. This approach is generally similar to what Meir Sternberg describes as "discourse-oriented analysis" and to "speech-act" literary theory as explicated by Susan Lanser.⁹ my descriptive name for it is "culturally cued literary reading." In feminist studies, this approach often concentrates on exposing the patriarchal structures and values and the androcentric concerns underlying the

⁶ See Phyllis Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1978) and Texts of Terror (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). It might be said that Numbers 27 and 36 represent respectively the celebrative and the terrifying categories of texts, although the restricting of women's marriages can only modestly be compared to the terrors of death and rape that typify the narratives in Trible's second study. For Cheryl Exum, see, for example, "You Shall Let Every Daughter Live: A Study of Ex. 1:8-2: 1 0," in The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics, ed. M. A. Tolbert (Semeia 28; Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1983), pp. 63-82. For Mieke Bal, see, for example, "Sexuality, Sin, and Sorrow: The Emergence of the Female Character," in her Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), pp. 104-130.
⁷ God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, p. 8.
⁸ See Susan Lanser's analysis of Bal and Trible in her "(Feminist) Criticism in the Garden: Inferring Genesis 2-3," Semeia 41 (1988), p. 70. Lanser contrasts this approach to a "speech-act model" of communication that allows for "culture-specific linguistic rules that are almost never articulated," in which construal of a probable context in which the text was produced also plays an important role. Whether or not her labels are accepted or applicable to other cases, Lanser's two types of literary criticism bear strong resemblance to the first two approaches I had delineated before coming upon her very helpful analysis.
⁹ Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative: Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), p. 15, and Lanser, "(Feminist) Criticism," op. cit.

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narrative, as I have tried to do in the second illustrative interpretation. Scholars engaged in this kind of literary work include Esther Fuchs, T. Drorah Setel, and Renita Weems.¹⁰

The third approach may be described as one focused on historical inquiry rather than literary study; it seeks to use data from other ancient semitic cultures, as well as comparative sociological models and material remains found by archaeologists in order to begin to reconstruct a clearer and more reliable picture of women's life in ancient Israel. Biblical sources both contribute to this picture and are illumined by it. Phyllis Bird, Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, and Carol Meyers are among scholars developing this approach.¹¹

V

In feminist publications, these three main lines of investigation have, up to now, proceeded along more or less parallel tracks, but with very little public or published conversation among their proponents as to the¹² relative value, purpose, or outcome of the methods involved. Why this lack of public conversation, beyond our normal human tendency to talk more with those with whom we agree most and have most in common? Let me suggest two possible reasons.

First, there remains a political and perhaps also a psychological need for biblical scholars pursuing feminist issues to work together despite their disagreements as they continue their wilderness journey, experiencing themselves as a minority whose interests are regarded as low priority or even as frivolous or self-serving by many guild colleagues. Whereas the guild as a whole can form large groups of scholars engaged in each of these interpretive methods generally (and many subvarieties), the number of feminists using these methods to tackle feminist issues in Hebrew Scripture studies is still too small for significant subgroups to

¹⁰ For example, Esther Fuchs, "The Literary Characterization of Mothers and Sexual Politics in the Hebrew Bible," in Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship, ed. A. Yarbro Collins (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press, 1985), pp. 117-36; T. Drorah Setel, "Prophets and Pornography: Female Sexual Imagery in Hosea," in Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, ed. Letty Russell (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985), pp. 96-95; Renita Weems, "Gomner: Victim of Violence or Victim of Metaphor," presented at the 1987 Annual Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, forthcoming in Semeia. Weems' dissertation, "Sexual Violence as an Image for Divine Retribution in Hosea, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel" (Princeton Theological Seminary, 1989), pursues this subject in greater detail.
¹¹ See, for example, Phyllis Bird, "The Place of Women in the Israelite Cultus," in Ancient Israelite Religion: Essays in Honor of Frank Moore Cross, ed. P. D. Miller, Jr., P. D. Hanson, and S. D. McBride (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1987), pp. 397-420. For Tikvah Frymer-Kensky, see, "The Strange Case of the Suspected Sotah (Numbers V 11-21)," Vetus Testamentum 34 (1994), pp. 11-26; for Carol Meyers, "Procreation, Production, and Protection: Male-Female Balance in Early Israel," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 51 (1983), pp. 569-93.
¹² Examples of such conversation are slowly beginning to appear. Lanser points to her difficulties with the work of Trible and Bal. A forthcoming essay by Fuchs on the Jephthah's daughter narrative will raise questions about Trible's method, and other such debates about approach to specific texts might be cited. Well-known disagreements such as that between Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Rosemary Ruether (e.g., in the Review Symposium on Fiorenza's In Memory of Her in Horizons II [1984], pp. 146-50,154-55) are focused much more on hermeneutical. theory than on interpretive method as such.

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have formed. It is difficult for persons in such a situation to hear one another's questions and criticisms in private, much less in public.

Second, among Christian feminist biblical scholars the problem of the relationship between interpretive method and biblical hermeneutics may, ironically enough, be a stumbling block to conversation about method. Feminist scholars in all fields have a high level of investment in the relationship between their work and social change, no matter how arcane their subject. Feminists engaged in biblical studies are acutely aware of the influence of the Bible on Western culture. For those who identify themselves as part of the Christian tradition, the consequences of their work for their own understanding of the faith and for the entire life of the church are critically important. Each person who works as "Christian," "feminist," and "biblical scholar" is faced constantly with two closely related questions: is my interpretive method sufficiently congruent with my view of the Bible, and is my method effective in helping the church to face the theological issues raised by feminism, in helping all of us to move from wilderness toward promised land? The difficulty of answering these questions for oneself, the urgency of forging ahead with the task according to one's own best understanding, the low priority assigned to these questions by the guild and by many employing institutions, and perhaps even hesitancy about the pain and risk of engaging the questions with those who deeply disagree, all conspire against sustained conversation around the question of method.

The problem of the relationship between interpretive method and biblical hermeneutics relates to what Letty Russell has described as the "midas touch" of feminism, in which everything turns not to gold but to questions of authority.¹³ The methods that Christian feminist interpreters are choosing may well have a great deal to do with their understanding of how the Bible may become the Word of God for the community of faith in our day, even though the connections may not be made explicit. Someone using a formal literary approach, for example, may want to emphasize the role of the text itself as primary conveyor of the Word of God, so that any possible meanings in the text itself should be lifted up for consideration. Someone using a culturally cued literary approach may want to emphasize parallels between how the Bible falls short of reflecting the whole community of faith that gave it birth and how our contemporary dominant theologies fall short of reflecting the whole of the contemporary community of faith. Or, someone focusing on historical reconstruction may want to emphasize aspects of one or another of the faith communities of the biblical period as a model for male-female relations in the church today.

At least three considerations are foundational to any feminist conversation about the relationships between interpretative method and hearing the word of God. First, scholars using any one of the three

¹³ Letty Russell, Household of Freedom: Authority in Feminist Theology (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1987), p. 12. Russell converts the traditional phrase into the "feminist touch."

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designated approaches to biblical material can find themselves in possibly unresolvable disputes over their results. Trible reads Genesis 2 as a celebration of the equality of male and female, for instance, but the same kinds of formal literary criteria have been used to argue that the chapter is, in fact, a "text of terror" that displays subordination of the woman.¹⁴ it is not necessary to turn to a culturally cued approach to reach this result. Debate over what counts as evidence and how to assess evidence is inherent in each approach, not just a matter of dispute among them. And each method is capable both of exposing patriarchy and of highlighting challenge to patriarchy.

Second, no one method of interpretation and no one set of hermeneutical principles will guarantee conclusions appropriate for "doing justly, loving loyalty, and walking attentively with God" (Micah 6:8). This is readily seen in the results of interpretation of key portions of Genesis 1-11 in the South African Christian context. The official views of the South African Dutch Reformed Church on the nature and use of Scripture are remarkably similar in expression to those put forward in the 1983 statement known as "Presbyterian Understanding and Use of Holy Scripture."¹⁵ Yet, the South African Dutch Reformed scholars have found clear biblical support (in their view) for apartheid by applying these principles in their exegetical and hermeneutical work. The exegetical results of other scholars, let alone their conclusions concerning the implications of these results for apartheid, are, needless to say, radically different. No method can ensure that the interpreter will advocate God's kind of justice. The example reminds us not only that biblical interpretation matters, but also that biblical interpretation is a political act, an act with consequences for the church and the world. Any of the three methods of interpretation already discussed can be used in support of the silence and subordination of women--or in support of their voice and equality.

Third, precisely because biblical interpretation is political, and because all of us do it out of a tradition (not only a tradition of content, but also a tradition of method), it is vitally important that the text itself (any particular text, or the canon as a whole) be heard as potential corrective to and judgment upon our own interpretations of it. One of our greatest aids in hearing a text afresh is hearing someone else's competing interpretation (often but not always from an alternative approach). Yet, one cannot overemphasize how difficult it is for Christian persons whose sense of identity is self-consciously rooted in a particular interpretation of the Bible to engage in this process of listening to other interpretations.

¹⁴ In brief form by Rebecca Clouse in "Considering Speech and the Structures of Reality: Gen. 2:18-24," paper prepared for Feminist Hermeneutics course at Yale Divinity School, Oct. 8, 1985.
¹⁵ These views are incorporated in the 1974 document of the Nederuitse Gereformeerde Kerk (Dutch Reformed Church) entitled "Human Relations and the South African Scene in the Light of Scripture." See W. Vorster, "The Bible and Apartheid I," Apartheid Is a Heresy, ed. J. W. deGruchy and C. Villa-Vicencio (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1983), pp. 95,99-100.

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Suppose, for example, that a Christian feminist has based her view of herself on a life-giving interpretation of Genesis 2-3 that says that the woman corresponds to the man in creation and that the woman's conversation with the snake was not the beginning of sin. Then she reads that another feminist scholar has declared that the transforming interpretation of Genesis 2-3 cannot be correct, that the text really means that women, created second and sinning first, should keep silent and obey their husbands. Probably, this woman's first instinct will be to ignore or to discredit by any means available this interpretation of the text as sexist, unless she has some clear way to free herself from the hermeneutical conclusion that silence and obedience are required of her as well. Until she possesses a hermeneutic adequate to deal with the pervasive patriarchy of Scripture, such a woman will continue to latch on to interpretations that enable her to gloss over biblical patriarchy and androcentrism; her only alternatives are to ignore the Bible or to abandon her Christian faith. The possibility of real listening among and within various approaches requires not just scholarly openness, but also some prior conversation about the way proponents of each approach see their work in relation to biblical authority.

The literature in feminist studies presents a range of such hermeneutical proposals,¹⁶ but these are seldom linked with comments on interpretive method. Let me sketch briefly my own hermeneutical model and then comment on my interpretive method in relation to it. My work toward a constructive position on the function of the Bible in the church is centered in the expression "authority in community," which has its roots in my participation in the preparation of the U.S. contribution to the World Council of Churches' study on the community of women and men in the church.¹⁷ Descriptively, "authority in community" recognizes both the communal process in formation of the canon and the communal character of centuries of Christian theological reflection based on the Bible. Constructively, "authority in community" highlights the continuing role of the community in biblical interpretation and particularly the idea that the Word of God comes to the community in its encounter with the text.¹⁸

At the same time, the concept of "authority in community" explicitly undercuts the assumption that the dominant group in the community is

¹⁶ See, for instance, the essays by Ruether, Fiorenza, and Russell in Russell's Feminist Interpretation of the Bible.
¹⁷ As part of the U.S. contribution to the World Council study, the Faith and Order Commission of the National Council of Churches of Christ U.S.A. prepared a working paper entitled "Authority-in-Community." Madeline Boucher drafted a text for discussion at the March 1981 meeting of the commission, and I served on a drafting committee to hammer out revisions based on the plenary conversation.
¹⁸ James Sanders, in his Canon and Community: A Guide in Canonical Criticism (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), pp. 21-45, emphasizes the intrinsic pluralism and adaptability of the Bible, as well as the processes of selectivity and repetition in canon formation. Closer to my own view is Paul Hanson, The People Called: The Growth of Community in the Bible (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1986), pp. 535-37, though I would give more emphasis to aspects of the biblical community to which the canonical writers did not give special note.

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necessarily right.¹⁹ "Authority in community challenges any uncritical acceptance of the results of historical canon formation or of biblical interpretation, since the whole community was not represented either in the process of canon formation or in the history of biblical interpretation and theological reflection. As a biblical scholar, I am required by this concept of "authority in community" to take serious account of all the factors that led to distinctions between canonical and extracanonical viewpoints, and especially to notice whose voices never got into the conversation at all. Likewise, I must take account of the factors that have led to distinctions between "right" interpretation of the Bible and "wrong," and again must notice especially whose voices have been missing through the centuries of biblical interpretation. It is probably not accidental that those now seeking to recover lost or forgotten viewpoints are primarily those whose viewpoint has so often been disregarded. An emphasis on "authority in community" highlights our contemporary responsibility to listen to those past and present who have been heard least, including women, because hearing voices that have been ignored or silenced enables the community to question its own assumptions and thus to have a greater likelihood of encountering the God who seeks to encounter us.

Given this perspective on authority in community, the "locus of revelation" is neither in the text or in the history that produced the text, but where God is at work in the whole life of the believing community, including its text production and its ongoing reflection on its texts. Such a formulation highlights the need for the contemporary community of faith to discern where God was at work in successive biblical communities, without prejudging whether that work is witnessed to by text or by the historical matrix that shaped the text. "Authority in community" makes potential room for both.

This concept of authority in community has implications for evaluation of the three approaches to biblical interpretation outlined earlier. By my own predilection, I am primarily an "approach two" person. I find it almost impossible to ignore cultural context. Yet, I enjoy looking at how a text "works" as an example of its literary genre, whether narrative, law, or poem. For such a culturally cued literary analysis, the resources offered by those who have special expertise in approach three, archaeology, sociology, anthropology, and data developed by specialists in other ancient cultures, are essential.²⁰

But beyond my own predilection, I believe that a culturally cued literary approach "fits" most adequately with an understanding of authority in community" as the context in which the Bible ought to

¹⁹ See Russell, Household of Freedom, p. 61.
²⁰ See Meir Sternberg, The Poetics of Biblical Narrative.- Ideological Literature and the Drama of Reading (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), whose introductory chapter emphasizes the interdependence of "source-oriented inquiry [addressing] itself to the biblical world as it really was" and "discourse-oriented analysis... [that] sets out to understand not the realities behind the text but the text itself as a pattern of meaning and effect" (p. 15).

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function in the shaping of the life of the Christian community. A culturally cued literary reading allows the text a central place while consciously incorporating the ancient conversation partners of the world of the text, both the louder and more easily recoverable voices and those muted ones to which feminism wants to pay special heed.

What about the first approach, the "formal" literary approach? Although it is not my own way of working, I want to make a case for its importance as well.²¹ I would argue for the value and validity of the first approach on at least three grounds. First, I believe in the power of acts of imagination and in the need for creative imagination as women seek to find both their places of celebration and their places of terror in relation to the biblical tradition. Imaginative entrance into a text should be encouraged as one aspect (not the whole) of hearing God's Word as the community encounters the Bible,²² for it is in the act of imagination that personal experience and the biblical text most readily touch each other. This is not to say that the highly disciplined linguistic work of the first approach has no controls. It is to say, rather, that when the controls of our hypothetical reconstruction of biblical culture are set aside, new interpretive possibilities may emerge.

Second, what a formal literary approach does with sophisticated tools may well highlight the culture-boundness of a traditional interpretation of a text, or even mistaken assumptions in a culturally cued literary reading done by a self-conscious feminist, simply by showing that another reading is theoretically possible. Sometimes those of us using approach two or approach three may be too quick to impute to a text all the cultural baggage we know of, so that the text is not allowed to break free.

Third, reading a text as it stands may even help us to discover a historical reality (not just an authorial reality) that we had heretofore supposed to be nonexistent. What if ancient Israel really believed that God did not want women to be subordinated to men? What if Jepththah's daughter was a "tradition in Israel?²³ What if women prophets were quite ordinary? We can be helped even in our historical reconstruction if we allow this approach to name new possibilities for our serious consideration. Imagination and the discipline of historical reconstruction need to work in tandem to help us examine all of our presuppositions about the character of an ancient patriarchal and androcentric culture. In some respects, the culture may turn out to be more patriarchal than we have feared, but in others it may be less so.

²¹ This claim will set me over against Meir Sternberg's position in his polemical rejection of the first option as he writes, "Once the choice turns out to lie between reconstructing the author's intention and licensing the reader's invention, there is no doubt where most of us stand" (Poetics, p. 10).
²² On this point, see Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation (Boston: Beacon, 1984), on the importance of supplementing historical reconstructions of women's biblical history by a "hermeneutics of creative actualization that expresses the active engagement of women in the ongoing biblical story of liberation" (p. 20).
²³ See Trible, Texts of Terror, p. 106.

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And so, in the end, I want to stand by all three of the interpretations of the narratives about Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah. (Remember their names, lest they be lost from the roster of Israel!) A culturally cued literary approach is the interpretive method most congruent with my understanding of the Bible as the church's book, but this approach needs to be supported and supplemented by inquiries using the other two approaches. It is my hope that a fresh understanding of "authority in community," together with an interpretive approach to the Bible appropriate to such a view of authority and of community, can mark a path through the wilderness to the land of promise.