Women Exemplars for an Emerging Polity

This chapter analyzes how female figures relate to events in the nascent Muslim polity—in its emerging theological discourses, its normative social practices, and its encounters with other religiously identified polities. Moving roughly chronologically through the revelation of Qur’anic surahs, the chapter focuses on narratives in which women are involved in the establishment of communal moral and legal precedents, such as in the case of a slander against a righteous woman. This heuristic brings to light ways in which female personalities serve as exemplars of vice and virtue against the backdrop of a religious polity in formation. The chapter argues that the Qur’an regularly depicts female moral and spiritual excellence and is often proactively engaged with affairs of direct importance for girls and women. At the same time, certain female figures exercise their agency only to their own detriment. The chapter highlights how narratives involving biblical figures feature prominently in the Qur’an during a period in which the Prophet Muḥammad was attempting to forge political alliances grounded in a sense of theological kinship. In this context, the Qur’an depicts the women of the Prophet Muḥammad’s family as continuing a legacy of exemplary biblical women figures.

The Demand to Listen to Korean “Comfort Women” and to Two Biblical Women

Correlated to the experiences of Korean comfort women, the story of Solomon’s judgment (1 Kgs. 3:16–28) becomes a resistance narrative to hegemonic powers. The interpretation discusses the literary strategies of the women’s identities and naming, the emerging reversal of power, the issues of mimicry, mockery, ambiguity, and the conspiracy of readers. The Japanese military comfort women of World War II serve as the geopolitical context with which the interpretation justifies its focus on the two biblical women. It becomes apparent that colonizing and patriarchal powers ignore victim-survivors of sexual violence and abuse whether in the biblical text or in recent Korean history. Biblical texts and recent wartime events illuminate each other.

Exploring Biblical Women in Music

This essay explores various musical works that retell the stories of biblical women who are largely silent in the biblical text. It analyzes operas and oratorios featuring biblical women with prominent roles in more than one musical work. These are: Sarah, Hagar, and Rebecca in the book of Genesis; Jochebed, Pharaoh’s daughter, and Miriam in the book of Exodus; and Michal and Bathsheba in the books of Samuel. This research draws on my previous scholarship on nineteenth- and twentieth-century opera, oratorio, and song settings of biblical women. Many musical settings of biblical narratives focus intensely on the women. The women’s singing voices add new elements to their depictions, and librettos almost always enlarge the women’s roles. Composers and librettists together turn the women into three-dimensional characters. The essay presents various threads in numerous musical works that tie together the re-visioning of several biblical women. The goal is to illustrate how the selected women move from the biblical background to the musical foreground, and to offer new and surprising perspectives on biblical women.

Commemorating the Nameless Wives of the Bible: Midrashic Poems by Contemporary American-Jewish Women

A proper name individualizes a person, the lack of it making him or her less noticeable. This insight is apt in regard to the nameless women in the Hebrew Bible, a resolutely androcentric work. As Judaism traditionally barred women from studying, many Jewish feminists have sought access to the Jewish canon. Much of American-Jewish women’s poetry can thus be viewed as belonging to the midrashic-poetry tradition, attempting to vivify the biblical women by “revisioning” the Bible. This article examines two nameless wives who, although barely noted in the biblical text, play a significant role in their husbands’ stories—Mrs. Noah and Mrs. Job. Although numerous exegetes have noted them across history, few have delved into their emotions and characters. Exploration of the way in which contemporary Jewish-American poets treat these women and connect them to their own world(s) is thus of great interest to both modern and biblical scholars. Herein I focus on five poets: Elaine Rose Glickman (“Parashat Noach”), Barbara D. Holender (“Noah’s Wife,” and “Job’s Wife”), Oriana Ivy (“Mrs. Noah,” and “Job’s Wife”), Shirley Kaufman (“Job’s Wife”), and Sherri Waas Shunfenthal (“Noah’s Wife Speaks,” “The Animals are our Friends,” “Time,” and “Arc of Peace”).

Reading from Worlds under the Text: Oceanic Women in the missio Dei

Missional hermeneutics is a relatively recent development in the field of biblical hermeneutics, emerging from several decades of scholarly engagement with the concept and frame of missio Dei. In a key recent publication in the field, Reading the Bible Missionally, edited by Michael Goheen, the voices of the Global South and of women – and certainly of women from Oceania – do not feature. In this article the authors, both Oceanic women, interrupt the discourse to read biblical text from their twice-under perspective. The Beatitudes provide the frame and the lens for a spiralling discussion of the missio Dei as, to borrow from Letty M. Russell, “calculated inefficiency.” Stories of faithful Oceanic women interweave with those of God and of biblical women, offering their complexities to challenge assumptions and simplicities.

A Catalogue of Virtuous Women. Myth and Mythography in Clement of Alexandria, Stromateis 4,19,118-123

In this paper I examine the mythological references contained in Clem. Alex. Str. 4,19,118-123, a passage in which Clement develops the idea that perfection is equally attainable by men and women, and illustrates it by listing examples of female perfection, including biblical women, historical figures, and mythical heroines. After an analysis of Clement’s technique of embedment of the mythical examples, I show that his wording conveys a subtle distinction between the mythical women on the one hand and the historical and biblical women on the other by signalling the poetical character of the former. In this context, it is the synthetic and selective nature of the references that allows Clement to exploit myth’s illustrative function without explicitly distancing himself from it. Finally, I argue that his source on several mythical examples is a mythographical catalogue of figures grouped under φιλο- compounds.

Sacred Connections: Using Faith-based Narratives to Create Matricentric Empowerment Spaces for Syrian Refugee Women

Christian social workers are called by both faith and professional ethics to welcome refugees. The Syrian conflict has created the largest refugee crisis the world has ever known, and while women and children are extremely vulnerable, the unique needs of refugee mothers are often overlooked in both policy and practice. Great importance is placed on motherhood roles in both Western and Arabic cultures, and providing targeted support to uplift refugee mothers can have significant positive ramifications as Syrian refugees resettle into their new lives. Guided by Brené Brown’s insights on empathy and drawing parallels from crossover stories of Biblical women in both Christian and Islamic traditions, the author uses sacred connections to build empathy and enact social change. This paper highlights ways that Christian social workers can adopt a matricentric (mother-focused) approach and provides a recommended interfaith model for intervention with Syrian refugee mothers.