At my baptism, I was given several pink-spined compendiums that celebrated the presence of women in the Bible. Over the years, the invitation merely to acknowledge the presence of these women and gloss over the complicated contexts they come with has become increasingly unsatisfying. Holding on to my faith has required me to wrestle with the way that the stories of these women and the history of interpretation that accompanies them jars with my understanding of God’s desire for justice.
The invitation of feminist theologians to read biblical texts with a “hermeneutic of suspicion” has been empowering in this task. It has enabled me to notice where the presence of women in the Bible (or interpretation of it) has come at the cost of their exploitation, oppression or lack of agency. Reading with a hermeneutic of suspicion, the goal is not to find a lens which resolves gender equality. Instead, it is liberation.
Take my namesake Hannah’s story, for example. In the opening chapters of 1 Samuel, we encounter Hannah, longing for a child and appealing to God. Hannah’s story is often used to highlight the benefits of prayerful petition. Whilst this may be a good message, using Hannah’s experience to demonstrate it feels uncomfortable. At the boundaries of Hannah’s story, we encounter limitations which mean both her desires and agency are shaped by her need for survival. Hannah’s longing for a son is not simply borne of desire or rivalry with her husband’s second wife, Peninnah, but of necessity. Without a son, Hannah risks becoming kinless after her husband’s death, left to poverty. Her husband, neither childless nor dependent on his offspring to survive, taunts her with her own desperation by constantly questioning her love.
Hannah does express agency throughout the narrative: she names her child, dedicates him to Yahweh, petitions God in prayer and sings out in celebration. In fact, she is the subject of a verb in the narrative more than three times than she is the object. We even glimpse notes of social transformation in her prayer. But all of Hannah’s power to act is tied to her desperate need to bear a son. Her agency beyond the domestic sphere is neither mentioned nor operated, should it even exist. Even the only other woman in the narrative is exploited to this end: as the rivalry between Hannah and Peninnah is used as a narrative tool to demonstrate divine intervention, we ignore the exploitation of both women’s experiences to prop up a moral message.
As 1 Samuel continues, men become kings and Hannah returns to domestic life, her future secure but the limitations of her world intact. Hannah’s story may well be a vehicle for a bigger message, but her experience of it does very little to transform the restrictions imposed on her because of her gender. As her song concludes, the narrative moves on, dominant structures are fixed, and Hannah is eclipsed from the picture. Even if transformation is to occur in the long term, as Hannah’s song predicts, she won’t be part of it.
Is Hannah’s story redeemable despite all of this? Does it even need to be redeemed in order for it to be part of the good news of the Bible? Perhaps Hannah’s experience of God at work in her life is enough to be good news. Hannah exercises her agency; her plea is heard by God and her future secured. But this isn’t liberation. Hannah’s desire is shaped and met by a patriarchal structure which goes on to be upheld beyond her lifetime. Change happens, but transformation never occurs.
If we’re reading with the goal of liberation, then we must be uncomfortable when the Bible stops short of this. We cannot be comfortable with an understanding of a God who is content to work through structures that perpetuate oppression but never break them. We cannot be satisfied when boundaries that reduce agency and deny power are upheld, even celebrated, because they set the scene for an interesting moral message. If we settle for easy answers that dismiss the pain experienced by people because of inequality and injustice, this does not feel like good news.
Instead, perhaps this complexity and discomfort is exactly what we should seek. Feminist biblical scholar Elna Mouton suggests that a feminist interpretation of the Bible invites us to learn to rest in the liminal space between “wonder” and “discomfort”. [i] We must “experience and account for both the richness and the complexity, both the admiration (awe, trust, hope) and the discomfort”. [ii] In doing so, we create safe spaces, in Mouton’s words “risky and fragile” spaces, where we experience God’s offer of life alongside all of creation – not just the privileged few. God’s freedom embraces complexity, and our task as readers in pursuit of liberation is to work at the thresholds, refusing to leave anyone trapped by interpretations that uphold unjust structures of oppression. This feels more like good news to me.
[i] Elna Mouton, “Feminist Biblical Interpretation: How Far Do We Have Yet To Go?”, in L. Juliana Claasens and Carolyn J. Sharp, Feminist Frameworks and the Bible: Power, Ambiguity and Intersectionality, (Bloomsbury: T&T Clark, 2017), pp. 211-220, (p. 216).
[ii] Mouton, “Feminist Biblical Interpretation”, p. 216.
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