Abstract
Upon receiving the review copy of this book, I was intrigued by the striking cover image of a woman with red tape covering her mouth. The title and editor of the book are printed over the red tape. In addition, the beginning of the book of Daniel is reflected in the woman’s eyeglass lenses. Another striking, and at times overwhelming, characteristic of the book is its length. Within its 700+ pages, the book contains 36 essays by 36 authors along with a rich 11-page introduction by the editor.
Sherwood lists three goals for this anthology: “I set out to disturb canons on at least three levels. First, the canon-within-the-canon of texts assumed to be of particular interest to feminist biblical scholars” (e.g., books named after female protagonists such as Ruth or Esther; female metaphors in the Bible such as the harlot and the personification of wisdom; and the appearance and absences of women in the Bible, including Eve and the silence of women in the New Testament. “Second, I set out to disturb those canonical versions of the history of the discipline of feminist biblical studies orbiting around a canon of established scholarly signatures all located within biblical studies.…I wanted, third, to move beyond the limits of a text-oriented model of reading” and a “Protestant understanding of religion as reading, based on scriptures” and “encourage a focus on…lived religion and to invite scholars from Anthropology and Sociology of Religion as well as History, Theology, and Literature” (p. 3).
Sherwood is especially successful in her first and third disruptions. She is successful with her second disruption but does include essays by a few of the “canonical feminist biblical scholars” (e.g., Mieke Bal, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza, and Carol Meyers). She expands the canon to include voices not just from the United States and Great Britain but also from Argentina, Germany, Ghana, Hong Kong, Iran, Israel, the Netherlands, South Africa, and Sweden. Overall, the volume is very interdisciplinary. It is difficult to review this vast collection of essays in its entirety. Instead, I will highlight some of the essays very briefly in order to pique the interest of Affilia readers.
The book is organized into three parts. Part I, entitled “Prophets and Revolutionaries,” “features lost predecessors and forgotten names alongside foundational figures in the field of feminist biblical scholarship” to expand the “genealogy of feminist biblical studies” (pp. 3–4). Essays in this volume include a comparison of three manifestos (Anders Behring Breivik’s European Declaration of Independence, Valerie Solanas’s “Society of Cutting up Men,” and the book of Revelation) and an examination of the biblical character Eve during various waves within the women’s movement. Several essays focus on how women throughout history have used the Bible in their writings (e.g., the reflections on Mary and Esther by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz [1648–1695], a Mexican Catholic nun; Emily Dickinson’s innovative usage of biblical imagery and allusion in her poetry; and Toni Morrison’s reading of Song of Songs in her novels Song of Solomon and Beloved).
Part II, entitled “An Unconventional Tour of the Biblical Canon, Beyond the ‘Canons’ of Feminist/Womanist Criticism,” is the longest part of the volume. In it, the authors employ a wide variety of feminist methodologies to offer fresh, sometimes provocative, interpretations of specific biblical texts. For example, an essay on feminist Midrash essay shows “how the appropriation of classical rabbinic hermeneutics alongside contemporary feminist considerations can produce a work which speaks from within the Jewish tradition to new, contemporary questions” (p. 219). Queer hermeneutics are applied to the story of Ehud and Eglon (Judges 3). Part II includes two particularly challenging essays. One is on the politics of remembrance—reading the genealogies of 1 Chronicles 1–9 alongside memorials such as the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the Yasukuni Shrine, and the Nanjing Memorial—and a second proposes a new reading of Paul’s admonishment for women to wear a veil (1 Corinthians 11: 5–16) that “fosters an ethically responsible reading, which does not create sexual, religious, or ethnic others marked by the veil” (p. 490).
Part III, entitled “Offpage: Actualizations and Performances of Scripture beyond Protestant Models of ‘Reading,’” includes many thought-provoking essays. One author encourages us to reread the Vashti character in Esther within the HIV-AIDS South African context where Vashti becomes “a model to all…to say ‘no’ to the pandemic of HIV and AIDS by challenging simplistic readings of the Bible” (p. 543). Another author stresses the importance of understanding the infertility journeys of Sarah and Rebekah from non-Western perspectives including Ashanti culture (present-day Ghana). Another author examines artistic allusions to the snake in the “Fall Story” (Genesis 3). After comparing two paintings by Edvard Munch, she concludes, Once the allusive presence of the snake…has been perceived, the ambiguity and the resulting responsibility weighs heavily on the viewer. This alone activates a visual street-smartness; a tendency to claim one’s autonomy in the face of the bombardment of visual culture that throws images at us all day long (p. 595).
