Womanist Midrash

A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

Wilda C. Gafney

• Editorial: Westminster John Knox Press
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781611648126
• Categoría: Theology & Religion
• Categoría: Biblical Criticism & Interpretation

Womanist Midrash is an in-depth and creative exploration of the well- and lesser-known women of the Hebrew Scriptures. Using her own translations, Gafney offers a midrashic interpretation of the biblical text that is rooted in the African American preaching tradition to tell the stories of a variety of female characters, many of whom are often overlooked and nameless. Gafney employs a solid understanding of womanist and feminist approaches to biblical interpretation and the sociohistorical culture of the ancient Near East. This unique and imaginative work is grounded in serious scholarship and will expand conversations about feminist and womanist biblical interpretation.

PART I

Womanist Midrash on the Torah

1

Genesis

BEFORE BEGINNING: GOD-WHOSE-NAME-IS-
TOO-HOLY-TO-BE-PRONOUNCED

Four Hebrew letters, yud-he-vav-he, corresponding to YHWH (or YHVH) represent the Divine Name in the Hebrew Scriptures. The Divine Name is God’s Most Holy Name. It is holy and cannot be pronounced. Unlike other words in the Hebrew Bible, the Four Letters are not accompanied by vowels enabling pronunciation; rather, they are accompanied by vowels from a different word, usually adonai (Lord), indicating an acceptable substitution that can be pronounced. Sometimes elohim (God) is called for; see Ezekiel 2:4. The combination of the sacred four letters, called the Tetragrammaton, and these vowels produce a word that simply cannot be articulated (try combining the consonants q-r-s-t with the vowels a, e, i; there is no such word). This rabbinic practice led to the substitution of “Lord,” “God,” and other titles (e.g., “the Name”) when reading the text and to the contemporary practice of writing “the LORD” in mixed large and small capital letters to represent the Most Holy Name. A tradition of sacredness evolved around the Name so that it was recited only in specific liturgical contexts.

Some biblical scholars have disregarded the religious conventions around the Divine Name and have offered a hypothetical pronunciation and spelling. That practice has deep ties to the anti-Semitic and anti-Judaistic roots of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment Western biblical studies, and I do not use it.¹ Lastly, since there are feminine and masculine names, titles, and images for God in the Scriptures, I gender God variously in translation—sometimes feminine, sometimes without an articulated gender. Knowing that male constructions dominate in the biblical text, interpretive literature, and worshiping contexts of many if not most readers, I rarely use masculine constructions. As a womanist translator, I am committed to uncovering God-language that empowers black women and girls, locating their reflection of the divine image in the biblical text. Though calling someone out of (or outside of) their name is a serious violation in many black cultural contexts, the Divine Name is a name that cannot be named and can be substituted for only with inadequate language, calling for manifold options.

TORAH: SHE IS A TREE OF LIFE

The Torah is a transformational text. God transforms space, time, land, and peoples in the narrative that begins with a beginning (the first word of the Torah) and moves to Israel (the last word of the Torah in Hebrew). In one mystical tradition, the very letters of the Torah are agents of transformation. The Torah is so much more than the Law to which it is often reduced (and then thrust into a binary opposite “Gospel”), particularly in some Christian interpretations. The Torah is instruction, revelation, and sometimes law. Torah (with a capital T) is the first five books of the Scriptures and all that is in them: story, song, genealogy, geography, legal material, and lessons from the ancestors. Torah (with a little t) is instruction and jurisprudence. So, while there is torah in Torah, not all Torah is torah, and there is torah outside of the five books of the Torah! Toroth (plural of torah) can be found in any of the many genres of Torah. Torah then is the first five books, their teaching, in whole or part, other teaching in other parts of the Bible, and religious teaching from beyond the Bible, in classical or contemporary midrash, for example.

She Is a Tree of Life . . .

Proverbs 3:18 speaks of wisdom and extols her virtues (see vv. 13–18) and rewards. One common rabbinic interpretation is that the “wisdom” extolled by Proverbs is the Torah, as in the midrash on Genesis in Bereshit Rabbah 17:5. A Torah scroll is an exquisitely sacred object. As a repository of divine Wisdom, and in some perspectives for the very Divine, a Torah scroll is treated reverentially: wrapped, dressed, and sometimes crowned, laid down, and rolled out with care, only a pointer (not human flesh) touching the sacred text, with dedicated space for repose (storage) and a place of honor for its reading. Special honors are given to those who approach and read and recite prayers in proximity to it, and there are special criteria for who can approach and when. There are also special criteria for who can write a Torah scroll and how, how the letters must be shaped, what color ink to use, what kind of ink to use, what kind of scroll to use, what prayers to pray before, during, and after the process. Some of this reverence extends to the Torah in book form: it is not appropriate in the Jewish contexts with which I am familiar to put a Torah (book) on the floor. The fall of a Torah scroll to the floor would be a communal calamity, requiring all who witness it to fast for forty days, according to some traditions.

The Torah is a locus of divine revelation (and divine self-revelation). The word torah comes from the verb y-r-h, “to throw” (e.g., “to cast lots”) or “to shoot” (arrows). With regard to torah, y-r-h also means “to throw” rain or instruction from the heavens; see Leviticus 10:11, “You are to teach the daughters and sons of Israel all the statutes that the HOLY ONE OF OLD has spoken to them through the authority of Moshe.”²

In a mystical sense, Torah can be seen as an embodiment of divine Wisdom and for some as the Word of God (with a capital W). When the Torah is praised and celebrated in biblical and postbiblical prayers, psalms, and songs in Hebrew, the verbs and adjectives are feminine, because torah is grammatically feminine. This will be the case for other images, metaphors, concepts, and portrayals of God in the text. The feminine gender of torah stands in sharp distinction to the masculine Word or logos (from the Greek) with which many Christians are familiar. And it stands in concert with the wisdom traditions of both canons; chokmah (Hebrew) and sophia (Greek) are both feminine. In her all-encompassing embrace, Torah includes womanist wisdom. However grammatical gender may be understood, torah-language ensures that liturgical language preserves feminine and masculine sacred language and images.

As a text, the Torah emerges in layers from varied ancestral oral traditions to discrete revised written traditions brought together in a massive editorial project. In one sense it is useful to think of the Torah as being produced starting with Deuteronomy, which serves as its theological anchor—portions of which were written in the seventh century BCE—and concluding with Genesis, which was most certainly edited during (if not after) the Babylonian exile in the sixth century BCE, along with the rest of the Torah. This dating provides a sense of theological urgency; the collection and compilation of these sacred stories is a response to the trauma experienced by survivors of the Judean monarchy (including those remaindered from the remnants of the northern monarchy) in the face of the defeat of the nation, dismantling of the monarchy, burning of Jerusalem, and razing of the temple. These tragedies and their attendant horror provide the impulse for scripting theology. Yet there are ancient texts scattered throughout the Scriptures, including in the Torah, that are older than their surrounding texts, such as Miriam’s Song³ in Exodus 15, and the Song of Deborah in Judges 5 next to its much younger prose sibling in Judges 4. Perhaps one ought not think of the Torah or indeed the rest of Scripture in chronological terms; the books are not in chronological order in either Jewish or Christian configuration.

The story of the Torah is a story of relationships: relationships between God-Whose-Name-Is-Holy and creation, the Holy God and human beings, human beings and creation. The Bible privileges some of these relationships with text space; there are characters whose stories dominate the text: they speak and act, they speak to God, and God speaks to them. This volume explores the women and girls who are not prominent in the biblical text or interpretive traditions and seeks to reintroduce them. Arguably at one time some of these women were better known. There is presently, I believe, a significant body of female characters in the Hebrew Scriptures who are unknown even when they do speak and act in the text, even when they do speak to God, and even when God speaks to them.

The women in the Torah are distributed unevenly. Many are named or referred to in Genesis. Fewer individual women are named in the rest of the Torah; rather, there are collectives—frequently national groups, for example, Israelite women, Egyptian women, and Canaanite women. There are also hypothetical women in the jurisprudence sections, for example, a woman who makes a vow, a woman who is raped, a woman suspected of adultery. There are women whose names are called in the Torah with whom many, if not most, readers are unfamiliar. Meet them, listen to them, and learn from them. Among them are Adah, Zillah, Naamah, Reumah, Mahalat, Basemath, Oholibamah, Mehetabel, Matred, and Me-zahab. Then there are all of the women who are not named: the women in Canaan who are cursed by Noah, the women of Sodom and Gomorrah, over whom God and Abram haggle, the women of Babel, and many, many more. And yes, there are women who may be more familiar: Eve, Hagar, Sarah, Keturah, Rebekah, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, Zilpah, and Miriam.

IN BEGINNING, A BEGINNING

Genesis 1:1 In beginning, He, God created the heavens and the earth. ²The earth was formless and shapeless and darkness covered the face of the deep, while She, the Spirit of God pulsed over the face of the waters.

In Biblical Hebrew b’reshiyt, the first word of Genesis, is a beginning, not the beginning. It is most literally in-beginning or in-a-beginning or even when-beginning.⁴ The translation “In-the-beginning” for this single word stems from the Greek version of the Israelite Scriptures, the Septuagint (LXX), and certainly represents one way the text has come to be understood. It is neither the literal meaning nor the only way of reading or hearing this word. A beginning gestures to spiraling creation and its stories and to multiple contextual ways of hearing, imagining, and retelling these stories, including womanist midrash.

The second word of the text, bar’a, is a simple (Qal), masculine, singular, active verb, he-created. One womanist or feminist translation might be In beginning God created the heavens and the earth. While elohiym, the singular Israelite “God” with a plural grammatical form (also “gods” in non-Israelite contexts), is gendered in Biblical Hebrew, it appears to be less so in English. Or at least that is a common claim. My experience in classrooms and congregations demonstrates that while some reader/hearers read and hear God as gender-neutral or gender-inclusive, many read and hear “God” as male, as the polar opposite of “goddess” (which in their construction does not merit the capital G of “God”).

In the second verse, a second verb articulating divine action occurs, merechepheth, a Piel (not-so-simple, sometimes intensive form), feminine, singular active verb, she-pulsed. The verb, r-ch-ph, can mean “hover,” “flutter,” or “tremble.” The verb occurs only twice in Hebrew Scripture, in Deuteronomy 32:11 to describe an eagle over its young and in Jeremiah 23:9 in which all the prophet’s bones shake, rattle, and/or roll. Its subject in Genesis, ruach, “spirit” (and occasionally “wind”), is feminine.

Though the Divine is articulated with feminine and masculine gender in the Scriptures, in translation and tradition God became virtually exclusively male. The gendering of God’s Spirit as feminine calls for the feminine pronoun, yet generations of sexist translations have gotten around this by religiously avoiding the pronoun altogether. So in each case the text will say, “The Spirit [verb]. . . .” No unacceptably feminine pronoun is needed. But she is still there.

She, the Spirit of God

Imagine hearing the Scriptures proclaimed with the gender of God’s Spirit restored: the Spirit, She rested on them . . . (Num. 11:26); then the Spirit of God, She wore Gideon (like a garment) . . . (Judg. 6:34); the Spirit of God, She came upon David . . . (1 Sam. 16:13); the Spirit of God, She has made me . . . (Job 33:4). This occurs more than thirty times: Gen. 1:2; Num. 11:26; 24:2; Judg. 3:10; 6:34; 11:29; 13:25; 14:6, 19; 15:14; 1 Sam. 10:6, 10; 11:6; 16:13–14; 19:20, 23; Isa. 11:2; Ezek. 2:2; 3:12, 14, 24; 8:3; 11:1, 5, 24; 43:5; Hag. 2:5; Ps. 143:10; Job 33:4; 1 Chr. 12:18; 2 Chr. 15:1; 20:14.

She, the Spirit of God, She-who-is-also-God, at the dawn of creation fluttered over the nest of her creation at the same time as He, the more familiar expression of divinity, created all. They, Two-in-One, are the first articulations, self-articulations, of God in (and the God of) the Scriptures. God is female and male, and when God gets around to creating creatures in the divine image, they will be female and male, as God is. Feminine language occurs in the text repeatedly of God; this means that feminists and womanists advocating for inclusive and explicitly feminine God-language are not changing but restoring the text and could be considered biblical literalists.

THE FIRST WOMAN

Genesis 2:18 It is not good that the adam is alone; I will make a mighty-helper correlating to it.

The detailed account of the creation of a human woman is without parallel in the available ancient Near Eastern literature. It is curious; the animals are created with the ability to partner and mate; yet the adam is singular, pluripotent, but singular. I have translated the adam as “it” because the pr...

Índice

• Cover
• Advance Praise for Womanist Midrash
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Women of the Torah and the Throne
• Part I: Womanist Midrash on the Torah
• Part II: Womanist Midrash on Women of the Throne
• Appendixes
• References
• Index of Ancient Sources
• Index of Subjects
• Excerpt from An Introduction to Womanist Biblical Interpretation, by Nyasha Junior