Vindicating the Vixens

On March 23 at DTS, I moderated a panel discussion with Dr. Glenn Kreider, Sarah Bowler, Sharifa Stevens, Dr. Timothy Ralston, and Karla Zazueta about women in the Bible whom we have either vilified or marginalized. Vindicating the Vixens (Kregel Academic, forthcoming) is the result of a diverse team of 16 male and female theologians who’ve partnered to take a second look at vilified and marginalized women in the Bible, and we got some of the contributors in Dallas together to talk about our findings. The church has often viewed women’s stories through sexist eyes, resulting in a range of distortions. In this panel discussion, three of us DTS profs and three graduates talk about the women we explored.Order Vindicating the Vixens.

Bathsheba's Story: How I changed my perspective

Today we have a guest post from one of my former students, Sarah Bowler. I served as one of her thesis readers, and she did some brilliant work, a sampling of which you'll find here: 

Bathsheba’s story captures our attention. Painters, such as Jean-Léon Gérôme or Rembrandt, have depicted her bathing provocatively. Actress Susan Hayword brought her story to life in the 1951 film “David and Bathsheba,” nominated for five Academy Awards. Authors speculate on her life in historical fiction works.

I’ve even stumbled across various forms of this social media meme (see photo).

Notice the words “David had an affair,” a fairly common phrase. I thought little of it the first time I saw the meme, but when I conducted research for my thesis on Bathsheba, my perspective changed.

I started with the notion that Bathsheba tends to get a bad rap. I had always figured the details regarding her responsibility in the situation were ambiguous, and thus we should be careful with assumptions about her character. But the more I delved into the biblical text the more I realized her story wasn’t as ambiguous as I thought.

For example:

We often say Bathsheba bathed on top of a roof. >>> The text and cultural studies indicate she was probably in an enclosed courtyard.We portray Bathsheba naked. >>> The Hebrew word is ambiguous. She could have been washing her hands or her feet only (while fully clothed).We view Bathsheba as a woman whose immodesty caused a king to stumble. >>> We should instead view David as a “peeping Tom.”We point out that Bathsheba “came to the palace.” >>> We fail to mention David sent messengers (plural) to fetch her.We tend to call the situation an affair. >>>The evidence from the text suggests it was rape.We bestow upon Bathsheba partial blame. >>> The biblical author placed the blame fully on King David.

But why do the details of one story really matter? Does our view of Bathsheba affect how we live out our Christian faith? I believe it does.

As I researched, I found current examples in which Christian writers and editors failed to be empathetic toward victims and demonstrated a “lack of understanding and discernment in regard to sexual predation, child abuse and rape culture mentality” (quote from: Heather Celoria).

Even sadder, some spiritual leaders rape or sexually abuse young women, and many of the victims still receive partial blame in situations where a spiritual leader is fully at fault.

How we interpret biblical narratives affects how we interpret events around us.

Now, when I hear phrases like “David had an affair” or “Bathsheba bathed on a roof,” I don’t just simply think about how she gets a bad rap. I think about how she was an innocent victim, and I think about the “modern day Bathshebas” who exist today.

Bathsheba’s story ought to prompt careful thought because the repercussions of allowing negative stereotypes to persist are very real. I long for the day when believers eradicate the line of thinking where the victim shares partial blame for a perpetrator’s sin.

One step toward that end is sharing the “true” Bathsheba story.

The Women in Jesus's Genealogy

“This is the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham . . .” (Matthew 1:1, NIV)

 

Two Gospels, Matthew’s and Luke’s, include genealogies of Jesus Christ. Luke traces Jesus back through Abraham, while Matthew provides the Messiah’s Davidic lineage. But another key difference between the lists is
that Matthew’s, unlike most such lists in the first century, includes five
women. And while many commentators view these women as examples of scandal and grace, Matthew probably intended something different.

 

With the first four—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Uriah’s wife—Matthew
shows Jesus’ fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that through Christ “all nations” would be blessed (Gen. 22:18). All four were Gentiles. The historian Philo (Virt. 220–22), who lived during Matthew’s time, said Tamar was from Syria Palestina, a Canaanite city. And we know Rahab was from Jericho. Ruth was a Moabitess. And the title “Uriah’s wife,” a phrase probably designed to remind readers of the word “Hittite,” indicates
Bathsheba’s nationality. Mary, the fifth woman, was fully Jewish. Her inclusion demonstrates that Jesus is the promised son of David’s line. So together these five women show that Jesus is Lord of the nations and King of the Jews, the promised son of Abraham and the promised son of David.

 

Our Lord had to be both. To be the all-inclusive Messiah, Mary had to be Jewish, but Jesus also had to have Gentiles in his pedigree. And Matthew could not have made the case for Gentile inclusion with any of the men, as these all had to be descendants of Abraham. The only way to include Gentiles in our Lord’s pedigree was to include his Gentile foremothers.

 

This King is different from all others. Prior pedigrees of royalty in Israel stressed the king’s Jewishness through his male ancestors. But this pedigree, by including five women, establishes Jesus simultaneously as the king who sits on David’s throne and the ruler of all nations—King of kings and Lord of lords!

(We will continue the series on justice for women after Christmas.)

Rethinking the Bathsheba Story

The new issue of Prism is out, and in it, an article thattakes a fresh look at the Bathsheba story. The article begins like this:

 “How much responsibility did Bathsheba have in thataffair? After all, she was bathing where David could see her!” I have heardthis line, and others like it, many times in the course of my evangelicalupbringing and education—the David and Bathsheba story used as an example of“why women should be modest” and “how temptresses can bring down godlyleaders.” But that’s not what the story is about.  It’s a story of a woman being sexually abused by a man in power.

The Women in Jesus's Genealogy: If Not Scandalous, What? (Part 2)

Today's post on Tapestry:

In my last Tapestry column, titled “The Five Not-So-Scandalous Women in Jesus’s Genealogy,” I made a case for relooking at the reason Matthew included five women in Christ’s pedigree (Matt. 1:1–17). Most commentators point to these women as examples of sinfulness—especially sexual sin or scandal. And I think that's seriously misguided.

I argued that Matthew intended his readers to think of something other than sexual scandal when they heard the names Tamar (v. 3), Rahab (v. 5), Ruth (v. 5), “the wife of Uriah” (v. 7), and Mary (v. 16). So what did Matthew’s readers hear?

To answer this question we must first consider the overall argument of Matthew’s Gospel, and it’s this: Jesus is King. And what point about King Jesus was Matthew making by including these five women? With the first four, Matthew demonstrated that Jesus is the fulfillment of God’s promise to Abraham that through Messiah all nations of the earth would be blessed (Gen. 22:18). And by including Mary, Matthew demonstrated that Jesus Christ is the promised son of the Davidic line. Indeed, the message of the women in Jesus’s genealogy is this: King Jesus is the all-inclusive Messiah for all the earth’s peoples, not only to the Jew, but also to the gentile.

The first four women named in Jesus’s genealogy—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah”— were, in fact, gentiles. And while the fifth woman, Mary, was Jewish, she couldn’t be gentile, because Jesus was the biological son of Mary alone, not of Joseph’s lineage. For Jesus to be the all-inclusive Jew-gentile Messiah, Mary had to be Jewish, but Jesus also had to have gentiles in his pedigree.

I don't think Matthew's point is only to give a head's up to women in an otherwise patrilineal genealogy. To affirm women, he could have chosen those with whom his readers were most familiar—Sarah, Rebecca, or Leah, for example. And/or he might have even included all the mothers and fathers on the list.

And if Matthew wanted only to make the point that God forgives sexual sin, he already had plenty of “qualified” men in Jesus’ ancestry from which to choose.

No, he had a different emphasis in mind. By including Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba and Mary, Matthew demonstrated that Christ has the pedigree to stand as king over both Jews and gentiles—over all the earth.

Matthew could not have made the case for gentile inclusion—which was of prime importance to his argument—with any of the men, because the Messiah had to be from the male bloodline going back to Abraham, meaning all the men had to be descendants of Abraham. So the only way to include gentiles in Jesus’s royal pedigree was to include his gentile women ancestors.

But how do we know Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and “the wife of Uriah,” as Matthew calls her, were actually all gentiles?

We begin with the first two women, who were Canaanites. Of Tamar, the biblical text says simply that Judah got her as a wife for his son, Er (Gen. 38:6). So nothing in Genesis would indicate that Tamar was a gentile. But Philo, a Jewish exegete who lived at the time of Matthew, wrote this about her: “Tamar was a woman from Syria Palestina who had been bred up in her own native city, which was devoted to the worship of many gods, being full of statues, and images, and, in short, of idols of every kind and description. But when she, emerging, as it were, out of profound darkness, was able to see a slight beam of truth, she then, at the risk of her life, exerted all her energies to arrive at piety…living for the service of and in constant supplication to the one true God” (Virt. 220–22). To Philo’s readers, and to those of his contemporary, Matthew, “Syria Palestina” was unequivocally gentile.

As for the second woman, Rahab—she was from Jericho (see Josh. 2), the first of the Canaanite cities conquered with God’s help in the Promised Land. Slam dunk.

And the third woman was Ruth. The text makes clear that she was a Moabitess (Ruth 1:4), so definitely a gentile. Score: 3–0.

That leaves the “wife of Uriah.” Now, notice that Matthew avoids identifying her by name, even though readers know he’s talking about Bathsheba. One might argue that this not-naming treats her as “the other,” degrading her. But wait. Can you finish this phrase: Bathsheba was first married to Uriah the [fill in blank]”? If you said, “Hittite,” you’re correct. And Matthew’s readers definitely would have known him by this title. So if Matthew wanted to emphasize the gentile-ness of Bathsheba, what better way than by reminding readers, using a sort-of shorthand, that her first husband was “the” Hittite? By the time Bathsheba bore Solomon, she was David's wife. But by reminding readers of Uriah, her first husband, Matthew stresses Bathsheba's origins.

And in fact, Uriah was not just any Hittite. According to esteemed Israeli archaeologist Eilat Mazar, “The story of David's defeat of the destitute Uriah (2 Sam. 12) marks the very end of the Jebusite [gentile] royal dynasty.”[1] And as Heather Goodman noted in an article for bible.org, “This presents a nuance to the story about David, Bethsheba, and Uriah. More than a story of lust, it has political ramifications. When David killed Uriah and took [Uriah’s] wife, it symbolized [David’s] ultimate defeat of the Canaanites of Jerusalem.” (And if Uriah was a prince, as some suppose, that makes Jesus from a gentile line of royalty, as well.)

Now, what was so significant about Canaanites and Hitties? As Richard Baucham, author of Gospel Women, reminds readers, these two groups “were among the seven peoples of the land of Canaan whom God had promised to drive out and Israel had been commanded to annihilate (Exod. 23:23, 28; 33:2; 34:11; Deut. 7:1; 20:17; Josh. 3:10; 1 Kgs 9:20–21;Ezra 9:10).[2] Canaanites and Hittites were as “gentile” as you could get. And Christ is both descendant and lord of them, too.

Some feminist scholars have argued that by making the women the “other”—the outsider, the gentile—in Matthew's argument, he has added his own insults to women. Yet the named women's other-ness is precisely what Matthew uses to argue that this King is different, even better. Whereas in the past all pedigrees of royalty in Israel stressed only a king’s Jewishness via his male ancestors, this pedigree not only includes women but requires women in order to establish Jesus as simultaneously the king who sits on David’s throne and the ruler of all nations, King of kings, Lord of lords.

[1] Eilat Mazar, The Palace of King David: Excavations at the Summit of the City of David, Preliminary Report of Seasons 2005-2007 (Jerusalem: Shoham Academic Research and Publication, 2009), 43.

[2] Baucham, Richard. Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels. Grand Rapids, MI: 2002, 42.

The Not-So-Scandalous Women in Jesus's Genealogy

My Tapestry post for bible.org's Women in Leadership blog:

The Gospels include two genealogies of Jesus (Luke 3:23–38 and Matthew 1:1–17). Luke’s version traces our Lord back to Adam, placing him over the family of mankind. Matthew’s list establishes Jesus as heir to the Davidic dynasty. But another key difference between the two is that Matthew’s list, unlike most such lists in the first century, includes five women. Why?

Sadly, if we do a quick Google search on the females in Jesus’s genealogy, we find that many, if not most, people conclude, “To show what great sinners God incorporated into the family tree.” We see words such as “scandalous” and “immoral” that point to the past sex lives of these women. One writer exclaims, “But these women were not, on the surface, notable or saintly women whom we would want to find in our lineage!” The implication is that the men were good and righteous; the women, naughty—especially sexually.

But we could just as easily say, “But these men were not, on the surface, notable or saintly men whom we would want to find in our lineage!” Yet have you ever heard a message or read an article about the genealogies in which the main point was what great sinners the men were and what great grace God showed to include them? Me neither. And in viewing the women in Jesus’ genealogies as “bad girls,” we both miss the author’s intent and demean females.

Granted, any human in the genealogy of the Son of God is evidence of God’s great grace to sinners. But that’s not the point here. Assume we applied to men the same standard we apply to the women on the list. Right off the bat we encounter David (1:1). Interestingly, whoever wrote the account of David and Bathsheba in 2 Samuel 11 assigns zero responsibility to Uriah’s wife for the adultery, while he presents David as lusting, then committing adultery, and finally ordering the murder of a faithful man in order to cover his own sin. David had much more social power than Bathsheba. So if we want to talk about the great sinners in the genealogy, David could stand as Exhibit A.  

Moving ahead to the next verse, we see Abraham (v. 2). Remember his lie? It went something like this: “Tell Pharaoh you’re my sister so he won’t kill me.” And what about his grandson, Jacob (v. 2), who deceived his brother out of the birthright? And then we come to Judah (v. 3), the father of Tamar’s twins. For a fab look at what Genesis 38 says about Tamar in light of Jewish custom, check out Carolyn Custis James’s Lost Women of the Bible. There’s good textual evidence that Tamar sought to obey (oral) levirate law when she dressed as a prostitute so her widowed father-in-law would impregnate her. But let’s assume for the sake of argument that Tamar was in the wrong. If so, she dressed as a prostitute and committed sexual sin. But what about Judah? This guy lied in promising to give her one of his sons as a husband (a great injustice). Then he committed an immoral act in paying a prostitute to have sex. And finally, he was a huge hypocrite for seeking to have her killed for being a hooker! He even admitted she was more righteous than he (Gen. 38.26). (This is not even to mention the story in Genesis 37 of selling his brother, Joseph, to some Ishmaelites and then lying to his dad about it for years.)

Continuing, we find more failures. Royal failures—literally. The kings were no Boy Scouts. How about Solomon with his umpteen wives who led him to worship other gods? And Rehoboam, who blew off the counsel of his elders so he could over-tax his subjects? And Manasseh, who committed idolatry?

Enough already. You get the point.

So if first-century listeners didn’t think “sexual sin” or “sexual scandal” when they heard the names Tamar (v. 3), Rahab (v. 5), Ruth (v. 5), the wife of Uriah (v. 7), and Mary (v. 16), what did they hear? 

To be continued… (in two weeks).

Women and History

I find it interesting, and not in a good way, how often historians have vilified women by emphasizing their roles as seductresses.

Case in point: When we refer to the widowed Old Testament figure, Judah, son of Jacob, most of us don't immediately think, "the guy who paid for a prostitute." But when we refer to Tamar, the woman he slept with, we do usually think of how she seduced him. (If we even know the story, that is.) Yet Tamar was within her levirate rights in seeking to establish a descendant named for her deceased husband. Judah was the one with banal motives.

Mention Bathsheba, and most think of the woman who "brought David down" rather than the woman David had his military guys sieze and bring to the palace for his pleasure. She probably thought the king was off at war and not standing on his palace balcony when she bathed on the rooftop (where people usually bathed, I might add).

When we think of Cleopatra, we usually think of the woman who seduced Caesar and Mark Antony, but when we think of Caesar and Mark Antony, do we immediately think of them as the guys who slept with hundreds of women? (Because they certainly did.)

One of the things I like about Stacy Schiff's November release, Cleopatra: A Life, is her focus on Cleopatra as a plain-looking, shrewd administrator. We know from coins that the queen herself would have approved that she was no Elizabeth Taylor look-alike. The woman was, however, a fantastic leader over a number of decades, if we consider how she cared for her people and assured peace for her nation.

A NY Times book reviewer put it well: "Instead of the stereotypes of the 'whore queen,' Ms. Schiff depicts a 'fiery wisp of a girl' who grows up to become an enterprising politician: not so much a great beauty as a charismatic and capable woman, smart, saucy, funny and highly competent, a ruler seen by many of her subjects as a 'beneficent guardian' with good intentions and a 'commitment to justice.'”

After a several-month break for comps, holidays and snow days, I'm reading the final chapters of Schiff's book. I predict it'll garner a stack of awards. Maybe even a Pulitzer. Such a terrific blend of research and insight.