Fathom Magazine interview w/ me about Vixens

This interview with me ran in the latest issue of Fathom Magazine.  Today we’re happy to have as our guest Dr. Sandra Glahn. Sandi earned her ThM at Dallas Theological Seminary (DTS) and her PhD at the University of Texas at Dallas (UTD) in Humanities–Aesthetic Studies. A professor in the Media Arts and Worship department at DTS, she teaches courses in writing, medieval art/spirituality, gender, and sexual ethics. She is the author of more than twenty books, including the Coffee Cup Bible Study series. But today we want to talk with her about her latest book Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting the Sexualized, Vilified, Marginalized Women of the Bible (Kregel Academic), which just came out.

Tell us about Vindicating the Vixens.

Vindicating the Vixens has been on my heart and mind for more than a decade. As I studied history and cultural backgrounds at the doctoral level, I ended up revisiting some of our Western-influenced interpretations of the biblical text.For example, the woman Jesus met at the well in Samaria had five husbands, true enough (see John 4). But why do most people assume that means she was faithless and immoral? Women in her time and place did not divorce husbands five times. The man with the most recorded divorces had only three. If a woman did initiate legal proceedings, she had to do so through a male. Women could not simply walk into a court of law and speak on their own behalf. So, it’s unlikely that “the Samaritan woman” had divorced five husbands.Additionally, when we read that this woman’s current man was not her own, we assume she was living with some guy. Because that’s what it would mean in the West. But in her world, it is far more likely that she had to share a husband in a polygamous relationship in order to eat.Put these factors together, and you realize this person was probably not a beautiful young woman with loose morals. More likely, she was an older woman who had endured the death of a husband several times (war was the number one cause of death for men), been dumped a time or two, and consequently having to share a husband in order to survive. Additionally, the text says she was waiting for, looking with hope for, the Jewish Messiah (4:25).So we have, probably wrongly, assumed this woman was guilty of sexual promiscuity, and that Jesus was confronting her about her sin. More likely, Jesus was bringing up her greatest point of pain before revealing to her that he is the very Messiah for whom she has been waiting. For everyone else in Jesus’ world, the Lord seems to subtly veil who he is. But with this broken woman hanging on to hope, he comes right out with it.This woman is one of many whom the contributors to Vindicating the Vixens reconsider in light of what we know about cultural backgrounds, not only from new data but also from having more varied “eyes on the text.”

You’ve been known to talk about the importance of having varied eyes on the text. What do you mean by that?

Scholars from underrepresented groups looking at the Bible see what many of us in privileged positions have missed. They have brought to the text observations from a powerless perspective, which is the perspective of the typical person to whom Jesus ministers. (Like this great message from the perspective of those who are hearing impaired.) The body of Christ is made up of many parts that need each other to function as a healthy whole. But we’ve missed out on what some of those parts have to offer.In our book the contributors look afresh at Eve, Hagar, Sarah, Tamar, Rahab, Deborah, Ruth, Huldah, Bathsheba, Vashti, Mary Magdalene, The Samaritan Woman, Junia, and even the Virgin Mary—who gets marginalized by Protestants. And we look at them through the eyes of sixteen biblical scholars, each of whom hold a high view of scripture. And they all hold at least one advanced degree in Bible and theology. They are men and women; complementarian and egalitarian; American and Australian; black, white, Arab, and authors of books like Discipleship for Hispanic Introverts. Their varied backgrounds mean they bring insights in the text that the majority culture in North American has often missed—and exported. And as a result, the authors’ combined efforts provide a fresh look at the kindness of God and his heart for the vulnerable. (You can watch some of them talking about this book.)

What made you decide to do this project?

First, I believe men and women—not just husbands and wives—are supposed to partner in ministry. The church father Jerome had Paula partnering with him, though many think theologically trained women are a recent innovation. They are not. A greater emphasis on social history (as opposed to studying only troop movements, kings, and empires) has come from the academy due to women’s greater involvement in higher education in the past half-century. Trained social historians bring new ways of culling out data from the text—like what I just said about marriage practices in the Near East.But also, my deep friendship with some international students, especially those from Mexico, combined with travels to several continents told me we needed more than a Western perspective when doing observation, interpretation, and application.Additionally, part of my job used to involve serving as editor-in-chief of DTS Magazine for Dallas Theological Seminary, and I also teach theologically trained writers. So not only have I spotted some great writers, but I learned of projects people were doing that needed greater audiences. Sometimes the great writers were those doing this work.As a sampling, there was the student doing a thesis on Bathsheba (Sarah Bowler); a scholar who wrote a book on Arabs in the Bible that changed how I saw Hagar (Tony Maalouf); and a whole corpus of work on Bible stories that included women and men in need of vindication (Carolyn Custis James). For ten years or more I’ve been keeping a mental note of how these all fit together, and I could hardly wait to coordinate it.

What do you hope to accomplish?

Originally, I hoped only to help us read the Bible more accurately as we read about these women. But a happy result of the project was that the team of scholars went beyond simply exonerating those wrongly vilified or marginalized to explore what we have missed in the larger story by misunderstanding the smaller stories and how they fit into the whole. Now I see how the Tamar-posing-as-a-professional-sex-worker narrative fits into Joseph’s story in Genesis—which scholars have often assumed she merely interrupted. What emerged from all these micro-narratives was and is a clearer vision of God’s heart for the vulnerable in the meta-narrative.Before even writing, all of the authors agreed to donate profits to the International Justice Mission. So in a tangible way, we also hope our scholarship will lead to lives changed for the better for “the least of these.”

Read the chapter on Rahab by Eva Bleeker.

You can read an excerpt from Vindicating the Vixens about the context and cues from one of these heroines, Rahab.

In terms of ramifications for scholarship, I hope readers will see the absolute necessity of inviting to the table a more diverse group doing translation and interpretation than what we have typically had. I hope that we will never again see a translation of the Bible published that has only men or only women or only people from one “camp” looking at the text, but that we will instead celebrate our differences and seek diligently to include a variety of people due to our belief in God’s love for unity in difference.

Where can we find Vindicating the Vixens?

You can find the book at Amazon, Christianbook.com, and at the Dallas Seminary Book Center

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.)

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).