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Daniel in the Homophobic Lion’s Den

by Johanna Stiebert on

Here’s a post by Shiloh Project co-director Johanna Stiebert about her second research visit to Nairobi, where she participates in a project with Ugandan LGBTQ+refugees. The project has the title “Tales of Sexuality and Faith: The Ugandan LGBT Refugees Life Story Project”and is funded by the British Academy/Leverhulme Trust. Its lead investigator is Adriaan van Klinken. 

The project is focused on stories: life-stories, stories of the Bible, and stories that combine the two. At its heart and centre is a group of refugees, a collective called The Nature Network. Johanna talks about the project and its intersections with Shiloh-relevant themes, such as religion and vulnerability to violence, in an earlier post. Here are some of her reflections on the project’s recent developments. 

Stories and Lives

Stories matter. In my life certainly stories and story telling have played a major part since as far back as I can remember. Growing up, I was the youngest member of a multi-generational household and even before I learned to read stories, stories were told and read to me. I loved folk stories and fairytales but I especially liked stories about me, set in the-time-before-I-could remember. I loved the stories of when I was very small, about the funny or naughty things I did. 

I demanded to hear such stories of my earliest life over and over again. I demanded details and eventually heard multiple versions, with different embellishments (and probably some exaggerations and inventions). Those stories somehow linked me to the protagonists of other stories; they made me feel important, an agent. They linked me to the past, to a bigger, world-connecting meta-story. I like stories to this day.

My academic work focuses on the study of the Bible. It was the stories that first drew me in but also the people I met through studies and teaching – and their stories. Approaches of biblical interpretation have become more honest about how our identities and experiences shape our interpretation and increasingly, life stories and Bible stories have been coming together for me.

Nairobi Stories

Adriaan has been travelling to Kenya, making friends, hearing stories, making stories, and gathering material for his publications for some years. When he and the people who move into and out from The Nature Work developed ideas around life stories and Bible stories, I was eager to get involved. By then, I had also become involved in a number of other projects, all of them relevant to the Shiloh Project, that explore the use of stories and images derived from the Bible to open up discussions about gender-based violence. Because the Bible – while variously interpreted in different settings – is a shared text, it has been an effective medium for connecting me with people whose identities, lives and experiences are very different to mine.

I have only been to Nairobi on two short visits – the second was last month, in January. My impressions of the city are a succession of little snapshots – of bustle and crazy traffic, but also of sweeping parks with leafy trees; of roadsides displaying an array of wares, from potted plants to double beds, playground items to beaded bracelets; of colourful roadside fruit and vegetable markets and little enterprises selling cut flowers or grilled corn on the cob. We drove several times through Kibera, Africa’s largest urban slum, which is highly concentrated with busy-ness – washing drying, wood being cut, tiny shops crammed together selling everything from cellphone units to clothes alteration. Sometimes, such as in the large malls, I could completely forget where I was – other times, in Kibera, or seeing grazing warthogs by the roadside, marabous perched on monuments, or monkeys on the walls of residential buildings, you knew you were definitely in Kenya.

But back to life stories. When something sharp happens in our lives, when we are, for instance, accused of something we haven’t done, then the telling of our stories becomes more carefully constructed. We choose our elements with care, so as to recount vividly and persuasively what really  happened. This also happens when we are treated unjustly in other ways – and many of the stories we heard at The Nature Network reported being accused of ‘recruiting’ minors, of being willfully deviant, of choosing depravity to dishonour family and community and religious affiliation. The life stories collected as part of this project were invariably told with vividness and fluency. The refugees were used to telling their stories – they were often telling them for survival, including as part of their efforts to secure resettlement with UNHCR. 

The stories told featured rejection, threat, violence, vulnerability, condemnation from family and community and church representatives. Sometimes there were stories of a painful past and of a present in which the story was turning towards more hope. New families were formed within The Nature Network, families not of blood ties but of ties of love and solidarity and acceptance. New religious networks were established, with prayers that bonded together and with a God who loved unconditionally – a God who created queer and whose image was therefore queer. 

The Story of a Project: Tales of Sexuality and Faith

The first stage of the project consisted of collecting life stories of refugees associated with The Nature Network. The majority of this was conducted by two members of the Network one of whom, Raymond Brian, is its co-founder. During interviewing, contributors were asked about the role and presence of religion in their lives and whether they had a favourite Bible story. Some interesting things emerged here. Many stories – from all over the Bible – were sources of inspiration. Jesus was repeatedly identified as an ally – as someone who embraced those on the fringes of society and who spoke out against condemning others. One interviewee mentioned identifying with David in the story of David and Goliath (1 Samuel 17). The reason was that the interviewee felt small and up against a Goliath of mighty and imposing challenges in day-to-day life. Like David they had little to work with – a small stone, metaphorically-speaking. But that small stone could be utilized to achieve something bigger and assert their rights and be vindicated. A second story that popped up was Daniel in the Lions’ Den (Daniel 6) – because the interviewee this time identified with the threat all around but simultaneously with a strong sense, too, that like Daniel they had done nothing to justify such threat and hostility. It was this story that seemed like a good one to draw on more.

Daniel in the Homophobic Lions’ Den

Before Adriaan and I arrived in Nairobi, the members of the Nature Network spent time reading the story of Daniel in the Lions’ Den and discussing it in groups. By the time we joined them the story was quite familiar. Now it was time to relate it to personal experience.

On 12 January we all gathered at the Network’s main venue, on the outskirts of Nairobi.

We shared breakfast and introduced ourselves and each other; we discussed expectations for the day – which ranged from the practical (to receive a refund for travel expenses) to the experiential (to learn, be entertained, and form connections and new friendships) – and rules (to respect one another and listen, and to all participate). 

Next, Chris gave a summary of the earlier meeting – where the text of the Bible was read and discussed in focus groups. A decision was made to read the text again – this time with the specific plan to try and make the story relevant to the present.

In our groups, as soon as we sat down with the biblical text, printed out on paper, to read it aloud together, a mood of seriousness descended. I think this is discernible in the pictures.

When we all got together to pool what had taken place in our groups, the discussion got very lively. We looked together at the characters and at the events of the Daniel story – who and what could these be in the present setting?

In the Daniel story there is a king, King Darius, who is somewhat sympathetic to Daniel but none the less submits to his governors who remind him of the laws. Who is this king today? Who are the governors?

Suggestions came in thick and fast: the king is the government of Uganda, or the President of Uganda. The governors are oppressive elements of African culture and pastors using the Bible to condemn, as well as members of parliament. Daniel is the LGBTQ+ community – being unjustly persecuted. The lions are maybe family members who are sometimes harmful and obstructive but not always, or enemies within the LGBTQ+ communityitself who sometimes deny their sexuality, or who choose to blackmail others when it suits them to do so. The den is identified as Kenya and as prison… Some spoke up to say they found the punishment of the governors’ wives and children wrong, others saw this as collateral damage, or as the punishment of those who didn’t speak up but benefited from their powerful family members’ privileges. 

After some discussion, a play was put together, performed and recorded. This all happened very quickly– from discussion to completion of the recording took no more than 3 hours. The idea of weaving stories together and of transporting an ancient story into the lived present was quickly embraced and vividly imagined and reenacted. There were some fabulous spontaneous ideas and there was much articulate expression both of condemnation encountered and liberation desired.

The King is the President of Uganda. (In this reenactment he has a consort.)

The governors are members of parliament and representatives of churches, as well as a mufti from an Islamic congregation. 

Daniel is a representative of the LGBTQ+ community.

The den is prison.

There are also in this reenactment members of the police force, of the press and supporters of Daniel.

God’s voice can be heard at the beginning and end.

Here is the recording, ‘Daniel in the homophobic lion’s den’. Enjoy.

It was a real joy watching the play at each of its various stages. The strength of feeling and the power of story telling really come across. There is a new immediacy and resonance to the old story of Daniel. I, certainly, will never read this story again in the same way. And when we all watched the completed recording together everyone was very engaged and delighted with the end result.

In time, we – members of the Network, Adriaan and I – hope to publish a book about the project. 

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Why didn’t the Levite’s concubine—that is, his pilegesh—scream?

by James Harding on

The Death of the Levite’s Concubine

James E. Harding

University of Otago

Why didn’t the Levite’s concubine—that is, his pilegesh—scream?[1]

A few weeks ago, I visited the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin. As I wandered through the maze of rooms in this treasure trove of European painting, I came across a work by the seventeenth century Dutch artist Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674) entitled “The Fieldworker of Gibeah offers Lodging to the Levite and his Concubine” (Der Feldarbeiter von Gibea bietet dem Levit und seinem Kebsweib Unterkunft). Eeckhout was a pupil of Rembrandt, whose far more famous work “Moses with the Tablets of the Law” (Moses mit den Gesetzestafeln) hangs just a few footsteps away.

It was not some particular detail or quality of Eeckhout’s painting that caught my attention, so much as the sheer fact of it. I had never seen any part of the story of the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19:1-30) represented in art before. The scene is the moment when the fieldworker, an old man from Ephraim who is living as a sojourner in Gibeah, part of the tribal patrimony of Benjamin, speaks to the Levite and his concubine and offers them the hospitality of his home, while warning them against spending the night in the town square (Judges 19:20). It is difficult to know what someone who knew nothing of the biblical story might make of it, but knowing the details of the narrative in Judges lent the painting a distinct yet subtle sense of foreboding. None of the figures in the scene looks at the viewer. The Levite looks at the fieldworker, while gesturing towards his female companion who, seated and weary from the journey, also looks towards the fieldworker. In the background, a tired and visibly bored young boy leans on their donkey and gazes, like his older companions, at the old man. Leaning on his spade, the fieldworker looks towards the Levite, and although turned slightly away from the viewer, his gaze and hand gesture seem to convey a sense of warning. Hanging from his belt is a large bunch of keys, perhaps to keep his house locked against the violent men of the town. And a knife: is it for work only, or must it double as a weapon for self-defence?

Although the story of the Levite’s concubine is an unusual subject, Eeckhout’s painting is not unique. The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg holds a work by another painter of the Dutch Golden Age, Willem Bartsius (ca. 1612-after 1639), entitled “The Death of the Levite’s Concubine.” Here, the Levite has opened the doors of the house to find his concubine lying senseless on the step (Judges 19:27). He stares at her in shock, while an old man—presumably his host—sits desolate in the shadows behind him (unless I have misidentified the men, and it is the host who is staring at the dead woman in shock, but the wording of the biblical text would suggest I have identified them accurately). Again, I wonder what someone unfamiliar with the biblical story might make of the scene. Would they know the woman has been raped? Perhaps the artist could safely assume that his viewers would know the story, and would therefore instantly recognise what had happened to the woman, but we might then ask how they were accustomed to interpreting the text. With whom would they have sympathised? With the woman, the Levite, the host? I must confess that, knowing the Hebrew text well before ever having heard of this painting, I find the Levite’s visible shock a little jarring. For in the biblical account, he shows no apparent emotion at all. “‘Get up,’ he said to her, ‘we are going.’ But there was no answer. Then he put her on his donkey; and the man set out for his home …” (Judges 19:28 NRSV).

One might, indeed, wonder what the Levite was expecting. After all, he had thrown her out to the men of Gibeah in the first place (Judges 19:25), after the host had begged them not to rape his male guest (Judges 19:23), offering his own virgin daughter and the Levite’s concubine instead (Judges 19:24) (incidentally, what did become of the old man’s daughter?). At any rate, it seems that the Levite and his host assume she is dead, as, apparently, did Willem Bartsius.

This is certainly the most common way of reading the story. After all, when the Levite addresses the Israelites gathered before the LORD at Mizpah, he tells them that, “The lords of Gibeah rose up against me, and surrounded the house at night. They intended to kill me, and they raped my concubine until she died” (Judges 20:5 NRSV). The Levite’s word tends to be taken at face value, not only by the other characters in the story, but by later readers, both within and without the guild of biblical scholars. To take but one example, the brief summary of the story in Heinrich Krauss and Eva Uthemann, Was Bilder erzählen, tells us that, after being handed over by the Levite, “the next morning she lay dead in front of the door.”[2]

And it may indeed be the case that this is not only the most intuitive way of reading the biblical narrative, but also the one most faithful to the text. It may simply be that the author, for stylistic reasons, chose not to tell us explicitly in Judges 19:26-27 that the Levite’s concubine was dead. The author could have been avoiding redundancy, given that the Levite himself tells the Israelites gathered at Mizpah—and therefore indirectly tells us—that the men of Gibeah raped her until she died (though in point of fact the Hebrew text does not make absolutely explicit the causal link between her rape and her death, and so perhaps Robert Alter’s translation, always attentive to the stylistic subtleties of biblical narrative, may have it slightly better—“Me they thought to kill, and my concubine they raped, and she died”).[3] He—and I am assuming for the sake of argument that the author was male, though I have no firm evidence for this—may have been deliberately reticent in Judges 19:26-27, heightening the pathos of the scene by making the reader draw the most obvious conclusion from her battered and silent body, and incidentally making the Levite’s blunt statement to the Israelites in the next scene all the more stark. Alternatively, by making a distinction between what the Levite tells the Israelites and what the narrator tells us, the author could have been casting into relief the moral bankruptcy of what the Levite has done, and of how he reacted to the woman’s fate—I am leaving aside for the moment the question of the extent to which the Levite’s situation could have been so morally compromised as radically to restrict his freedom to choose what course of action to take, the implications of which are powerfully explored in an important essay by Katharina von Kellenbach[4]—perhaps even hinting that it was the Levite himself who was either the woman’s murderer, or at the very least indirectly responsible for her murder.

The conciseness of classical Hebrew narrative leaves a great deal of room for the reader to probe its gaps and ambiguities, in stark contrast with the instinct of modern philologists, translators, and commentators to explain everything, leaving the reader with almost nothing to do. As Alter comments in the introduction to his recent translation:

Literature in general, and the narrative prose of the Hebrew Bible in particular, cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audiences guessing about motives and connections, and, above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution. In polar contrast, the impulse of the philologist is—here a barbarous term nicely catches the tenor of the activity—to ‘disambiguate’ the terms of the text. The general result when applied to translation is to reduce, simplify, and denature the Bible.

The problem, however, is that the enigmatic character of biblical narrative prose is such as to leave gaps and ambiguities that may be filled in ways that may be so at odds with the intention of the text (I will leave the putative intention of the author to one side for now) as radically to misrepresent it. Yet what does one do with a text that leaves such ambiguities and gaps?

Even if we cannot be absolutely sure whether a particular gap or ambiguity has been dealt with fairly or not, in view of the range of probabilities that might be inferred from a careful study of comparable ancient texts, we can perhaps learn quite a lot from the way that later readers and interpreters dealt with such ambiguities and gaps. What we learn, though, has at least as much to do with the presuppositions of those later interpreters and readers as with the text they are reading and interpreting. So we might well ask, just why do most readers of the story of the Levite’s concubine assume that she was dead when the Levite opened the doors of the house to find her lying there, silent?

As Phyllis Trible pointed out long ago in her famous exegesis of this passage, this assumption goes back at least as far as the ancient translators of the scriptures into Greek. Where the Hebrew tells us sparingly that “there was no answer” when the Levite ordered her to get up, the Greek of Codex Vaticanus tells us instead that, “she did not answer, for she was dead.” Thus Trible: “The Greek Bible says, ‘for she was dead,’ and hence makes the Benjaminites murderers as well as rapists and torturers. The Hebrew text, on the other hand, is silent, allowing the interpretation that this abused woman is yet alive.”[5] So when the Levite gets home and cuts his concubine up in order to send the twelve bloody chunks of her body to each of the tribes of Israel, could it be that he is also her murderer? Trible notes a suggestive and disturbing parallel here to the Aqedah, where Abraham raises a knife to his still living son Isaac (Genesis 22:10). She writes:

Does he intend to slay the concubine? Though the Greek Bible rules out such a possibility, the silence of the Hebrew text allows it. Moreover, the unique parallel to the action of Abraham encourages it. Perhaps the purpose in taking the knife, to slay the victim, is not specified here because indeed it does happen. The narrator, however, protects his protagonist through ambiguity.[6]

So we need at least to consider the possibility that the concubine was not, in fact, dead when the Levite found her, and that he was in the end more directly responsible for her death. How might this alter our reading of this text, and our moral response to this most brutalised of biblical characters?

In a recent opinion piece in The Guardian, written against the background not only of the Harvey Weinstein trial but also recent rape trials in the United Kingdom, Sonia Sodha raises some vital questions about how victims of sexual assault are expected to respond when they are attacked, in light of the range of responses survivors actually report. For some survivors, the instinctive response is, in effect, to freeze, a response that has been termed “tonic immobility” or “rape-induced paralysis,” or in Sodha’s words, “the evolutionary equivalent of playing dead.” This “freeze” response is a key part of Rape Crisis Scotland’s current public awareness campaign #ijustfroze, which aims to raise awareness of the variety of responses to sexual assault that survivors actually experience, and thereby to challenge popular misconceptions of how they can be expected to react. The neurobiology of sexual assault is not something that, to my knowledge, has yet been considered in any depth in the study of the fate of the Levite’s concubine. Perhaps it is time for this to change.

It may be instructive to compare the narrative in Judges with the laws in Deuteronomy that cover what we would now call rape (it is important to bear in mind both that there is no single word in the Hebrew of the Tanakh that corresponds to the English word “rape,” and that there are major social and cultural differences between our world and that of Iron Age Israel and Judah—but we need somehow to find a vocabulary that enables us to speak intelligently about both contexts, and to draw out the points of comparison and contrast between them).

There are two laws in Deuteronomy 22:23-27 that deal with the case of a virgin (betulah) whom a man has found and had sex with. In the first case, the man found the girl and had sex with her in a town. They are to be taken to the town gate and stoned to death, because on the one hand the girl did not cry for help, and on the other the man has committed the crime of adultery against another man. In the second case, the man comes upon the girl in the countryside, where no-one could hear her cries for help. The man alone should die, because even if the girl had cried for help, there was no-one to hear her screams.

A lot could be said about this passage, but for now let us look at what distinguishes the two cases. While one might, with some justification, say that the law at least does seem to recognise the distinct personhood of the girl—the acknowledgement that she may have cried for help in the second case suggests that she is not only regarded as a part or extension of her father’s property (contrast Exodus 22:15-16, which like Deuteronomy 22:28-29 is so worded as to exclude entirely the matter of the girl’s consent, making it impossible to tell how far the language of “rape” can be meaningfully applied, though in Deuteronomy 22:28-29 the man is admittedly said to have “seized” the girl rather than “seduced” her), or the property of the man who had paid the brideprice for her, and she does indeed seem to be given the benefit of any doubt there might have been as to whether she was in fact forced by the man to have sex—nonetheless the distinction between the two laws is significantly determined by the reaction of the girl to a man having sex with her. But why, in the first case, should anyone assume that the girl’s silence denoted her consent? What if the man had indeed forced her to have sex with him, entirely against her consent, and she simply froze due to the trauma of the assault?

My point here is that the way readers of biblical texts concerned with rape continue to interpret those texts may have more than a little to do with wider cultural assumptions about how victims and survivors are expected to react. Sodha makes the point that “the ‘freeze’ response can be appallingly mischaracterised as willing submission and plays into societal myths about what does and does not constitute rape and consent,” referring to the question posed by a defence barrister in a Belfast rape trial two years ago: “Why didn’t she scream?” (He continued: “[T]he house was occupied. There were a lot of middle-class [!] girls downstairs—they weren’t going to tolerate a rape or anything like that”).

Why didn’t the Levite’s concubine scream? Why didn’t she fight back? Why didn’t she try to escape?

The narrative in Judges in fact does not tell us whether she screamed, whether she fought back, or whether she tried to escape from her abusers. To be sure, the narrator tells us that she was abused by “the men of the city,” a gang of men, thus presumably severely limiting her ability to fight back or escape. And of course, we readers are at the mercy of an author who wrote the narrative in this particular way, adopting the persona of a putatively omniscient narrator, and so we are left to wonder, as we puzzle over the gaps and ambiguities, how she might have responded. But perhaps this narrative silence is significant for more than purely literary reasons, for could it not be that the narrative is, whether deliberately or not, drawing our attention to our own temptation to ask precisely the sorts of invasive and presumptuous questions of alleged victims of rape that Stuart Olding’s barrister wished the police had asked?

And then why, when she reached the house where “her master” was staying, did she simply fall at the door? Why did she not then at least cry out for help?

The usual interpretation would imply that she was so bruised and battered by her assault that she simply could not do anything else, could not even raise her voice to cry for help (compare perhaps Deuteronomy 22:24), and that if she was not dead when she fell at the door of the house, her physical trauma was such that she soon died.

It may, however, be worth bearing in mind that it was “her master” who threw her out to the mob in the first place, and his host who offered her, and his own daughter, to them to protect his male guest’s body, and therefore his honour. We also do not know much of the backstory. Why, for example, did the woman flee to her father’s house in the first place? Leaving aside for a moment the possibility suggested by Mieke Bal that the Levite had contracted a sort of marriage in which his wife ordinarily remained in her father’s house, could she have been trying to escape from an abusive partner? The Greek text of Codex Alexandrinus (perhaps preserving the Old Greek reading)[7] tells us she was “angry” with him, without telling us why, whereas the Masoretic Text seems to say she “prostituted herself against” (NRSV note) him, seemingly laying the blame for what happened on her (the precise meaning of the Hebrew in Judges 19:2 is admittedly not at all clear, a number of suggestions having been made to explain it).

It is sobering indeed to reflect on the possibility that, in the society that lies behind this narrative, far too many women may have stayed with violent husbands they were too afraid, or too restricted by the norms and customs of their clan and their society, to leave. It may, then, be worth considering the possibility that in addition to the trauma of a horrific sexual assault, she was now faced with the dread of returning to a house that contained men who had either surrendered her to violence, or offered to do so. Yet not only were they implicated in her assault, and not only may they themselves have been perpetrators of sexual violence, they were now her only source of protection.

So why didn’t the Levite’s concubine scream? Perhaps she did, and we, along with the Levite and his host, have closed our ears. Perhaps the narrator has simply closed our ears for us. Or perhaps she remained silent out of sheer terror, frozen between the horror of what she just endured, and what she might still be about to face from “her master.”

[1] There is some debate concerning the appropriateness of the English word “concubine” to translate the Hebrew noun pilegesh. J. Cheryl Exum, with some justification, prefers “wife,” since the term in this narrative seems to indicate a “legal wife of secondary rank” (Fragmented Women: Feminist (Sub)versions of Biblical Narratives (JSOTSup, 163; Sheffield: JSOT Press, 1993), 177). The term “concubine,” by contrast, might lead the reader to regard her less sympathetically than they would a primary wife. Indeed, the usual interpretation of the Hebrew text of Judges 19:2 might even compound the problem by associating her with prostitution. Mieke Bal, furthermore, has suggested that pilegesh here indicates a wife who continues to dwell in her father’s house after marriage (Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 83-86), but even if that is the case here, it cannot apply to all biblical occurrences, and it may indeed be the case that the biblical corpus reflects an evolution in the meaning of the term. I have retained the term “concubine” here, despite its problems, because it has been so widely used, and in particular because it is used in the names of the paintings by Eeckhout and Bartsius (the Gemäldegalerie uses Kebsweib and the Hermitage uses nalozhnitsa, respectively). Elsewhere, in discussing this passage, I have left the term pilegesh untranslated in order to signal that the term is not fully understood (see my “Homophobia and Masculine Domination in Judges 19-21,” in The Bible & Critical Theory 12 (2016): 41-74; “Homophobia and Rape Culture in the Narratives of Early Israel,” in Rape Culture, Gender Violence, and Religion: Biblical Perspectives (ed. C. Blyth; E. Colgan, and K. B. Edwards; Religion and Radicalism; Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 159-178). I am assuming, however, that not all readers of this blog are conversant with Hebrew, and that to use the Hebrew term throughout might, in this context, be cumbersome and confusing. I hope that I may be forgiven, then, for continuing to use the term “concubine.”

[2] Heinrich Krauss and Eva Uthemann, Was Bilder erzählen: Die klassischen Geschichten aus Antike und Christentum (5th ed.; München: C. H. Beck, 1998), 218. A sixth edition was published in 2011, but I am quoting from the edition to which I have ready access.

[3] Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2019), 2:152.

[4] Katharina von Kellenbach, “Am I a Murderer? Judges 19-21 as a Parable of Meaningless Suffering,” in Strange Fire: Reading the Bible after the Holocaust (ed. T. Linafelt; The Biblical Seminar 71; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000), 176-191.

[5] Phyllis Trible, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Overtures to Biblical Theology, 13; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984), 79. Trible is partially drawing here on an earlier work by Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist (New York: Seabury, 1980), 200-202.

[6] Trible, Texts of Terror, 80.

[7] Cf. Natalio Fernández Marcos (ed.), Judges (Biblia Hebraica Quinta, 7; Stuttgart: Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft, 2011), 53.

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“The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate’” (Gen. 3: 12): Shifting the blame in the story of The Fall

by Sara Stone on

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Sara Stone (@wordsfromastone), University of Glasgow

Kate Millet (1970: p. 53) declares that the myth of The Fall is “designed in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female.” With this in mind, I will use a literary perspective to investigate the link between The Fall as told in Genesis 3 and the existence of a victim-blaming culture in the Hebrew Bible. Specifically, I will explore how the case surrounding Jephthah and his unnamed daughter in Judges 11 echoes the blame-shifting attitude we see in Genesis 3. By “victim-blaming culture,” I mean a society that places the blame for a crime or act of violence (whether sexual or otherwise) onto the shoulders of the victim rather than the perpetrator. In other words, the victim is held entirely, or partially, at fault for the harm that befell them.

The Bible is an influential book that holds great significance, both historically and in contemporary society. Therefore, by investigating the notion that the very first book of the Bible exhibits harmful attitudes and highlighting how these attitudes are reflected in narratives that come later, we can recognise a pattern of toxic traits held by those in higher positions within biblical power structures. Regarding the relevance that this has today, I suggest that the presence of victim-blaming in the opening book of the Bible has paved the way for the same victim-blaming to take place historically as well as from a narrative perspective. Victim-blaming is part of the wider phenomenon of rape-culture, which describes a culture whose prevailing social attitudes normalises, or trivialises, sexual assault and abuse (Gay, 2014). By recognising the blame-shifting attitudes that exist in biblical texts, we can challenge them and recognise these same attitudes as they materialize in contemporary society.

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The events of The Fall in Genesis 3 are integral to the story of humanity’s creation (Genesis 2). After discovering Adam and Eve have eaten the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge, God asks Adam, “Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?” (Gen. 3:11). In his response to God, Adam attempts to shift the blame onto both Eve and God: “The man said, ‘The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I [subsequently] ate’.” (v. 12). Verse 12 suggests that Adam only ate the forbidden fruit because the woman whom God had created gave it to him, implying that if Eve had not been present then Adam would have kept the command that God prescribed him in Gen. 2:17. Moreover, his words “The woman whom you gave me” implicates God in the blame too. Everybody but Adam seems to be at fault for the actions that Adam himself did. However, we are able to hold Adam accountable for his actions for a number of reasons.

First, as Eryl Davies (2003: p. 102) notes, to claim that Eve was ultimately responsible for the events of The Fall is a complete misunderstanding of the narrative. For, the serpent addresses the woman with plural rather than singular Hebrew forms in Gen. 3:1–5. Therefore, the original Hebrew suggests that the man was indeed present with the woman when she was being seduced by the serpent. If that were not evidence enough, Gen. 3:6 explicitly tells us that, after taking a bite of the fruit herself, Eve gave some to the man, “who was with her.” Eve was not alone in the initial disregard of the command in Gen. 2:17.

Second, in Gen. 3:6, Adam took the forbidden fruit from Eve without question and therefore denies his own individuality. Yes, Eve did initially take the forbidden fruit. However, Eve was not told directly by God to not eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil because Gen. 2:16–17 only addresses the man; woman was not created until after this command from God. Therefore, the responsibility to uphold God’s command was arguably left in the hands of Adam. Indeed, it can be speculated whether or not Eve could hear God’s command, as at that point, she was still a rib in Adam’s side. However, we know that Adam was undoubtedly present and had the ability to hear God’s instruction.

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Nevertheless, Eve herself is not entirely irreproachable in this blame-shifting scenario as she attempts to relocate the blame that Adam gave to her onto the serpent: “The woman said, ‘The serpent tricked me, and I [subsequently] ate’” (Gen. 3:13). Indeed, Gen. 3:12–13 demonstrates that neither man or woman are taking responsibility for their actions and the subsequent harm that will befall them in Gen. 3:16–19. Instead, the couple both project their guilt onto someone else. Notably, both Adam and Eve blame others that are below them in the perceived power structure; Adam blames Eve, Eve blames the serpent. Thus, both Adam and Eve are illustrating a blame-shifting mentality at the very start of humanity. And, as parents to humankind (Gen. 3:20), they are setting an example for their descendants to follow.

Regarding contemporary society, similar acts of blame-shifting are still very prominent, both in cases of sexual assault and otherwise. For example, during the sexual assault case involving Brock Turner, Turner was characterised as a promising student and “champion swimmer” by the media, whilst the woman he attacked (Chanel Miller) simply became known as the “drunk girl at the party,” strongly suggesting that she was responsible for the harm that Turner perpetrated against her (Brockes, 2019). In a similar act of victim-blaming, Jacob Rees-Mogg made comments whilst doing a radio interview claiming that the Grenfell Tower fire victims did not use their “common sense” and leave “the burning building”; according to Rees-Mogg, they should have ignored the advice given by the fire department to “stay-put” (Proctor, 2019). Both examples illustrate the way that people can shift blame from themselves onto victim(s) whom they perceive to be lower than them in the power hierarchy, in a similar way to how Adam and Eve blamed those whom they believed had less power than them.

The story of The Fall thus suggests an inherent propensity for a perpetrator to shift the blame onto their victim; this allows us as readers to recognise the existence of a blame-shifting mentality in our own social context. If we fail to recognise and challenge this mentality, then we allow for the dangerous rhetoric of victim blaming to continue. The victim-blaming culture illustrated in Genesis 3 is also echoed in other parts of the Hebrew Bible, and I turn now to the unnamed daughter of Jephthah who appears in Judg. 11:34–40. When the elders of Gilead are being threatened by the Ammonites, they turn to Jephthah and appeal to him to be their commander (Judg. 11:5–6). Jephthah agrees after being enticed by the promise that he will become the leader of “all the inhabitants of Gilead” (Judg. 11:8–9). Jephthah subsequently turns to YHWH for a guarantee of success by vowing that he will sacrifice “whoever comes out of the doors of my house [first] to meet me” if his success is assured (Judg. 11:31). Jephthah proves to be successful in battle, however his rejoicing is short-lived when it is his daughter that comes out of his house to greet him, and therefore it is she whom Jephthah needs to sacrifice in order to fulfil his vow to YHWH (Judg. 11:34).

Jephthah remains committed to his vow and yet blames his daughter for his misfortune: “When he saw her, he tore his clothes and said ‘Alas, my daughter! You have brought me very low; you have become the cause of great trouble for me. For I have opened my mouth to the Lord, and I cannot take back my vow’” (Judg. 11:35). Arguably, this is a mournful cry from Jephthah, and the tragedy of this affair is emphasised in Judg. 11:34, where we are told that his daughter is his only offspring. This deepens Jephthah’s conundrum as the eradication of a linage was one of the worst fates that could befall any person in biblical Israel (Frymer-Kensky, 2002). The shifting of blame from Jephthah onto his daughter indicates his sense of horror and tragedy at the situation he has found himself in. Arguably, Jephthah’s anguish is a disguise for his self-centred expression of self-pity; he is only distressed because of the loss he will face, rather than feeling guilt or lamenting over everything his daughter will lose as a result of his vow. Jephthah’s daughter has unknowingly dealt her father an unavertable blow simply by being the first to greet him after his return home.

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Yet, while Jephthah vows to YHWH that he will sacrifice the first to come out of his house, the nature of said sacrifice is unclear. Phyllis Trible (1984: p. 97) notes that the masculine gender of the terms used is standard grammatical usage in biblical Hebrew, which on its own does not indicate either the sex or species of the promised sacrifice, and thus a certain vagueness prevails. Did Jephthah intend for a male or female human sacrifice? Perhaps he expected a servant, or even an animal. The horror Jephthah expressed in Judg. 11: 35 confirms that he was not expecting his only child to come forth. Yet, Jephthah does not question why it is his daughter that came out first. Instead, he immediately expresses his horror and straightaway blames her for what he subsequently needs to do in order to keep his vow. Jephthah’s narrative thus echoes sentiments from Genesis 3; particularly, the fact that Jephthah does not question his daughter’s actions echoes Adam’s own failure to ask Eve why she chose to eat the forbidden fruit in Gen. 3:6.

Jephthah does not attempt to argue with God or his daughter in an effort to spare her life and thus prevent his lineage from becoming obsolete. Instead, he is submissive to the requirements of the vow and to his daughter’s insistence that he kill her (Judg. 11:36); this is akin to the way that Adam complied with Eve when she passes him the forbidden fruit. And just as Jephthah blames his daughter for the action that he needs to take in order to obey the vow that he made, Adam ultimately blames Eve in Gen. 3:12 for the actions he took after she gave him the fruit.

However, it should be noted that Jephthah does acknowledge his own part in his conundrum when he says, “For I have opened my mouth to the Lord” (Judg. 11:35). In contrast, Adam does not acknowledge his own culpability for his downfall: “she gave me fruit from the tree, and [subsequently] I ate” (Gen. 3:12). While it is commendable that Jephthah acknowledges the role he played in his downfall where Adam does not, he still ultimately shifts the blame away from himself and onto his daughter – the victim of a horrific act of violence. Judg. 11:35 is a classic example of victim-blaming in the Hebrew Bible, that arguably reflects a blame-shifting mentality similar to what we see in Gen. 3:12. I argue that Jephthah, as a biblical descendant of Adam and Eve, illustrates the inheritance of blame-shifting passed down from his earliest forebears. The implications of Genesis 3, and other biblical examples of blame-shifting, demonstrates how a person who has greater power than their victim can use victim blaming to escape culpability and further marginalise those whom they have already victimized. This, as I mentioned earlier, can also be seen in contemporary contexts too.

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Overall, the notion that the myth of The Fall has been “designed in order to blame all this world’s discomfort on the female” (Millet, 1970: p. 53) requires an investigation into the blame-shifting attitude that this myth exhibits, and the consequences of that from a literary perspective. Blame-shifting sentiments in Genesis 3 are reflected in the story surrounding Jephthah’s unnamed daughter. Both Adam and Jephthah tried to avoid the blame for their actions onto the shoulders of a woman. Arguably, Genesis 3 introduces a wider blame-shifting mentality in the Hebrew Bible. The case regarding Jephthah’s unnamed daughter illustrates how women are blamed for the very violence perpetrated against them. Moreover, in Ezekiel 16 we see Jerusalem portrayed as an ungrateful and faithless wife to whom God has given so much; the narrator implies that if Jerusalem had been grateful and loyal to her “husband’” then no harm would have come to her. Moreover, in the Book of Job, Job’s comforters attempt to console Job, an upright person, that the misfortune he is currently enduring must be divine retribution for the sins he has to have committed. While Job’s “comforters” are not the preparators of his downfall, they still demonstrate a blame-shifting mentality by insisting that he must have done something wrong for God to punish him so badly. The reader knows from the book’s prologue, however, that this is not the case: Job is completely innocent of all wrongdoing.

In conclusion, Adam and Eve are presented in the Bible as the forebears of humankind, and their own propensity to shift the blame appears to have been inherited by their “offspring.” In a literary sense, the placement of The Fall at the very start of the Hebrew Bible has given “permission” for blame-shifting to take place in later narratives. By recognising the victim-blaming attitudes that occur throughout the Hebrew Bible, we are able to challenge and critique such behaviour and highlight its continued, toxic influence in contemporary society.

 

Works Cited

Brockes, Emma. (2019). ‘Chanel Miller on why she refuses to be reduced to the ‘Brock Turner

       sexual assault victim’. Accessed 6 November 2019.

Davies, Eryl W. (2003). The Dissenting Reader: Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible.

Aldershot, Burlington: Ashgate Publishing.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. (2002). Reading the Women of the Bible: A New Interpretation of

their Stories. New York: Schocken Books.

Gay, Roxanne. (2014). Bad Feminist: Essays. Great Britain: Corsair.

Millet, Kate. (1970). Sexual Politics. New York: Doubleday & Company.

Proctor, Kate. (2019). ‘Rees-Mogg sorry for saying Grenfell victims lacked common sense’.

        Accessed 6 November 2019.

Trible, Phyllis. (1973). ‘Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation’. Journal of the

       American Academy of Religion, vol. 41, no. 1: pp. 30 – 48.

Trible, Phyllis. (1984). Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives.

Philadelphia: Fortress Press.

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Professor Johanna Stiebert Inaugural Lecture: “Why I Love Studying the Bible even though (and because) It’s Perverse”.

by Shiloh Project on

On 10 October 2019, Johanna Stiebert delivered her inaugural lecture as Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Leeds. The title of her paper is “Why I Love Studying the Bible even though (and because) It’s Perverse”.

“In this inaugural lecture Professor Stiebert discusses her chequered and international career learning and teaching about Hebrew language and biblical studies. Her lecture focuses especially on biblical texts that surprised her – not least on account of their graphic nature. Her concluding remarks focus on the responsibilities of professors and on academic integrity.”

Click here to view the lecture. 

About Johanna Stiebert

Johanna Stiebert majored in Biblical Hebrew, alongside English Literature, at the University of Otago (New Zealand), graduating with honours in 1992. She continued her studies with a two-year MPhil in Hebrew Bible at the University of Cambridge and then her PhD on shame in biblical prophetic literature at the University of Glasgow, graduating in 1998. By this time she had started her first teaching post at St. Martin’s University College (now the University of Cumbria) in Lancaster. Wanting to travel, she was about to go teach English as a second language with VSO in Madagascar, when she was appointed to a teaching post in Hebrew Bible at the University of Botswana. Three years in Botswana were transformative, including professionally. There at the height of the HIV/Aids pandemic, it became sharply clear that the Bible played an active part in matters of life and death. The Bible has since become in her own research much more than ‘just’ a fascinating, ancient object of study. Johanna has continued to work with scholarly and other communities in southern Africa and, more recently, also in other parts of the continent. After Botswana and before joining the University of Leeds, she worked at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. This environment, too, being in a state University in the buckle of the Bible Belt during the Bush years, was formative.

Johanna has been at Leeds for ten years and teaches modules on the Bible and Judaism. She has just completed her fifth monograph, her third in Leeds. She is currently involved in four research projects, all centred in some way around the Shiloh Project, an initiative exploring the intersections of rape culture, gender-based violence and religion. She has still not got to Madagascar.

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UN 16 Days of Activism: Day 10 – Helen Paynter

by Helen Paynter on

Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?

I am a Baptist minister and an Old Testament specialist. I teach Old Testament and Biblical languages, based at Bristol Baptist College. In particular, I am the founding director of the Centre for the Study of Bible and Violence.  The CSBV is a study centre dedicated to working in the area of the interpretation of biblical texts of violence. It exists to promote and conduct high-quality scholarship, and to serve the churches in the UK and internationally by offering accessible resources to equip them to read the scriptural texts of violence well, and the challenge the ways in which the Bible is sometimes weaponised for the promotion of violence. We hope thereby to enable the church to offer counter-violent counter-extremist narratives in situations of conflict or tension.

 

How does your research or your work connect to activism?

One of the areas that I am passionate about is the interpretation of biblical sexual violence, which has been interpreted – at various times in the history of the church – in some very disturbing ways. I have recently completed a book on the dreadful story of the Levite’s wife from Judges 19, called Telling Terror in Judges 19: Rape and Reparation for the Levite’s wife. This will be coming out soon in the Routledge Focus series. In this book, I offer what is known as a ‘reparative’ interpretation of the text; that is, while acknowledging the horrors it presents and the ideology that may lie behind it, seeking to read for some suprising positives that the narrative offers. As part of this work, I did quite a lot of research into modern situations of sexual violence with which this ancient text has contact, particularly the horrific Delhi Bus Rape. I draw these comparisons in the book.

Another project I have been involved in was the #SheToo podcast series, produced by Rosie Dawson for the Bible Society. I was a consultant and contributor for this series, wherein Rosie interviewed various female scholars from different faith perspectives on some of the narratives of sexual violence in the Bible.

The other arm of the CSBV, which looks at the weaponisation of the Bible, has led me to write a second book this year, to be published by BRF in 2020. The title is still under negotiation, but the current working version is ‘The Bible Doesn’t Tell Me So: Why submitting to abuse is not a Christian wife’s duty’. Tragically, domestic abuse is sometimes sustained by abusers through appeal to various biblical texts, and churches also sometimes contribute to this by the misapplication of biblical principles. As a Christian minister, I am not only deeply disturbed by this, but feel a sense of responsibility to attempt to address it, and this book is intended for that purpose. It is aimed at women who are trapped in abusive marriages where the Bible plays a part in their abuse, and also at those who seek to help them, and at church leaders. I am hoping that it will reach an international market as well as a domestic one, and that through it, women will find themselves empowered to find places of safety and resist manipulative attempts to keep them trapped in situations of abuse.

 

Why is activism important to you and what do you hope to achieve between now and the 16 Days of 2020?

I think I’ve probably covered the first question above. Between now and the beginning of December next year, I hope that both of these books will have been published, and that I will be able to speak on the subject at various national and possibly international platforms. In particular, I am hoping to be in a position to attend and contribute to the Baptist World Alliance quinquennial meeting in Rio next year, where there will be a specialist subject stream on gender based violence.

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UN 16 Days of Activism: Day 6 – Barbara Thiede

by Barbara Thiede on

I teach full-time in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina Charlotte and serve as the Program Director for our department’s graduate program. I am also an ordained rabbi and teach for ALEPH – Alliance for Jewish Renewal.

In both settings, I teach a range of courses focused on gender, power, class, and race. These fall, broadly, into two categories. As a historian of Jewish history, I teach the history of European antisemitism and the marketing of the Holocaust. As a biblical scholar, I teach a wide range of courses that focus on gender, power, and violence in the Hebrew Bible. I am currently writing a full-length monograph entitled Male Friendship, Homosociality and Women in the Hebrew Bible. I am also working on a volume for the Routledge series “Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible” entitled Rape in the House of David: A Company of Men.

Writing about causes I support has been a significant part of my activism in public realms, too. For some twenty years I wrote for a regional section of The Charlotte Observer as well as for the Observer’s Viewpoint page as a community editorial columnist. Here, I was able to address a range of issues, from domestic violence and sexual assault to antisemitism and racism. Likewise, my blog, Adrenalinedrash, includes writing on sexual violence, racism, and antisemitism from a rabbinic perspective.

From my earliest days at UNC Charlotte, when I created the first women’s group for addressing eating disorders, to my campus involvement today in our annual Sex Week, addressing the very real concerns of my students has been one of my primary goals. One in every four of my female students will be the victim of sexual assault during their undergraduate careers. While teachers of Religious Studies regularly engage with class, gender, race, sexuality, and ability, classroom conversations are often detached from the rape culture that surrounds them. But the rape culture of the Hebrew Bible is familiar to my students for a reason; like today’s rape cultures, it relies on a web of male friendships, alliances, and social relationships that are essential to its preservation. In the classroom we can analyze how hegemonic masculinity that supports rape culture works both in ancient texts and in contemporary settings. And we can talk about what must be done to change the statistics and make college campuses safe for women.

Though I am involved with efforts to combat racism and gun violence as a speaker and rabbi, much of my activism has centered on working with local church and civic groups. For almost two decades, I have regularly addressed sexual violence and hegemonic masculinity in the Hebrew Bible in a wide range of denominational settings. Because biblical authors present sexual violence against women as permissible, we need to interrogate the texts we hold sacred.

I participate in marches and rallies and speak for a host of causes I support – from protecting voting rights to winning citizenship for undocumented immigrants to saving our broken planet. And I have found that my greatest impact takes place in classroom, faith, and community education. There, I can develop relationships, open doors, unpack a conversation, and empower those I am working with – from the eighteen-year-old college students to eighty-year-old grandmothers. We are all needed in the struggle against rape culture.

Between now and the 16 days I will be helping students at UNCC with the organization of this year’s Sex Week (sexual violence is a key topic), writing a piece for my blog on the male alliances that support rape culture in both the Hebrew Bible and our own time, and working with a full class of students who are writing their final papers – almost all of which center on sexual violence in Hebrew Bible. Teaching in two different academic settings, spending many Sunday mornings with faith groups, and writing offer me opportunities to address and confront the rape cultures we must combat and eradicate. And in our time.

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UN 16 Days of Activism: Day 3 – Nancy Tan

by Nancy Tan on

I’m Nancy Tan – the one in the salmon pink shirt. This picture was taken last month at a retreat for the female pastoral staff and I gave a talk on “Interpreting the Bible: from Feminist and Masculinities Perspectives”. It was an overnight retreat for the sisters to relax from their busy schedule at church and to encourage and empower each other.  Each of the sisters in this picture are activists: actively protecting the rights of the marginalised, oppressed, harassed and frightened people living in HK now – from victims of abuse to the asylum seekers. I am very honoured to be in this picture!

I am currently an Associate Professor in Hebrew Bible at Divinity School of Chung Chi College, the Chinese University of Hong Kong. I teach courses related to the Hebrew Bible, and also Gender Critical Interpretation of the Bible and Contextual Interpretation of the Bible. Through these courses, and some of my current research interest and work, I hope to challenge conventional interpretations that propagate the suppression and denial of the rights and self-esteem of women and some men in the Bible and especially today.

 I am now working on a book entitled Resisting Rape Culture: The Hebrew Bible and Hong Kong Sex Workers with the Routledge series on Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible. I have been working on a project reading Bible passages that mention sex workers with the sex workers in Hong Kong. This book is part of the output of some of the readings.

 Activism is an inherent component to negotiate issues of injustice. It is the only avenue to raise the awareness and consciousness of the public the stories of injustices suffered by the society. It compels the public to make ethical judgments. From now until the 16 days of 2020, I hope to complete the book I have mentioned above, get it published and also promote it. I hope this small token could become part of the larger on-going efforts to instill respect for sex workers in more people, and also to eliminate rape culture in our society.

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International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women – UN 16 Days of Activism: Day 1 – Ericka Dunbar

by Ericka Dunbar on

To celebrate the first day of the 16 Days of Activism Campaign, which coincides with International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, we spotlight activist Ericka Dunbar. You can learn more about Ericka’s work here.
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I am Ericka Dunbar, a Ph.D. student at Drew University, completing my studies in the area of Bible & Cultures. My focus is the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. My dissertation is entitled: “Trafficking Hadassah: An Africana Reading of Collective Trauma, Memory and Identity in the Book of Esther.”

My research connects to activism in several ways. Foremost, in my research, I utilize intersectionality and polyvocality as frameworks that enable me to expand traditional interpretations of biblical texts. The application of these frameworks illuminates the ways that Africana girls and women often experience intersectional oppression at the hands of patriarchs and colonial entities. For example, both Hagar in the book of Genesis and the virgin girls from Ethiopia and other African locales in the book of Esther, are taken from their native lands and sexually exploited by patriarchs and colonial subjects.

When reading the narratives intertextually, systematic oppression of Africana females due to intersectional identities becomes evident. Africana girls and women are sexually exploited at the intersections of ethnicity, gender, class, and in relation to interlocking systems of power and domination by patriarchs and colonial subjects. In these texts, ideologies of Africana inferiority are promoted and social hierarchies are created, frequently relegating Africana females low on the hierarchy (as concubines and slaves). Both the ideologies and hierarchy function to justify the abuse and oppression of Africana females.  Consequently, Africana girls and women become sex slaves to patriarchs and kings that extract their bodies from their natal homes and transport them to other locales for the patriarch/king’s sexual pleasure.

In addition, the application of these frameworks provides an opportunity to integrate the voices and experiences of Africana girls and women regularly ignored or minimized by interpreters, namely the nameless virgin girls in the book of Esther. This type of activism resonates with the type of activism reflected in the #SayHerName movement.

#SayHerName raises awareness of the countless Black girls and women that are victimized by police and anti-Black racialized violence. It centers the stories of those whose experiences of police and racialized violence are muted in both historical and media representations.  My work parallels this movement in that I give voice to the often overlooked and ignored experiences and traumatization of Africana girls and women in the ancient biblical contexts. However, not only do I focus on Africana girls and women in ancient contexts but I also illustrate how the girls’ and women’s experiences in the biblical narratives resonate with the experiences of Africana girls and women trafficked and rendered sex slaves during the transatlantic slave trade and even into the present.

While, the #SayHerName movement focuses on Africana girls and women that are killed by police in the US, I focus on sexualized violence perpetrated against Africana girls and women. I also emphasize that Africana girls and women were recognized as property of colonies in ancient contexts and during the slave trade. Therefore, they received no legal protection from rape and sexual enslavement. I point out these facts as a means of highlighting that current police brutality against Africana females is a legacy of patriarchy and colonial domination. In addition, the failure of law enforcement and legal systems adequately to protect Africana victims from sexual exploitation or to punish offenders is in large part a horrendous legacy of racist stereotyping and colonialism.

Perhaps some contemporary examples of the sexual exploitation of Africana females will illuminate the types of injustice that advocates such as myself are speaking out about. Three women, Cyntoia Brown, Chrystal Kizer, and Alexis Martin who were trafficked and sexually exploited in the USA as minors, either have been or are being prosecuted for defending themselves against their traffickers. The forfeiture of protection by police and legal systems is another form of violent brutality. Moreover, the lack of protection from an abuser and the criminalization of victims exacerbate their suffering.  Girls and women should not be criminalized for protecting themselves or escaping abusive exploitation. Therefore, I not only emphasize intersectional oppression and elucidate damaging ideologies but I also critique systemic oppression and the failure of legal entities to uphold justice and protect vulnerable persons.

Secondly, I teach with an emphasis on trauma and social justice. It is essential for me to prepare students for the world and ministry by shaping lives that are committed to not only critical thinking but to justice as well. When I help students to recognize inequalities and trauma in the ancient world of the text and in our very own contexts, we create conscientious communities that are responsive to discriminations and disparities. As co-learners, we help each other recognize the mechanisms of power and how power can be used to transform systems and conditions to ensure justice and equity for all members of society.

One way that we promote equity and justice is by creating a space that affirms the humanity and dignity of all. We allow diverse knowledge, experiences, and interpretations to enhance the learning space and we respond to critical issues that impact humans globally. I find that in addition to contextualized learning, interdisciplinarity is a great asset for social analysis, promoting critical thinking, and interpreting information to discern solutions. Moreover, we discuss and respond to these issues both inside and outside of the classroom. Practices that demonstrate an orientation to social justice include a trip to the Civil Rights Museum, activism through social media engagement, involvement in protests/rallies/marches/voter registration drives, implementing and organizing church programming to address social issues, and/or involvement in organizations that create/impact legislation. There are a wide range of practices that our learning community engage in as a means of embodying our scholar-activist identities. We supplement book-knowledge with experiential knowledge to produce changes in the communities in which we serve.

Alongside teaching at Spelman College and the Interdenominational Theological Center, I serve as a representative on the Joint Action for Advocacy for Justice and Peace Convening Table, National Council of Churches (USA), and on the faculty team for the Samuel DeWitt Proctor’s Dale Andrews Freedom Seminary hosted by the Children’s Defense Fund. The seminary course is an immersion experience for seminarians who desire to engage and cultivate prophetic voices with communities that contend against systemic injustices that directly impact children and youth. Scholars, community and church leaders, and activists gather at this week-long Institute to describe and model non-violent direct organization and collective action for justice though public theology, communal, and congregational praxis.  This past summer, I took two of my former Spelman students to the institute and transported two others from Candler School of Theology at Emory. I’ve taught students at Spelman that participated in other CDF programming as well. I have become a mentor beyond the classroom to many of these students and to other students that I’ve met through the Forum for Theological Exploration. These relationships are meaningful to me because of our relatedness as Africana women and our shared focus on child advocacy and on challenging sexualized violence against Africana women in ecclesiastical structures and society.

In late October, a Clark Atlanta University (Atlanta, USA) student by the name of Alexis Crawford was sexually assaulted by her roommate’s boyfriend and then allegedly murdered by her roommate and the roommate’s boyfriend. This atrocious event shook the Clark Atlanta community as well as the members of the other schools of the Atlanta University consortium, (two of which I serve as an adjunct professor) and the wider community surrounding these institutions. Specifically, the students in my Intro to Old Testament class at Spelman were traumatized by this killing because of the sheer callousness of Alexis’s abuse, their proximity to Alexis’s apartment and school, the failure of legal entities to protect Alexis, and because many have expressed experiencing similar instances of unsolicited sexual advances in their lifetimes. This killing illuminated for us that our scholarship is not divorced from the world around us. Rather, our scholarship is informed and impacted by the communities and societies that surround us. This semester, it has become increasingly clear that there is an exchange between the theories we engage in the classroom and our lived experiences beyond the classroom. In the last couple of class sessions since Alexis went missing and was found murdered, my students have been reflecting upon experiences of trauma and assessing how the educational processes we’ve engaged in this semester continue to aid in our ability to identify and challenge social injustices in practical ways.

Besides writing, teaching, and mentoring, I also travel and present papers on sexual trafficking and collective trauma at international conferences. Two of my papers/presentations are being turned into an article and book chapter and published in the next couple of months. Last summer, I presented a paper entitled, “For Such a Time as This #UsToo: Representations of Sexual Trafficking, Collective Trauma and Horror in the Book of Esther,” delivered at the 2018 Religion and Rape Culture Conference at the University of Sheffield (Sheffield, England). This paper has been turned into an article and is being published in a special edition of the journal Bible and Critical Theory. This past summer, I presented a keynote paper entitled “Sisters of the Soil: Surviving Collective, Cultural Traumatization: Intertextualities Between Hagar, the Ethiopian Virgin Girls in the Book of Esther and Mother Africa,” at the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians 5thPan-African Conference (Celebrating the 30thAnniversary of the Circle) at the University of Botswana (Gaborone, Botswana). An excerpt of this paper was translated into German and published in FAMA (Switzerland). The longer keynote paper will be published as a chapter in a book entitled Mother Earth, Postcolonial and Liberation Theologies by Lexington Publishers.

Activism is important to me because it galvanizes persons to participate in collective action to ensure every member of society is treated fairly and equitably. Activism and advocacy are means to inspire and create change. Students are capable of effecting social change thus it is important to reflect on and engage in advocacy and activism within and outside of the classroom. During the 16 Days of Activism I will continue to educate persons about the mechanisms of sex trafficking and its psychological, emotional, and physical impacts on Africana girls and women. I intend to tell the stories of girls and women whose lives have been impacted by sexualized violence as a means of increasing awareness of gender-based violence and to prevent and end sexualized violence against girls and women. I also hope that any efforts to decriminalize the sexual exploitation and trafficking of person will be thwarted.

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Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible Book Series: Inaugural Volume Out Soon!

by Shiloh Project on

We’re delighted to launch the inaugural volume of our book series with Routledge Focus.

Rape Myths, the Bible and #MeToo by Shiloh Project co-director Johanna Stiebert (University of Leeds) will be available in all good bookshops from 5 November.


We’ll be celebrating its publication with a launch event at The University of Sheffield on Friday 20 December 4-7pm G11 – Workroom 2, 38 Mappin Sheffield.

Talks from Johanna Stiebert and Dr Mmapula Kebaneilwe (University of Botswana) will be followed by a wine reception and seasonal buffet.

If you would like to join us, book your tickets here.

If you would like to submit a proposal to the series editors for consideration, contact us at [email protected]

We look forward to reading your ideas!

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“Until the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies”: Rizpah and the power of silent protest

by Siam Hatzaw on

Today’s blog post is written by Siam Hatzaw. Siam is an undergraduate student of English Literature and Theology at the University of Glasgow. She is an editor for Persephone’s Daughters, a literature magazine empowering female survivors of abuse, and is also a features editor of The Glasgow Guardian. You can find Siam on Twitter @siamhatzaw.

“Until the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies”:  Rizpah and the power of silent protest

The story of Rizpah and her silent vigil (2 Samuel 21:1-14) is one of the most heart-wrenching narratives of grief, devotion, and sacrifice within the Bible. But more than this, its implications are far-reaching as her story resonates with the voices of oppressed women throughout history. If actions speak louder than words, then Rizpah’s vigil epitomises the power of silent protest in the face of injustice.

The Madwoman in the Attic

I frame my reading of Rizpah through the “madwoman in the attic” trope which refers to certain female literary characters. The trope is coined by Gilbert and Gubar in their seminal work of feminist literary criticism by the same name, where they discuss the tendency within literature to characterise women as either angelic or monstrous, an embodiment of purity or an unkempt madwoman. Gilbert and Gubar argue that both characterisations should be killed off as neither can accurately represent women; they emphasise the need for women to be written as multifaceted and developed characters in their own right.

The trope’s name is drawn from the character of Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, a woman locked away by her husband for an unnamed insanity. The perception of Bertha’s character exemplifies the link between Rizpah and the madwoman trope: madness is continually feminised and thus weaponised against victims of trauma to deride the justness of their cause. Juliana Little explains that:

“Madness has been perceived for centuries metaphorically and symbolically as a feminine illness and continues to be gendered into the twenty-first century. Throughout history, images of mental illness in women send the message that women are weak, dangerous, and require containment”.

This association between women and madness is also represented through the feminisation of “hysteria” – a common theme in Victorian novels and the basis of a medical diagnosis (predominantly linked to women) that the American Psychiatric Association did not drop until 1952.

In short, women and madness have always gone hand in hand. Female literary characters are all too often painted as irrational, overemotional, or excessive – and it is here that we find Rizpah.

Situating Rizpah

Rizpah begins her story already a victim. She is introduced as Saul’s concubine and after his death, his commander in chief Abner is accused of “going into” her (2 Samuel 3:6-21). This leads to conflict between Abner and Ish-Bosheth, Saul’s successor, so Abner defects to David who becomes King. According to Isabel Hamley, Abner’s assertion of power through sexual domination to achieve his own means is enough to qualify the incident as rape. Rizpah’s body is used to assert a claim to the throne, making her “nothing but a pawn in powerful male hands”. The men’s conflict isconcerned with the violation of Saul’s property and pays no attention to Rizpah’s trauma. This comes as no surprise, considering the concubine’s status as “the locus of battles between men”.

David’s Atonement

Fast forward to 2 Samuel 21, we find Israel in the midst of a three-year famine. God tells David the famine is “on account of Saul’s blood-stained house” (2 Samuel 21:1) as he had broken an oath by trying to annihilate the Gibeonites in spite of Israel’s sworn promise to spare them.

David asks the Gibeonites what he can do for atonement, at which they call for the execution of seven of Saul’s descendants: five sons of Merab and two sons of Rizpah. Seven is considered the biblical number of completion, used repeatedly to reference redemption. Therefore, these men can be seen as Israel’s sacrifice of redemption for Saul’s sin.

Transforming Trauma into Action

The seven sons are executed and left to hang upon the hillside at the beginning of harvest, as Rizpah watches with unspeakable grief. Here we can draw a parallel with another grieving mother who stands at the foot of the cross, watching her own son become a sacrifice of redemption. What unimaginable strength must it take for these mothers to bear witness to their sons’ deaths?

According to Deuteronomic Code, corpses must be buried on the same day or they are cursed by God. Hebraic tradition views burial as a sacred rite. However, David leaves these men to rot for all to see – a grave injustice.

And so, Rizpah defies the king. Her suffering sparks something within her, driving her to turn her trauma into action.

Alone Upon the Hillside

Rizpah guards the corpses “from the beginning of the harvest until the rain poured down from the heavens on the bodies” (2 Samuel 21:10). This is a period of approximately six months, April to October, through which she endures immense physical and psychological torture. The sight and smell alone would be enough to destroy anyone – and yet, she perseveres.

Let’s come back to the madwoman trope. Picture Rizpah alone at the foot of the bodies, fighting off the birds by day and wild animals by night, sleeping with the rotting corpses… in all this time, she finds no aid, no company, or consolation. She is seen as a woman driven insane by grief.

But Rizpah doesn’t care. Her vigil is more than mourning; it’s a protest, and she knows she is right in the eyes of God.

Rizpah’s Significance for Israel

We should take a moment to consider why the bodies are left to hang. Samantha Joo argues that if David was only looking to appease God for atonement, he would have demanded a burial. Instead, he leaves them as a warning for those who would oppose him. Joo suggests that had it not been for Rizpah’s presence, onlookers would have slinked away in fear. Instead, because of this madwoman on the hillside, they start to ask questions. Their murmurs spread and eventually reach King David.

Rizpah’s protest was on the verge of dismantling the legitimacy of his kingship, as he had broken his oath to spare Saul’s descendants and defied Hebraic funeral ethics. And so, to silence the murmurs, David gathers the bones of Saul and Jonathan, together with the seven men, and gives them their just burial. After this, God “answered prayer in behalf of the land” (2 Samuel 21:14), and rain falls on Israel once more.

Ekaterina Kozlova proposes that by ensuring the men’s burial in the ancestral tomb, Rizpah’s vigil salvages the dynasty’s dignity. Moreover, it is intertwined with the fate of a nation. Her actions neutralised the penal plagues that wreaked havoc in Israel. Kozlova further argues that these ritual contexts allow women to enter the previously inaccessible domain of male power and turn these solemn occasions into public forums for pressing issues.

Rizpah rouses David into action as, according to the rabbis, he considers: “If she, who is but a woman, has acted with so much loving kindness, must not I, who am a king, do infinitely more?”. Thus, she uses the power available to her in this domain to shame the king into utilising his own power and right his wrongs.

What’s in a Name?

A deeper look into the meaning of Rizpah’s name illuminates the story’s political significance in light of her call to repentance. The name means “hot coals” which symbolises the cleansing of sin.  In Isaiah 6, a seraphim places a hot coal from the altar upon Isaiah’s lips to cauterise the wound of sin. Rizpah, the “hot coal”, served as a symbol to Israel as a cry to repent – when her protest is heard, the rain falls from the heavens and completes their redemption.

Athalya Brenner presents “hot coals” as a symbol of quiet but enduring passion, a slow-burning anger, and purification.Likewise, Kozlova notes that glowing coals or fire are symbolically connected to human life, further proposing that by situating Rizpah’s name (a double light-based cipher) at the intersection of two dynasties, it becomes “an indispensable gloss” on the narrator’s intentional social commentary: to criticise the king’s injustice.

Contemporary Examples

Rizpah’s story resonates with contemporary examples of women who use their trauma to fight for change. Joyce Hollyday relates her to Israel’s Women in Black, and to other groups of mothers of grief who become mothers of hope.

The Women in Black

The Women in Black are an anti-war movement demonstrating opposition to Palestine’s occupation by holding weekly vigils in mourning for the victims of the conflict. Formed in 1988 following the outbreak of the First Intifada, the group now comprises an estimated 10,000 activists around the world. The movement inspired global vigils in solidarity, which became protests for local issues in each country and evolved into an “international network of women for peace”.

Gila Svirsky has written about this movement’s powerful symbolism of mourning, dignity, and conscience; their commitment to nonviolence was a source of strength. She describes a particular vigil before which they had been warned by the Commissioner of Police about an overwhelming threat of violence – and yet more women than ever showed up to protest.

“All of us, with our hearts in our throats, more silent than our silent vigil ever really was, standing there in determination not to be shoved aside by bullies.  People threw things from their cars, but nothing exploded.  And the women continued to stand with dignity”.

It is notable that the majority of protesters were victims of trauma themselves, who channelled their pain into transformative action. As Svirsky states: “Those who were sensitive to the issue of violence against women applied that lesson to all forms of violence and oppression”.

Svirsky uses the Arabic word sumud, steadfastness, to describe the Palestinians clinging to their views despite adversity, not being shaken from the ultimate goal. Sumud reflects the power of nonviolent resistance. However, the media’s reports of the vigils are continually littered with ridicule and criticism. Svirsky writes: “What’s that you say about prophets in their own land?  One had to be really committed – or nuts – to keep plugging.  But we did”.

“Nuts”. These were madwomen in the eyes of the onlookers, like Rizpah, a picture of insanity at the foot of the bodies. The trope portrays women who are vilified, using “madness” to invalidate their cause, women who are called hysterical rather than brave, despised rather than sympathised. And yet, they persevere, standing firm against their oppressors. Both the Women in Black and Rizpah embody sumud in their powerful resilience.

“Comfort Women”

Another contemporary comparison is proposed by Samantha Joo, who relates Rizpah to bronze statues situated around the world which represent the “comfort women”. “Comfort woman” is a translation of the Japanese ianfu, a euphemism for “prostitute”. It refers to the many thousands of women and girls forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II. Joo explores the insidious efforts of governments who seek to suppress stories of and by these women whose bodies bear witness to rape and oppression.

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan pressured President Moon Jae-in of Korea to honour the December 2015 agreement in which the Korean government agreed to remove the bronze statue of a comfort woman standing outside the Japanese Embassy in Seoul, in exchange for an apology and monetary compensation. Prime Minister Abe “and other like-minded constituents” also tried to encourage the removal of bronze statues in Hong Kong, Australia, and the US, as well as whitewashing Japanese textbooks and attempting to change textbooks in Korea and the US. Joo views this as an attempt to “monopolize all of history with their master narrative”, an “all-out international campaign to wipe out the counter-narratives of the comfort women”.

Joo discusses the similarities between this endeavour to erase the scandal of the “comfort women” and King David’s attempts to cover up his collusion with the Gibeonites. The historian’s master narrative implies that David’s hands were tied: he had to sacrifice the men to restore fertility to Israel. Yet underlying this narrative was an attempt to silence David’s opposition. It is a message of terror, which Rizpah dares to confront.

Joo argues that, similarly, the Korean people must resist until Japan’s Prime Minister publicly acknowledges the systematic sexual enslavement of the “comfort women”. Just as Rizpah is the silent presence representing the senseless death of innocent men slaughtered for King David’s ambition, the statue represents the senseless trauma these women suffered through. Both the statue and Rizpah thus become counter-monuments embodying stories which interrogate and destabilize unjust leaders.

Joo powerfully states that:

“If any of us allow a government to deny the injustice of the past or the present by manipulating and perpetuating its master narrative, then we are complicit. We are like the men of Gibeah, who passively watch a king kill seven innocent people. Rather we, like Rizpah, should dare and persist in fighting the master narrative that tries to silence the cries of women who with their bodies incarnate the counternarratives.”

The Power of Silent Protest

Rizpah’s story echoes throughout the history of oppressed women. She is in a dangerously vulnerable position as a concubine, a victim of rape, and a grieving mother. Yet, Hamley argues that it is her very lack of power – exemplified in her repeated victimisation and taking up the only option open to her – that ultimately enables her to achieve her goal.

In the end, Rizpah, the madwoman alone upon the hillside, is vindicated. Hamley states: “The woman, invisible and used in 2 Samuel 3, abused further through the death of her sons, is now seen and recognised… not simply by David but by the God who only brings the famine to an end once justice is done for her loved ones”.

Rizpah’s story portrays the incomprehensible strength of women in their suffering, an ability to turn trauma into transformative action and enact real change. Although she is silent, her actions ring loud and clear as a daring challenge to the king to do what is right.

Funlola Olojede describes silent but open resistance as a powerful tool, particularly in cases where overt forms of protest would be dangerous or ineffective: “Her silence continued to cry out louder than words… her resilience in the face of unspeakable grief as she watched the bodies of her two sons rot away before her eyes speaks to women today”.

Across the world, women who bear unspeakable suffering are not allowing themselves to be broken. They are letting their silence cry out until justice is found, a mirror to Rizpah and her vigil which touched the heart of God.

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