Today’s post is by Barbara Thiede. Barbara is the editor of a forthcoming book with the title Rape Culture and the Bible: Scholars Reflect (Routledge Focus). The book has at its centre interviews with a range of scholars and activists who have researched some aspect of rape culture, religion and the Bible. Excerpts from interviews with some of these scholars and activists are now part of a film, which you can access in the link below.
The film is here!
But first, a little background…
Since the 1980s, scholars have turned their focus to the distressing nature of depictions of sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, as well as, though more tangentially, in the Greek Bible, and extra-canonical texts. However, the first application of the term rape culture to the Bible did not appear until 1997, in biblical scholar Harold C. Washington’s landmark article, “Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach 1.”[1]
Despite decades-long efforts to identify the pervasive normalization of sexual assault and sexual violence in biblical texts, terms like rape and rape culture have remained controversial. Hence, this film! The film is called Rape Culture and the Bible: Scholars Reflect, which is the same title as that of the monograph which gave rise to and expands on it.
In this film, scholars and scholar-activists reflect on their own contributions to the study of rape culture and the Bible, as well as on the field’s history and legacy. They make clear the ethical foundations of this work: namely, that ancient Jewish and Christian texts reflect harmful ideologies. And, as many of them note, these ideologies continue to sanction and permit abuse that is ongoing—even pervasive—in contemporary communities, cultures, and religious institutions.
Pioneering and newer voices in the field, including, importantly, scholar-survivors themselves, demonstrate herein, again and again, how human and embodied, how personal, and how meaningful and urgent this work is.
Each participant shares in the conviction that academic work on sexual violence in biblical and related texts cannot be confined to scholarly settings. All understand that they are working with a phenomenon that extends beyond the page. Some describe their public work as a form of activism. Harold C. Washington, though, puts it like this: “It’s not activism; it’s clarity.”
The film is narrated by Johanna Stiebert and Barbara Thiede. It features Caroline Blyth, Yehudis Fletcher, Pamela Gordon, Sandie Gravett, Sarojini Nadar, Lisa Oakley, Mitzi Smith, Ken Stone, David Tombs, Eric Vanden Eykel, Harold C. Washington, Gerald West and Sithembiso Zwane.
All contributors in the film and two additional participants, too, namely Miryam Clough and Meredith J. C. Warren, feature at more length in the book forthcoming soon in the Routledge Focus series “Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible.” The book, edited by Barbara Thiede, will have the title Rape Culture and the Bible: Scholars Reflect. It will be made available open access.
Please watch and share this film. NB: The film will be shown at our event on Religion and Violence on Wednesday 8 October 2025 at the University of Leeds.
[1] See Biblical Interpretation, 5(4), 324-363. https://doi.org/10.1163/156851597X00120.
