Lament as Womanist Healing in Times of Global Violence

Globally, violence against women and girls is a pandemic—resulting in massive trauma and death. Certain scriptures and cultural texts condone the aggression; others adamantly protest heinous, unjust behaviors. Lament provides an avenue for naming and processing individual and communal violence, grief, and pain. This essay explores lament as response to pain and suffering generated amidst sexual and domestic violence, from a global womanist perspective. After providing a brief overview of my womanist biblical hermeneutic, this essay: (1) explores lament as a response to patriarchal misogynistic violence in Scripture, in dialog with global domestic violence; (2) explores lament embodied in selected Psalms, lamentations, and a lament by Beyoncé; and (3) concludes by invoking lament as a pathway of engaging global, daily loss and grief.

Bathsheba in Contemporary Romance Novels

The biblical texts about Bathsheba have notorious gaps, even by the laconic standards of Hebrew narrative. Post-biblical receptions of the story flesh out the terse chapters of 2 Samuel 11–12 and 1 Kings 1–2, ascribing feelings and motives to Bathsheba and David that are not contained in the Hebrew text. This essay examines the intersection of reception history and feminist biblical scholarship by considering eleven novels about Bathsheba from the twentieth and twenty-first century. These novels expand Bathsheba’s character beyond the text, but in fairly gender stereotypical ways, such that feminist readers of the novels may be left wanting more.

Reading the Bible from Below in the Era of Globalization

It is evident that the world of the Bible is pre-modern and thus distinct from the globalized civilization. This chronological gap challenges readers, whether they are feminist or not. Mainly three attitudes can be observed among scholarly and ordinary readers. For some readers, the Bible is a document of the losers of a historical process of modernization that already began in ancient Israel. For other readers, the Bible is outdated and of no use to confront the challenges of globalization. A third readerly position challenges both of these views. This essay offers four arguments to orient biblical readers in the contemporary globalized world. First, the essay posits that globalization is an asynchronous development. Thus, even today, most people living in the impoverished regions of the world face conditions similar to those dominant in the Bible. Second, the essay asserts that women are the first victims in biblical times and still nowadays. Third, the essay maintains that biblical texts display social relations that still unveil contemporary relations. Fourth, the essay suggests that intercultural Bible readings give hope, as they nurture biblical readings from “below” to strengthen people to overcome the fatal consequences of today’s globalization.

Queering Delilah with Critical Theory and Gendered Bible Hermeneutics

Close your eyes and think of Delilah. Whom do you see? What does she look like? More often than not, this biblical character is visualized in both interpretive traditions and cultural retellings of Judges 16 as a femme fatale par excellence—a fatal woman whose exotic feminine allure and lethal sexuality ultimately destroyed Samson, that most heroic Hebrew holy man. In this chapter, I use gender-queer theory to interrogate the very “straight” ways in which these retellings make sense of the multiple ambiguities surrounding Delilah’s character within the biblical narrative. I take an intersectional approach, interpreting Delilah’s sexuality, gender, and ethnicity through a queer lens to conjuring up a myriad of alternative performances that her persona may inhabit. By so doing, I invite readers into delightfully queer spaces in the text that challenge essentialist reading habits and bring to light critical theoretical insights about Delilah’s interpretive and cultural afterlives.

Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture

This essay explores pedagogical strategies for addressing rape culture in biblical studies courses, employing Genesis 34 and Judges 19–21 as primary texts. The first section discusses the nature of popular culture and its impact on gender. The following four sections highlight cultural myths about sexual assault by focusing on significant biblical texts and incorporating aspects of popular media to facilitate conversations about rape culture. The conclusion summarizes the main points and encourage further studies that combine the study of popular media and biblical texts. Overall, the essay contributes to the reading and teaching of the Bible within contemporary rape culture so that students become critical interpreters of biblical texts, as they become resistant readers of past and present rape culture.

Ecofeminist Biblical Hermeneutics for Cyborgs and the Story of Jezebel

This chapter examines the Jezebel.com website as a feminist interpretation of the biblical story of Jezebel, in order to discuss the ways digital media make reading more transparent, intertextual, and holistic. Donna Haraway’s article “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” is a seminal work for both ecofeminism and the digital humanities. This articles uses her understanding of the cyborg and naturecultures to argue that Jezebel has become a cyborg online. Cyborgs and digital media could be used to reinforce the nature–culture dualism that is related to male–female dualism and has legitimated patriarchy and the environmental crisis. This chapter, therefore, argues that the identification of cyborg naturecultures in reading both the biblical stories and digital cultures is particularly important for ecofeminist approaches to the Hebrew Bible.

Neoliberal Feminist Scholarship in Biblical Studies

This essay provides a critical analysis of the neoliberal grounding of feminist biblical studies. I outline the main problems generated by this framework, notably fragmentation, repetition, the absence of theory, the limiting emphasis on method, and above all the validation of traditional (male-dominant) scholarly norms and practices. Seeking greater inclusion within biblical studies, neoliberal feminism has endorsed the normalizing approach to patriarchy and rejected its radical interrogation in women’s studies. My thumbnail historical overview of the field links disconnected publications in biblical theology, historical criticism, and literary criticism. The analysis shows that these possibilities advocate the relative utility of re-objectifying women with five hermeneutical strategies. They are: first, the depatriarchalizing strategy, exemplified in Phyllis Trible’s work; second, the historicizing strategy as employed most prominently by Carol Meyers; third, the textualizing strategy exemplified by Ilana Pardes; fourth, the mythologizing strategy employed by Susan Ackerman; and fifth, the idealizing strategy exemplified by Frymer-Kensky. By placing my critical analysis within the broader context of transformational feminist critiques published at the same time, I argue for a shift from the “biblical” to the “feminist” in feminist biblical studies.

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.

Justifying (Feminist) Biblical Studies in a Neoliberal Age

This essay looks at the place of biblical studies as a secular field of the humanities in an undergraduate liberal arts college in the neoliberal age. First, the article reviews the idea of neoliberalism as a governing rationality. Next, the article assesses how neoliberalism transforms the notion of higher education and the humanities, reducing it to economic terms for administrators, faculty, and students. The article also attends to neoliberalism’s effect on gendered experiences in higher education. Under this rationality, few justifications are available for biblical studies beyond economic reasons. Lastly, the article places (feminist) biblical studies in conversation with other fields challenging neoliberal rationality for justifying the continued existence of the humanities. It examine what (feminist) biblical studies may contribute to an intersectional humanities project for the liberal arts college as an alternative to the neoliberal vision of higher education.

Animal Studies, Feminism, and Biblical Interpretation

What can animal studies contribute to feminist biblical interpretation? This essay explores this question by calling attention to the role of feminist and gender analysis in contemporary interdisciplinary animal studies. Such studies point out that animals are often associated with women and with racial and ethnic others. After summarizing key positions from animal studies, the essay turns to several texts from the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets to outline the association between animals and women and ethnic others (especially Philistines) in biblical literature. The association demonstrates that another layer of complexity to male domination—or carnophallogocentrism—structures biblical literature.