This course offers a theological examination of the representation of women and gender in Christianity. Attention is given to the historical and cultural contexts of the first century and contemporary period. Theological, historical, literary, exegetical, and feminist methods are variously employed
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Course Requirements
- Active class participation: Assigned readings,. [20% of the grade] Students are required to read assigned readings.
2. Mid-term examination in class on the content of the readings and the material discussed in class. [20% of the grade]
- Three 4-5 page essays, one for each of the sections of the course (History of Feminist Theology, Feminist theology, and what you learned from reading assignment [30% of the grade]
- One final examination on the content of the readings discussed in class [30% of the grade]
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Read Online Books and Articles
In Memory of Her-A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins-Online Book
Is a Christian Feminist Theology Possible
Women's Bible Commentary
Theology Links
http://www.carm.org/dictionary.htm
http://www.biblestudytools.net/Dictionaries/BakersEvangelicalDictionary/
http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/etcbin/ot2www-hadden?specfile=/web/data/relig/hadden/HexConc.o2w
http://www.heavenlydoctrines.org/
http://www.ccel.org/jsp/bcb/main.jsp
Women of the Bible Dictionary Link
http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/women.html
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Feminist Theology Unit One
The Pleasures of Her Text by Alice Bach
IntroductionThe question of how feminism should define itself in relation to other critical methods and theories has caused sharp debate both in Europe and the U.S.A. As Judith Fetterley declared in The Resisting Reader, feminist criticism has been characterized by a resistance to codification and a refusal to have its parameters prematurely set. At this time most feminists agree that there are many communities of women, crucial differences within the category of women, and most important, there is no single message of feminist hermeneutics.
Gender is a word that heralds both risks and resistance. The resistance comes usually from those who have never thought of gender as influencing reading. The male gender has dominated the voice of the text, including also its interpretative voice, for such a long time that it is considered normative, objective, usual. "Objectivity is really male subjectivity," to use Adrienne Rich’s aphorism. As we have noted, the gender code in the interpretation of biblical texts has usually been adopted in its masculine version. But each time the canon is termed universal, the life of the patriarchal myth is extended. When the gender code is implicit, it contains the same characteristics as the moral code. It imposes upon every signifying element of the text a unified and preestablished theme. Only since the development of women’s studies has the gender code been explicitly criticized and explicitly embraced — in its feminist version. If feminist criticism has demonstrated anything, it has demonstrated the importance of the reader to what is read.
Of course feminists are products of the patriarchal culture too, and so have to deny the temptation of trying to produce a universal truth, a univocal meaning. Feminist criticism must remain fluid, not fixed, so that each one of us can contend with the ripples and waves of the dominant culture, diving into language to recover everything that is duplicitous and resistant and confounding. Elaine Showalter in a recent article has called for feminists to insist upon the recognition that gender is a central problem in every text, read or taught, whatever the era and whoever the author. A central problem, yes. But surely there are major risks in focusing on gender, splitting the world of reader into two. The first risk is reductiveness, to lose sight of the fact that focusing on certain categories obscures individual variation. Proclaiming the feminist agenda glosses over each woman’s struggle for self-definition. Rather than locking people into categories, feminist literary critics need to form temporary alliances and coalitions. Shifting boundaries of sexual difference must not be prevented from shifting. It is the desire to remain fluid, not fixed, to encourage spontaneity instead of linear argumentation, that inspired this volume. A large part of the pleasure of the text is the sense of process, of moving along a road toward feminism, a term which refuses definition or categorization.
In her chapter "Protestant Feminists and the Bible," Mary Ann Tolbert illuminates general characteristics of the Protestant tradition that are barriers for many women in appropriating a considerable amount of recent feminist research. Protestant feminists, Tolbert argues, experience special problems (not encountered by Catholic or Jewish feminists) specifically related to the Protestant tradition, the diversity of Protestant denominations one of the most evident. A primary problem, the ramification of sola scriptura for feminists, is that Protestant feminists have difficulty dispensing with the authority of scripture in favor of historical reconstruction. Tolbert calls for feminist literary critics to raise the issue of gender, to read with suspicion against the "male as norm" convention of reading biblical texts. Tolbert’s article begins the book because it raises the basic issues that concern each of the contributors: the question of gender and sexual difference in our scholarly lives.
Feminist literary critics are now examining the role of woman in biblical texts as enabler of the patriarchal society. In "The Pleasure of Her Text," I have offered a rereading of the story of Abigail, the prototypical good wife. While interpreters have always praised her, I wondered why, if Abigail was so good, she wasn’t rewarded with a son who became king? What I learned is that women have moments of strong speech and proud action in male-centered biblical narratives, but strong independent women act at the pleasure of their male creators. Too forceful and they embody male fears, and must be silenced or written out of the narrative.
Cheryl Exum protests the marginalization of female biblical characters through analysis of the phallogocentric texts in which they appear. Her chapter, "Murder They Wrote," examines the silencing of female characters by their male creators. Punishing a woman like Michal, who speaks her mind with barrenness and silence (narrative death), is one sort of message to women readers. Another patriarchal message is to glorify the obedient daughter who sacrifices her own life to help her father keep a vow to God. According to the biblical text, this model daughter is remembered in song each year by other obedient daughters. Exum demonstrates that we can choose to read the story of Jephthah’s daughter differently, "to expose the valorization of submission and glorification of the victim as serving phallocentric interests and to redefine its images of female solidarity in an act of feminist symbol-making."
Female scholars working with historical texts are confronted with a problem similar to that of their literary colleagues: they are reading the female voice as a palimpsest through the script of the dominant narrative. The texts that concern Carole Fontaine in her chapter, "A Heifer from Thy Stable," come from ancient Near Eastern societies: Mesopotamia and Anatolia. One of Fontaine’s major concerns is whether patriarchal texts can speak the reality of women’s lives. Fontaine searches for a model to evaluate the status of ancient women and the relationship of that status to the presence of goddesses and their worship. While Fontaine is faced with methodological considerations, she is attuned to the voices of these long-forgotten women. Never losing the thread of the women themselves to the temptation of scholarly method, Fontaine listens to the past. In their own words ancient women reflect the strength and wit with which they addressed and expanded the roles decreed for them by society.
Ellen Ross wonders what use feminist theologians have for a concept that characterizes human persons as imitators of a God who is often portrayed as a male deity. By creating a dialogue between two medieval theologians of the Augustinian tradition and two feminist theologians, Rosemary Ruether and Dorothee Soelle, Ross suggests that the heritage of the concept of imago dei may yet offer guidance to contemporary communities of renewal and hope. Ross’s exploration points to the role of feminist theology in recognizing the implications of the image of God theme for shaping our political experience "insofar as theological claims have praxis implications that call for concrete responses."
Martha Reineke looks at an important time of women’s history, the witch hunts of 1450-1750. In "The Devils Are Come Down Upon Us," she sets out to redress the Reformation historians’ neglect of this period of victimization of and violence against women. Through a synthesis of methodologies, especially the work of Rene Girard, she challenges other scholars in religious studies to refocus current strategies of analysis in order to be more responsive to the charge of feminist history. Reineke argues that "we seriously underestimate the resources of our discipline at a point where they are most crucial for our work in memoriam on behalf of our foresisters. To speak adequately of the witch craze, to remember all that we must remember if we are to free our foresisters from a history of victimization, we must treat myth as essential to the witch craze and its violence."
For some female scholars devising a new voice as well as new methodologies in which to cast their ideas is a way of deconstructing the patriarchal mold. Thus genre becomes a means to a political statement. While I am not suggesting that all female scholars search for a new means of written expression, or even that such a universal search would be desirable, let us consider some questions that Luce Irigaray has raised: "What other mode of reading or writing or interpretation and affirmation may be mine inasmuch as I am a woman, with respect to you, a man? Is it possible that the difference might not be reduced once again to a process of hierarchization? Of subordinating the other to the same?" Based on a corporeality of difference, writers such as Irigaray and Helene Cixous attempt to dislodge the primacy of the phallogocentric binary opposition of sameness by breaking down the hierarchy of presence/lack, or what Irigaray calls the "old dream of symmetry." In the "new" syntax, as she imagines it, "there would no longer be either subject or object, ‘oneness’ would no longer be privileged. . . . Instead the syntax would involve proximity that would preclude any establishment of ownership, thus any form of appropriation."
Whatever forms are constructed, the important element is to appropriate a nonhierarchical articulation of sexual difference in language. However, a language of universal gynocentrism is not the answer. Women do not share the same cultural and social conditions. Feminist writing should be resistant to sameness, to speaking someone else’s language, even if that language imitates other feminist scholars. Cultural and racial differences are often first noticed (and first submerged) in language. Women must take the initiative in preserving the particularity of their own language. And feminists will have to work to assure diversity of language in scholarly publications. Women in all scholarly disciplines will have to work together to assure diversity — to bring pleasure to the text.
ALICE BACH
New York CityJune 1900
Chapter 1: Did Jesus Have a Baby Sister? By Dory Previn
Dory Previn is a lyricist, novelist, composer, and performer. She is the author of two autobiographical works Midnight Baby and Bog-Trotter, and several musical plays, among them Mary C. Brown and the Hollywood Sign. One hears in her songs and her books a woman’s voice, sometimes brave, sometimes scared to be alone, always exploring — from the star-stained heights to the depths where the iguanas live. She is currently at work on a volume of short stories.
did jesus have a baby sister?
was she bitter?
was she sweet?
did she wind up in a convent?
did she end up on the street?
on the run?
on the stage?
did she dance?
did he have a sister?
a little baby sister?
did jesus have a sister?
did they give her a chance?
did he have a baby sister?
could she speak out by and large?
or was she told by mother mary
ask your brother he’s in charge
he’s the whipped cream
on the cakedid he have a sister?
a little baby sister?
did jesus have a sister?
did they give her a break?
her brother’s
birth announcement
was pretty big
pretty big
i guess
while she got precious
little notice in the local press
her mother was the virgin
when she carried him
carried him
therein
if the little girl came later
then
was she conceived in sin?
and in sorrow?
and in shame?
did jesus have a sister?
what was her name?
did she long to be the savior
saving everyone
she met?
and in private to her mirror
did she whisper
saviorette?
saviorwoman?saviorperson?
save your breath!
did he have a sister?
a little baby sister?
did jesus have a sister?
was she there at his death?
and did she cry for mary’s comfort
as she watched him
on the cross?
and was mary too despairing
ask your brother
he’s the boss
he’s the chief
he’s the man
he’s the show
did he have a sister?
a little baby sister?
did jesus have a sister?
doesn’t anyone know?Chapter 2: Protestant Feminists and the Bible: On the Horns of a Dilemma by Mary Ann Tolbert
Mary Ann Tolbert is associate professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. She holds graduate degrees from the University of Virginia (English literature) and University of Chicago (biblical studies). She is the editor of The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics (Semeia 28) and the author of Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Fortress, 1989).
For many women the freedom to proclaim their own experience in the world and their own vision of the world as authoritative and legitimate, rather than marginal and deviant as patriarchy would have it, is the profoundly liberating dynamic of the feminist movement. However, for many feminists, and especially for many Jewish and Christian feminists, their own experience is often painfully split within itself because, to echo Elaine Showalter’s words,1 we are both the daughters of the male tradition, of Abraham and the patriarchs, of Jesus, Paul, and the Church Fathers, of our male ministers and rabbis, professors and dissertation advisors, and at the same time sisters together in a new consciousness, which rejects the submissive, victimized roles Western society, formed and molded by these two great religious traditions, has forced us, and generations of our foremothers and sisters, to play. Consciousness of the mutilation of minds, spirits, and bodies perpetrated for centuries on women by patriarchal misogyny demands not only our rage but also our absolute commitment to oppose and dismantle all the societal structures still supporting that misogyny. We cannot will away this new consciousness no matter how much discomfort it sometimes causes in our personal and professional lives. We can no longer teach or preach male history, androcentric ethics, or patriarchal biblical interpretations as though they were universals; we can no longer pledge unquestioning allegiance to existing religious hierarchies and institutions as though they actually served the whole family of Mother God rather than mainly the brethren. We cannot forget what we as feminists now know, any more than we can deny the degree to which patriarchal patterns continue to shape our lives and careers, either through our acceptance of them or through our rebellion against them.This split within our experience, being both the heirs and the victims of patriarchy, is nowhere more apparent than in many women’s struggles to come to terms with the religious traditions in which they were born, raised, or formed. Short of throwing out whole traditions and developing entirely new religious systems, an option I believe all feminists must leave open, is it possible for feminists to extract the gold, silver, and clothing out of their religious lands of slavery without also keeping the manacles and chains, just as the children of Israel were successful in doing with Egypt (Exod 12:35-36)? In this essay I wish to explore that question specifically in relation to the struggles of women in one particular strand of the Christian tradition: Protestantism. I have chosen this group not only because it is the one I know best, having been myself raised in a Protestant denomination and having taught for the past nine years in a non-denominational, primarily Protestant divinity school but also because I believe that Protestant feminists encounter special problems related to their tradition that have not been analyzed sufficiently for their similarities and differences with feminists from other Christian and Jewish traditions to become clear, and such clarity may let us understand each other better and thus help each other more. This essay is only as an initial attempt at assessing these issues and, hence, in no way pretends to be a final or full explication.
The specific experience which inaugurated my thinking on this subject was the observation that many of my Protestant women students find difficulty in appropriating much current feminist biblical research and proposals for Women-Church or the ekklesia of women.2 They certainly comprehend the issues and are indeed eager to learn of and investigate the fuller, more central role of women in early Christian history, as feminist reconstructions are uncovering it. The difficulty arises, however, in drawing from such studies a definite praxis for them. There appears, in other words, to be some lack of fit between these feminist writings and their own concrete experiences. Since feminism, like all liberation movements, should always result in praxis, for the point is to change the world, not simply add to our knowledge about it, this difficulty in appropriation is in need of analysis and explanation.
In conversations, both formal and informal, with groups of students over the last two years, three general characteristics of the Protestant tradition consistently surface as barriers for many women in appropriating a considerable amount of recent feminist research. I would like to list and explain the problems caused by each characteristic briefly and then devote the remainder of this essay to a fuller exploration of the first, the role of scripture in Protestantism.
Problems in the Protestant Tradition
From the time of Martin Luther’s defense before the Diet of Worms in 1521, the first principle guiding the Protestant Reformation and the various groups growing out of it was the conviction of sola scriptura: "Scripture alone is the true over-lord and master of all writings and doctrines on earth."3 Although feminists cannot help but notice the patriarchal language by which Luther articulated this doctrine, the primacy granted to scripture and its authority over all human ideas, structures, decisions, and theologies continues to be one of the most potent influences in the religious formation of anyone raised in the Protestant tradition. While I intend to return to this principle and its ramifications for feminists later, even on a simple reading of it the reason why some Protestant feminists have difficulty dispensing with the text of scripture in favor of historical reconstructions becomes more evident.
The second characteristic of modern Protestantism that poses major problems for feminists is its striking diversity. One cannot speak of a Protestant view or position on anything; rather one encounters many views. Even the various denominations tend often to be split into several factions, so that, for example, one cannot talk about the Lutheran position but must say the Missouri Synod Lutheran position. This diversity is found not only in dogma and tradition but also in liturgy, church organization, and denominational structure. Such pervasive diversity tends to isolate Protestant feminists from each other, and women’s isolation from other women has always been one of the best weapons of patriarchal oppression: divide and conquer. Protestant women attempting to worship together, for instance, must begin by deciding whose order of worship to follow, whose hymnal to use, and whose liturgy to enact, so that our celebrations of sisterhood end up emphasizing our lives of separation. The actual number of feminists throughout all the Protestant denominations would prove, I believe, to be a substantial and highly influential body, but by dividing that body into separate groups of Methodist women, Presbyterian women, Disciples women, Baptist women, etc., and pitting each group against frustratingly different androcentric denominational structures, the numbers and influence of Protestant feminists have often been successfully marginalized. Indeed, so serious are the many differences in denominational structures and politics that Protestant feminists often do not even understand what their sisters in other denominations are facing and thus do not know how to support or help them. In such a situation, ideas of Women-Church or the ekklesia of women involve the visionary power of a longed-for "new Jerusalem"; yet, attempts to enact that vision tend only to underscore the reality of competing Protestant traditions that block unity.
Perversely enough, what little unity Protestant women were able to forge in the late sixties and early seventies in quest of the right of ordination in a number of denominations was quickly eroded by the very success of that campaign. Ordination itself has now become one more line of division among Protestant women, and one, I think, of the most dangerous, for it has the possibility of co-opting women into an androcentric hierarchical power structure rather than changing that structure.4 The difference in power, status, and authority between clergy and laity in most Protestant denominations is arguably one of the clearest examples of patriarchal patterning in the social organization of Christianity. Priests and ministers stand over their congregations as fathers over children, shepherds over sheep, holy people over secular people, in an obvious dominant-subordinate relationship. Some denominations, in fact, formalize this gulf between clergy and laity by enrolling clergy, not in the membership of the churches they serve, but rather in the area association of other clergy.5 Hence, the "church" for clergy are other clergy.
In past years many feminists hoped that as more women were ordained and filled parish posts, a different, more egalitarian model of ministry would emerge. So far, such has not proved to be the case. Sometimes ordained women feel they must act with greater authority and rigidity than their male counterparts to "prove" that they are really worthy ministers. Even more typically, ordained women find themselves assigned as associate pastors to a male senior minister, a situation which often quickly degenerates into the worst wife-husband dynamics. Nevertheless, however successful individual women may be in embodying their own vision of Christian ministry, the simple existence of an ordained class of women separate from lay women further divides and marginalizes any feminist influence. Clergy women tend to develop their own networks and organizations separately from lay women’s groups and find participation as equals with lay women in church groups or even in support groups difficult. Between denominational divisions and clergy-laity divisions, Protestant feminists are thoroughly isolated and robbed of effective power bases.
The third characteristic of Protestantism that thwarts feminists efforts is its emphasis on the individual rather than the community. In the early years of the Puritan settlement in New England, the right to vote was based on church membership, and church membership could only be won by each individual (male) being able to give a credible account of his personal experience of grace.6 Founded on the "inner-worldly asceticism" of the Reformation and refined by the Calvinistic doctrine of the unique worldly "calling" fashioned by God for each person,7 a staunch individualism occupies the center of the historic Protestant experience. The critical issue for salvation is the relation of each individual to God, not participation in certain groups or performance of certain rituals, although both of these latter actions have their places. It is this stress on the state of the individual soul that has encouraged the importance of conversion and revivalism in Protestantism. Moreover, this individual emphasis tends to foster a more private or personal vision of the good rather than a public or social one.8 Yet, for feminists it is vital to recognize the systemic nature of patriarchal oppression, rather than being totally occupied with its local and private manifestations. Asserting that none of us are liberated until all of us are liberated is not exaggerated rhetoric but the realization of the pervasive, systemic structure of oppression.
I am not saying that Protestant feminists tend to be self-centered and concerned only with their own pain, whereas non-Protestants are universalistic in their aims. It is just that the heavy value placed on the individual in Protestantism may encourage a shorter vision, focused on more immediate and limited objectives, like, for example, ordination or the election of a woman bishop, or on ad hoc responses to blatant instances of discrimination. Such short-term goals are obviously important, but they cannot substitute for a more broadly sustained social and systemic critique of oppression in all its various forms. African-American Protestant women have been much less distracted by this individual bias than their European-American sisters, perhaps because their double oppression, both racial and sexual, forces a broader assessment of the causes and structures of oppression in Western society and perhaps also because the social function of the Black Church in a segregated society and its roots in African tribal culture have served to mitigate the privatizing influence of Protestant individualism. Greater conversation between African-American and European-American Protestant women might be one way of keeping the longer-range issues of oppression more clearly in view.
Since in the traditional Protestant formulation each individual was to work at her or his specific divine "calling" in the world as a holy person, separate orders of religious men and women were discouraged. The model of a women’s community, allowing greater independence and communication among women than society at large generally permitted, was essentially lost to Protestant women by the Reformation.9 Instead, woman’s divine "calling" in the world as wife and mother was emphasized. Unlike Catholic women, Protestant women have had little opportunity or encouragement to define their religious identity in relation to other women or even to see that model as a possibility, for orders of Protestant nuns are rare. The religious identity of most Protestant women is defined primarily in relation to the family unit. Hence, Protestant individualism has acted also to stress Protestant familialism: the family as the focus of worship and Christian formation (as, for example, in "The family that prays together, stays together").
This familial emphasis has been so inculcated in many Protestant women that attempts to organize women-only retreats, worship services, or even meetings raises conflicting emotions in people otherwise committed to feminist issues. To exclude husbands, brothers, and sons even from those essential events required for women to raise their own level of consciousness, to learn how to support each other, or to begin to bond together to overcome generations of isolation seems to some a violation of true Christian love and discipleship. However, these actions are seen as violations mainly because for most Protestants the family has been made the ideal focus of one’s religious identity. To the degree that ideas of Women-Church or the ekklesia of women inevitably demand some amount of separatism, Protestant women often find them difficult to harmonize with their own tradition.
While each of these three characteristics of Protestantism has serious implications for the future of Protestant feminists, their combined weight may explain why the most important and compelling formulations of a feminist vision for contemporary Christianity have come by and large from the Catholic community.10 I in no way mean to denigrate the important contributions of some Protestant feminist theologians and biblical scholars,11 but any fair appraisal of the scene would have to acknowledge the wider role of women formed by the Catholic tradition. If Protestantism is to be challenged and changed by feminism or, to put it another way, if Protestant feminists are to find some means of remaining in their tradition, the many problems raised by the role of scripture, Protestant diversity, and individualism must be addressed in a serious and sustained fashion. As a first step in that broader discussion, I would like to examine the role of scripture in Protestantism and delineate possible feminist responses to it.
Sola Scriptura
Deeming it the sole authority in all matters religious, the early Protestant reformers used scripture to purge what they viewed to be a decadent and decayed Church. Scripture liberated them from the teaching of the Church Fathers and from the ecclesiastical structures which had developed over 1,500 years of Church life. Since according to Luther not even the revelations of angels could supercede scripture,12 all authority was vested in the Word of God, including the authority to interpret itself. Thus, elaborate allegorical readings were to be rejected, and the task of minutely studying scripture in order to establish its own meanings was begun, a task upon which we are still engaged almost 500 years later.13 For Protestants, the central and unavoidable problematic posed by the role of scripture is its authority, but exactly what that authority entails varies from denomination to denomination and indeed is often a hotly contested issue within denominations.14 So, rather than beginning with theoretical debates over authority, an argument which I will eventually have to enter, I wish to begin with the simpler question of functions: how does scripture function in Protestantism?
Although within the diversity of Protestantism generalizations are somewhat suspect, it seems justifiable to say that most Protestant worship centers on scripture: in public ceremonies, scripture readings and sermons based on scripture (though occasionally the connection between the scripture and the sermon may be rather tenuous) form the heart of the service with other liturgical elements (prayers, music, or eucharist) sharing greater or lesser amounts of attention; in private devotionals, scripture reading and prayer are the essentials. Scripture, then, for Protestants becomes the primary medium of communion with God; if Catholics commune with God mainly through participation in the sacraments, and especially the mass, Protestants Commune with God through scripture. Neil Hamilton’s assessment of scripture is representative of the Protestant perspective: "God, who is the Father of our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, for a certainty spoke in these writings, and this same God continues to speak through their witness. The New Testament is where to go to listen for the ‘call.’"15 The crucial images have to do with "call," "speak," and "listen." For Protestants, the Bible is not simply a source of knowledge about God or the early Christians or the Hebrew people; it is, rather, a source for experiencing, hearing, God or God-in-Jesus in each present moment of life.
Nevertheless, Protestant feminists along with their Roman Catholic and Jewish sisters must also acknowledge that this same Bible is often misogynistic and anti-Semitic, thoroughly androcentric and patriarchal, and seeped in ancient Near Eastern and Hellenistic mythology.16 Indeed, along with many of the so-called "classics" of Western literature, the Bible continues to exercise over women, and other oppressed groups like homosexuals, a form of "textual harassment,"17 appropriating social discrimination into textual structures and categories. To excuse the Bible, or other "great" Literature, for these acts of textual violence on the grounds that they are simply reflecting the social ethos of earlier cultures is either to underestimate the continuing power of these alienating images or to approve tacitly the existence of oppression in times past just because they are past.18 Jewish and Christian feminists, and especially Protestant feminists whose religious formation has been so permeated by scripture, are thus faced with a difficult dilemma: honesty and survival as whole human beings requires that we point out and denounce the pervasive patriarchal hierarchies of oppression, both social and sexual, that populate the Bible, and yet at the same time we must also acknowledge the degree to which we have been shaped and continue to be nourished by these same writings. How are we, then, to understand "the same Bible as enslaver and liberator"?19
Feminist Responses
At present the predominant feminist scholarly response to biblical androcentrism is to use the text, not as an authority in and of itself, but as a source for reconstructing the history of women in early Christianity or Judaism.20 This approach, which understands the Bible as prototype rather than archetype,21 has many advantages: it employs a well-recognized mode of analysis, the historical-critical method, with appropriate feminist modifications;22 it frees feminists from the chains of extant textual formulations by judicious appeal to the disciplined exercise of the "historical imagination"; it reveals the androcentric biases of most male reconstructions of early Christianity or Judaism by proving that the available evidence does not inevitably lead to the conclusion of women’s marginality; it empowers a new vision of an egalitarian community by uncovering the leadership roles and full participation of women in the historical development of early Christianity and Judaism; and it unequivocally asserts the damaging patriarchal tone of scripture as a whole and thus allows women to reject its "textual harassment" and shift the locus of revelation from text to history and from ecclesial authority to women’s community. Moreover, influenced by the Protestant principle of returning to the purer origins as a corrective for current degeneration, historical reconstructions of early Christianity or the historical Jesus have always sprung from overt, or more often covert, reforming aims.23 Feminist reconstructions are indeed no more of an advocacy stance than other reconstructions; they are simply more honest and open about their advocacy than white, male reconstructions have tended to be.
Along with these definite advantages, the feminist response of historical reconstruction has, as does any well-defined perspective, a number of limitations. All historical reconstructions face the difficulty of establishing which point in the historical origins ranks as the purest and thus possesses the authority to stand in judgment over later degeneration. For Luther, the New Testament period as a whole held that authority,24 but for later historical critics considerably narrower slices of that period are demonstrably purer, be they Paul’s missionary activity, the historical Jesus’ ipsissima verba, or the egalitarian movement called forth by Jesus. These contending points of historical authority are often related — not surprisingly — to the advocacy stances that generated the reconstruction in the first place and have perhaps served to return some of the flexibility of interpretation to scripture that was lost when the historical consciousness of the Enlightenment dethroned allegorical interpretation. However, if one hopes that by moving from ancient androcentric texts to historical reconstructions one has escaped patriarchal biases or reduced the polyvalent text to the objective, unitary truth of history, one is greatly mistaken: reconstructions are just as subject to advocacy and just as polysemous as any text has been.
More seriously, rooting authoritative revelation in a particular historical moment suggests that those groups not participating in that moment are somehow less worthy than those who do. Just such an assumption has undergirded the second-class status assigned to women by Christian patriarchy, for, so one argument goes, since Jesus chose twelve men as his disciples, women should not now be ordained as priests or ministers. While feminist reconstructions have done much to explode the patriarchal myth of women’s marginality in early Christianity, the underlying assumption that historical participation is a necessary prerequisite for full status in the present has not really been challenged. Hence, other groups who cannot reconstruct their historical participation (as, for example, certain racial groups, homosexuals, handicapped people,25 etc.) still face disenfranchisement. Unless male and female are seen to be the most basic categories of existence and thus, establishing the presence of both in the formative history of Judaism or Christianity empowers all people of whatever other identity groups, retaining the importance of historical participation will inevitably continue to relegate some people to marginal status.
Finally, from the perspective of Protestant feminists, reconstructions of the leadership roles of women in early Christianity, although adding vital elements to our formerly solely patriarchal picture of early Christianity, does not address the pressing question of how to work with biblical texts as they stand, considering their central function in Protestant worship and religious formation. Furthermore, in excavating the text for history, reconstructions by-pass, and consequently fail to explain the curious dynamic experienced even by many feminists: reading admittedly androcentric, occasionally misogynous, texts can still fill women with the passion for and vision of liberation. How is it that texts that negate the experience of women and define them as "other" are also texts that women continue to wish to claim as their own — and not out of ignorance but out of the realization that they have actually experienced these "negative" texts as liberating? Raising this last point suggests another direction for a feminist response to scripture, not as a substitute for historical reconstruction but as an additional alternative to it: the exploration of gender in relation to the reading of texts.
Gender and Reading
Various analyses of what is involved in the whole process of reading have dominated the debates in literary-critical circles during the last decade as interest in so-called "audience-oriented" or "reader-response" criticism has grown.26 Feminist literary criticism, beginning in this country in the early 1970’s with Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, has now entered those debates by raising the question of the relation of gender to reading. Although the "canon" of literature faced by feminist literary critics is rather more malleable than the one faced by feminist biblical critics, many of the same issues (e.g., the invisibility of women writers, misogynous characterization, and thoroughly androcentric texts) arise in both. Indeed, the stages through which feminist literary criticism has developed since the early 1970’s reveal a striking correspondence to feminist biblical interpretation. Elaine Showalter suggests that three stages in the progression of feminist literary criticism can be perceived:27 the first stage "concentrated on exposing the misogyny of literary practice"28 both in its negative, stereotypical image of women and in its assumption of women’s lesser status as writers and critics. From Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s Woman’s Bible to Mary Daly’s The Church and the Second Sex to collections of essays on the plight of women throughout church history, like Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Religion and Sexism to analyses of the textual violence against women in the Bible, like Phyllis Trible’s Texts of Terror, one of the earliest and continuing tasks of feminists in religion has been to document the overwhelming misogyny of Western religious traditions.
For feminist literary criticism the second phase "was the discovery that women writers had a literature of their own, whose historical and thematic coherence, as well as artistic importance, had been obscured by. . . patriarchal values. . .29 The recovery of the tradition of women as writers was and remains one of the most important contributions of feminist literary critics. This reconstruction of women’s literary tradition parallels the discovery and reconstruction of women’s leadership roles in the birth and development of Judaism and Christianity, the current predominant feminist response to religious patriarchy. For many literary critics, establishing the roots and tradition of female literature remains the most vital contribution feminist scholars can make to the battle against patriarchy. For others, however, although such reconstituting of the literary universe must be pursued as far as possible, the end result will still be unsatisfying because patriarchal values and institutions not only ignored the women who did write, they actually prevented many talented women from writing at all. Similarly, after every fleeting hint in scripture of the historical role of women in biblical times has been tracked down and every story involving women characters has been explicated, the sum total will still be only one coin in ten,30 the other nine manifesting the androcentric economy. Patriarchy and misogyny are not simply textual entities; they were and are cultural, social realities that fix definite limits to the participation and power of women in every age, including our own.
Given the finite limits of historical reconstructions, a third phase of feminist literary criticism has recently begun that demands "not just the recognition of women’s writing but a radical rethinking of the conceptual grounds of literary study, a revision of the accepted theoretical assumptions about reading and writing that have been based entirely on male literary experiences."31 I am proposing the need for just such a phase of radical revisioning of the accepted assumptions concerning scriptural interpretation and authority in feminist religious circles. Feminist revision, in Adrienne Rich’s words, is "the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction."32 One such "new critical direction" is reading the old androcentric texts of the Bible as women, out of the experience of being women in a patriarchal world. The texts themselves are not discarded nor are they used only as mines for a few precious glimpses of women’s history; they are rather to be re-read from a new perspective, that of women reading as women. Much recent feminist literary criticism has been charting the course for this kind of revisioning by exploring the relation of gender and reading.33
Such revisioning begins with the insight that readers make meaning. Scripture never has — nor ever could — interpret itself. Claims of that kind have been used to mask the institutional biases of authorized interpretations. Even the history of modern biblical research reveals the degree to which various scriptural interpretations are colored by the concerns and predispositions of each interpreter.34 While one may wish to take a moderating position that views the meaning of a text as the interaction of reader and text rather than simply the action of the reader,35 it nevertheless remains obvious that readers propose the meanings of texts which other groups of readers must then evaluate for themselves. That those evaluations occasionally result in a consensus of opinion indicates a second major aspect of the reading process: readers do not make meanings ex nihilo. Readers in every age are controlled to some degree in the meanings they construe by the dominant conventions of reading and writing governing the period.36
Moreover, these conventions, usually absorbed during each person’s educational and cultural development, are rarely discussed openly; they are rather the conventional "frames" orienting all other intellectual intercourse and are often referred to as one’s critical "sensibility" or "taste." They guide the way writers of an age write and readers of an age read, if they wish to be judged as good writers or perceptive readers. Realism, historical consciousness, and objectivity are conventions that have shaped modern discourse in the last two centuries, although objectivity is finally beginning to fade under the attack of psychoanalytic and Marxist ideological suspicion. It is also evident that conventions shift from age to age so that what passed as reliable and intelligible discourse in one period may be rejected by another. The striking demise of allegorical interpretation since the Enlightenment is a prime example of such a shift. Yet, both the intricate four-fold allegorical method of the medieval period and the historical-critical method of the Enlightenment are conventions of reading quite foreign to the periods in which most of the biblical texts were written.37 Consequently, while it might be possible to reconstruct some of the conventions governing the writing and reading/hearing process of Hellenistic literature and thus gain some insight concerning how the New Testament texts, for example, might have been read/heard by their earliest audiences,38 such a procedure has not been the major concern of religious establishments for the very good reason that the biblical texts are assumed to have contemporary rather than simply antiquarian relevance.39 So every age has seen in the biblical texts the reflections of their own concerns, issues, and dilemmas.
The realization that readers make meanings acts to relativize all interpretations of biblical texts and should allow women to reread them as women in open challenge to the dominant androcentric or patriarchal readings of the establishment. Only, unfortunately, it is not that easy. Though many of the conventions molding the writing and reading processes of various ages have indeed altered, at least one convention has stubbornly resisted change: the view that the ideal reader and the ideal writer are always male. Feminist literary critics by raising the issue of gender in relation to the conventions of reading have demonstrated the dramatic power of "male as norm" on the history of Western literature and on the generations of women schooled in its image.40 Since the male has been presented as normal and universal with the female as marginal and deviant, women have been forced to learn male language and identify — against themselves — with the male experience. As Judith Fetterley argues:
Though one of the most persistent of literary stereotypes is the castrating bitch, the cultural reality is not the emasculation of men by women but the immasculation of women by men. As readers and teachers and scholars, women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny.41
The long-term effects of the immasculation process on women, Fetterley asserts, "is self-hatred and self-doubt"; "Intellectually male, sexually female, one is in effect no one, nowhere, immasculated."42 What is true of the Western literary tradition is even more true of the Western religious tradition. That the biblical texts are overwhelmingly androcentric forces women to identify with a male perspective (e.g. Jacob getting Leah when he wanted Rachel; David wanting Bathsheba and plotting the demise of Uriah; Jesus choosing twelve men as disciples, etc.) in order simply to follow the story-line; we must, in other words, imagine ourselves as male in order to fulfill the conventional role of reader. In the case of scripture the underlying message is that to be addressed by God, to be a full member of the divinely created universal order, we must pretend we are male and consequently pretend that we are not female.
Since the immasculation process begins with the earliest experiences of reading and culture, women must now consciously work to exorcise "the male mind that has been implanted in us."43 The first step in the feminist radical re-reading of scripture is, then, to become a resisting, suspicious reader, to refuse to agree to the "male as norm" role assigned to the reader by androcentric conventions. Because the male identity has been so thoroughly embedded in our experience, accomplishing this first step will require women to help each other read together in a new way, naming the androcentric perspective each time it appears and hence freeing ourselves to see it for what it is. Such an action assumes theologically that revelation and authority do not occur in the Bible, nor did they occur once upon a time in some historical past; rather, revelation and thus authority come now in the present experience of the believer, who with others begins the task of re-visioning the past in order to live as a full human being in the present and in the future.
Can the response many feminists have had of experiencing liberation in androcentric biblical texts be explained by the immasculation process? Surely, some of it can, for by submerging our female reality and identifying with the male, we can, like Moses, lead our people to freedom or we can, like the disciples in Matthew, receive the commission to spread the gospel to the world. However, I suspect there is more to this response than immasculation alone accounts for. If androcentrism assumes male as universal, feminism in rejecting that assumption must be careful not to reject the universal as part of female experience as well. As Sandra Gilbert has pointed out, feminism and humanism should not "be mutually contradictory terms."44 Some androcentric texts — not all — clearly do touch authentic human desires and experiences: hopes for liberation, love, companionship, integrity, justice, and peace — what Patrocinio Schweichart calls the "utopian vision." These "male texts merit a dual hermeneutic: a negative hermeneutic that discloses their complicity with patriarchal ideology, and a positive hermeneutic that recuperates the utopian moment.
Thus, the second step in the feminist radical re-reading of scripture in the case of some, not all, biblical texts is to retrieve the genuinely liberational ideology that gives to them their basic emotional power. In order to perform this hermeneutic of recuperation, certain reading strategies may prove useful. Schweichart proposes that feminists use role reversal in reading some texts. Imagining Jesus and the twelve as women and a man anointing her head with oil (Mark 14:3-9) gives an entirely different, almost satiric, feel to Mark’s story, suggesting perhaps that a heavier sexual stereotyping underlies the episode than one might suspect at first reading. Alternatively, substituting a female synagogue leader and a female prostitute for the Pharisee and tax-collector in Luke’s parable (Luke 18:9-14) alters the story’s emotional effect and point not at all, providing an insight into its more universal claims. Other such strategies will need to be worked out as women re-read biblical texts as women.
Entering biblical texts from a new critical direction founded on a conscious understanding of both the thoroughly androcentric nature of the texts and the freedom of women as readers to make their own meanings provides another option in addition to historical reconstruction for Jewish and Christian feminists, and perhaps especially for Protestant feminists, to deal with their scriptural traditions. It has the advantage of being a way to work with the texts themselves, acknowledging their patriarchal disposition but resisting their destructive marginalizing of women while at the same time attempting to retrieve the utopian or truly liberational ideology embodied in them. It is, anyway, a place to begin.
NOTES:
1. Elaine Showalter, "Toward a Feminist Poetics" in E. Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985) 141.
2. See Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins (New York: Crossroad, 1983) 343-51; and Rosemary Radford Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Practice (New York: Harper and Row, 1985).
3. Luther’s address to the Diet of Worms as formulated in the Smalcald Articles, as translated and cited in W. G. Kummel, The New Testament: The History of the Investigation of its Problems, trans. S. Gilmour and H. Kee (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1972) 20.
4. On the problems with ordination, see Sara Maitland, A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
5. For example, United Methodist clergy are members of their conference and Presbyterian clergy are part of their presbytery; neither are members of the congregations they serve.
6. See the discussion of this practice and its downfall, first in the Bay Colony in 1691, and then elsewhere in New England in N. Q. Hamilton, Recovery of the Protestant Adventure (New York: Seabury Press, 1981) 16-23.
7. Ibid. 10-15.
8. Hamilton argues that the division between private and public understandings of the church’s mission is the single most enervating controversy in Protestantism; see ibid. 1-5. The pervasive influence and danger to North American culture generally from our passion for individualism, when what we need are communal solutions to pressing social problems, has been superbly analyzed in Robert I3ellah, Richard Madsen, et al., Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (New York: Harper & Row, 1985).
9. See the excellent discussion of the losses and gains of women in the Reformation in Jane Dempsey Douglass, "Women and the Continental Reformation" in R. Radford Ruether, ed., Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974) 292-318.
10. Mary Daly, Rosemary Radford Ruether, and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, to name but three, have contributed extensive foundational work of great diversity, clarity, and depth.
11. Certainly Sallie McFague and Letty Russell in theology and Phyllis Trible in biblical studies have provided major feminist studies.
12. "It is the Word of God that is to determine an article of faith — nothing else, not even an angel." In Luther’s Diet of Worms address as cited in Kummel 21.
13. For a discussion of the relation of the Protestant Reformation to the beginnings of biblical historical-critical scholarship, see ibid. 20-39.
14. See the recent discussion of the issue of authority in James Barr, The Scope and Authority of the Bible (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1980).
15. Recovery of the Protestant Adventure 3.
16. It was the Protestant need to have the New Testament continue to speak to the present coupled with the recognition of its deeply mythological nature that influenced Rudolf Bultmann to develop his de-mythologizing program; see R. Bultmann, Jesus Christ and Mythology (New York: Scribners, 1958).
17. This wonderful phrase was coined by Mary Jacobus, "Is There a Woman in This Text?" New Literary History 14 (1982) 119.
18. For a good discussion of these issues in relation to the Western literary canon, see Lillian S. Robinson, "Treason Our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon" in E. Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism 105-121.
19. It was with these thoughts that I concluded an earlier article on the Bible and feminism; see "Defining the Problem: The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics," Semeia 28 (1983) 113-26.
20. The major reconstruction for early Christianity would be E. Schussler Fiorenza, In Memory of Her.
21. Ibid. 33-36.
22. The use of the historical-critical method may not be totally advantageous, for feminists have yet to evaluate carefully what patriarchal assumptions may lie behind certain aspects of this method (for example, its adversarial nature, in which one proves one is right by showing everyone else to be wrong).
23. See, e.g., Joachim Jeremias’s claim that recovering the words of Jesus was the only way to "invest our message with full authority" in The Parables of Jesus (New York: Scribner’s, 1963) 9.
24. Actually Luther himself rather doubted the authority, both historical and theological, of four New Testament books (Hebrews, James, Jude, and Revelation), thus beginning a Protestant tradition of seeing a "canon within the canon;" see the discussion in Kümmel 23-26.
25. The issue of handicapped people in relation to the New Testament is difficult: people with physical and mental disabilities are numerous in New Testament stories, but their affiliation with Jesus in the gospels is always indicated by their healing. What, then, of handicapped people who are not healed, who are still blind, deaf, and mute? What is their relation to Christianity?
26. Two excellent collections of essays covering the broad spectrum of audience-oriented criticisms are S. R. Suleiman and I. Crosman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) and J. P. Tompkins, Reader-Response-Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).
27. The following discussion is drawn from F. Showalter, "Introduction: The Feminist Critical Revolution" in E. Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism 5-10.
28. Ibid. 5.
29. Ibid. 6.
30. See the use of this parable in P. Trible, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978) 200-202.
31. Showalter, "Introduction" 8.
32. Adrienne Rich, "When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision, College English 34 (1972) 18.
33. The importance of gender issues for reader-response critics may be seen in the interesting discussion of I. Culler, On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism After Structuralism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982) 43-64. New articles are constantly appealing in the area of gender and reading. Recent anthologies in E. A. Flynn and P. P. Schweickart, eds., Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986); N. K. Miller, ed., The Poetics of Gender (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); and J. Spector, ed., Gender Studies, New Directions in Feminist Criticism (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1986).
34. See, e.g., the modern history of parable scholarship in relationship to the specific interests and backgrounds of the scholars themselves, as discussed in N. Perrin, Jesus and the Language of the Kingdom: Symbol and Metaphor in New Testament Interpretation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976) 89-181.
35. Among audience-oriented critics, such a position would be represented by a critic like Wolfgang Iser (see, e.g., his The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978]). Although such a position makes practical sense, it is very difficult to argue theoretically, for in Iser’s case one must argue that a text is both determined and undetermined at the same time. Holding both poles together is almost impossible, so that Iser’s theory tends to alternate between a text-centered perspective and a reader-centered perspective, as many of his critics have pointed out (see, e.g., Culler, On Deconstruction, 75-76).
36. For theoretical and practical discussions of the importance of conventions, see J. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics, and the Study of Literature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975) 113-160; idem, On Deconstruction 31-83. and S. Mailoux, Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982).
37. Actually, allegorical interpretations probably bore a closer similarity to the typical and universalistic formulations of Hellenistic literature than the particular and historical conventions of contemporary discourse.
38. For an attempt to accomplish this type of literary-historical analysis, see my Sowing the Gospel: Mark’s World in Literary-Historical Perspective (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989).
39. Some modern experiences of reading the Bible might be clarified, however, by comparison with ancient conventions. For example, I have wondered whether the difference between the dominant ancient convention of using totally reliable narrators and the dominant modem convention, fostered by the modern novel and psychological character development, of using unreliable narrators and shifting points of view might predispose modern readers of the Bible to "hear" those texts as more authoritative and infallible than other stories they read.
40. See, especially, E. Showalter, "Women and the Literary Curriculum," College English 32 (1971) 855-62; idem, "Towards a Feminist Poetics"; and J. Fetterley, The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978).
41. The Resisting Reader xx.
42. Ibid. xxi, xxii.
43. Ibid. xxii.
44. "What Do Feminist Critics Want? A Postcard from the Volcano" in F. Showalter, ed., The New Feminist Criticism 32.
45. P. P. Schweickart, "Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading" in E. A. Flynn and P. P. Schweickart, eds.. Gender and Reading 43-44.
Chapter 3: The Pleasure of Her Text by Alice Bach
That which you are, that only can you read.
Harold Bloom, Kabbalah and CriticismNo sooner has a word been said, somewhere, about the pleasure of the text, than two policemen are ready to jump on you: the political policeman and the psychoanalytical policeman; futility and/or guilt, pleasure is either ideal or vain, a class notion or an illusion.
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the TextMy reading of Abigail’s story, found in 1 Samuel 25, is concerned with woman as reader of male-produced literature, and with the way the hypothesis of a female reader changes our understanding or vision of a text1 by exploring the significance of its sexual codes.2 Formerly, in analyzing biblical texts, it was de rigueur to present scholarly interpretations as objective or neutral descriptions; some critics now recognize that such a "neutral reading" is no more innocent than any other. All this time scientistic scholars have been telling it slant, reading from the male point of view. The typical reader response to female characters has held them in thrall to the dominant male figures, who are accepted as the keystone of each narrative unit. Female character is defined by male response. Often the perception of female characters as "flat" results from scholars’ crushing assumption that male authors have created male characters to do the bidding of their male god. A hermeneutical version of the old-boy network.
In this paper I consider the story of Abigail as a self-contained narrative unit which achieves its dramatic effect by the skillful interweaving of dialogue and by contrasts of character.3 By examining the sexual code, I am presenting an unabashedly subjective reading.4 Instead of evaluating and praising Abigail as a suitable partner for David, reading the text as it has been controlled by codes of male dominance, I adopt a revisionary approach, in order to explore female influence in a male-authored work. Understanding Abigail to be the focus of her own narrative, I award her an opportunity to break free of the traditional plot of love and marriage. The text lends itself to this interpretive strategy since all the other characters, the young outcast David, Abigail’s landowner husband Nabal, and the peripheral male and female servants, interact only with Abigail. No other character in the episode interacts with all the other characters. Thus, even though the story appears to be about male authority, female presence shines through.
A closer examination of the sexual codes in the text shows Abigail to be more subversive than her male authors have understood. During the time and space of her narrative, she has used her wise good-sense to control her life verbally while appearing socially dependent and compliant. The moment she encounters David, she speaks. Her determination is reflected in the series of active verbs (v 23) which rapidly move the narrative: wattemaher, wattered, wattippol, wattishtahu.
She hastened and got down from the donkey and fell before David on her face and bowed to the ground.
The first speech is hers. Before David can articulate the anger which the reader has heard him express to his men as Abigail was riding toward him, she delivers a series of beseeching demands, orchestrated to absorb the insults her husband had spoken. Well-chosen words will wash away the villainous words spoken earlier.
"upon me, my lord, be the guilt" v 24
"let your maidservant speak" v 24
"hear the words of your maidservant" v 24
Let your maidservant arrange for the gift to be given v 27
[loose rendering]Calling herself "maidservant," amateka or shiphateka, synonyms delineating a lower-class woman of no power, Abigail reflects the opposite in her actions: the text has informed us that Abigail is a wealthy woman, and now we see her in charge, comfortably issuing orders, while at the same time deflecting male anger. One suspects she has spoken equally soothing words to her husband to still his rages. There is no reply from David. The scene continues to belong to Abigail. After offering the gift of nourishment for him and his men, she proffers a greater gift: spiritual nourishment in the form of the prophecy endorsing David’s destiny to reign as the chosen one of God .5 Once she is assured that David has no further violent intentions toward Nabal, she dissociates herself from this husband, who she concedes has no hope of survival (vv 25-26), and seeks to link herself with David. "When YHWH has made good his promises to my lord, may you remember your maidservant" (v 31). Throughout her speech, Abigail continues to emphasize a power hierarchy, repeatedly calling David adoni and herself amateka/shiphateka. While her actions show that she is accustomed to controlling situations, her words assure David that she is handing over power to him. Abigail’s cloying humility is a result of her belief in her own words of prophecy. Her deference to the landless pauper underscores David’s position as prince in disguise. We are in no doubt that Abigail would not herald a rogue with words suited to royalty.
Abigail’s ability to act halts the negative progress of the story. The young men, who reported the foul acts of Nabal (vv 14-17), are incapable of reversing their master’s action. Abigail, the woman, acts swiftly. Nabal had refused to give David bread and wine and meat (v 11); Abigail gathers up extravagant amounts of those items and more. "Two hundred loaves, two skins of wine, five dressed sheep, five seahs of parched grain, one omer of raisins, and two hundred fig cakes" are brought to David (v 18).
A central illustration of her verbal power is provided in Abigail’s prophecy. Her words echo and elaborate Saul’s acknowledgment (chap. 24) that David will become the next king of Israel. But her words have a more powerful effect on David than Saul’s had; they stop him from committing a violent act. In the previous episode in the cave, David had spared Saul’s life before Saul extracted David’s promise of protection. Abigail’s words to David change the course of his action toward Nabal, and possibly the echo of her prophecy in chap. 26 guides David’s hand when he so flamboyantly seizes, then returns, Saul’s spear.
One impression of the patrician landowner’s wife is that she is the maternal wife of order and control. She sets limits on her husband’s refusal to comply with David’s request; she brings calm to David’s fury. The biblical author does not consider Abigail merely as the good mother. If she were, she would have been rewarded with a long life (in the text) and a top-rated male heir, a common patriarchal convention for conferring praise on a biblical woman. For a moment Abigail steps outside the bounds of convention: a woman succeeds in stopping the future king from committing bloodguilt. But in exercising power and speaking in her own distinctive voice, perhaps Abigail has been guilty of the crime of female ambition. In order for male power to be restored, her voice must be stifled. Her recorded moment of prophecy is not to be repeated.
Scholarly readings of Abigail’s story have often reduced it to "1 Samuel 25," that is, the commentators’ somewhat mechanical explanation of how David annexed his second wife and the valuable territory south of Jerusalem. Perhaps that is why Abigail has no passionate admirers. Few have taken pleasure in her text.
Suppose we befriend for a moment this woman brave enough to ride out from the closed security of her home to face the storms of her husband’s enemy. Instead of imprisoning her in the language of wife, let her break those restraints and relate to other women. We know she is strong and decisive; might she be capable of sustaining friendships, perhaps with Michal and Bathsheba? As Elizabeth Abel discovered in her study of women’s friendships, "through the intimacy which is knowledge, friendship becomes a vehicle of self-definition for women, clarifying identity through relation to an other who embodies and reflects an essential aspect of the self."6 Might Abigail comfort Bathsheba on the death of her baby? Did Michal return as "primary wife"; or had that position been claimed by Ahinoam, mother of Amnon, David’s eldest son? Was Abigail’s gift for pro-flouncing the right words at the right time necessary to keep peace among the wives of the monarch?
As the story unfolds, we can contrast Abigail’s behavior with the men’s actions; by holding our literary mirror at another angle, we can contrast her with the other women within the Davidic cycle. When Abigail is placed at the center of her drama, she emerges as a redeemer whose action and prophecy are necessary in assuring the future role of David, the divinely chosen monarch of Israel. Is it surprising to find that the historical code, strengthened with added muscle from the theological code, inscribes a woman in the role of God’s helper? Permitting a woman to pronounce a crucial prophecy remains well within the Deuteronomistic Historian’s narrative program. The prophecy is supportive, highlights the role of the deity in the selection of David as king, and "emphasizes David’s success in avoiding any action that would later jeopardize the integrity of his rule."7
Among the thematic threads that bind together chaps. 19-28 one can identify the depiction of Saul as the seeker and David as the vulnerable one whose life is sought. Holding the thread, like Ariadne guiding the reader through the Deuteronomist’s maze, is Abigail, who makes explicit the connection between the "seekers alter David" and Nabal. At the center of the maze, the minotaur is Saul/Nabal. Abigail’s action is "providential persuasion," part of the larger pattern within chaps. 24-26 of God’s active protection of David.8 Like Ariadne rescuing Theseus, Abigail keeps David safe from the devouring minotaur. Comparing Abigail with Ariadne is not frivolous; both women figure as a trajectory in a story about men; both women rescue/protect the questing hero and then follow him to a different land. Once in David’s land, Abigail is left out of David’s story. Theseus deserted Ariadne on the island of Naxos. As a figure of the process of solution Abigail/Ariadne rewards the hero (as well as the reader who makes her/his way to her) with a way out of the story. When we grasp Abigail/Ariadne’s thread, we follow a different path through the labyrinth. Instead of admiring the man who entered the arena to do violence, we admire the woman who led him out alive.
Neglecting to put Abigail at the center of her drama, as a primary actor, weakens her role as God’s helper. Adele Berlin does not regard Abigail’s words of prophecy (vv 28-31) as crucial to the narrative, claiming the insertion is "hardly relevant to the events of the Abigail story."9 Many scholars agree,10 however, that the primary theological function of Abigail is to speak the word of YHWH to David. While Nabal is ignorant of David’s true identity, Abigail recognizes David as the future king of Israel. Her prescience is a clear indication that Abigail is God’s chosen prophet-intermediary.11 Abigail’s assurance to David that he is YHWH’s intended ruler and must remain innocent to do God’s will is the link between the anointing prophecy of Samuel and the dynastic prophecy of Nathan.12 In an ironic twist, the fate about which YHWH’s prophet Abigail has warned David, that of shedding innocent blood, prophesies his downfall while it connects this episode of David acquiring his good-sense wife with that future episode of David acquiring another wife (2 Sam 11:1-25). Possibly Abigail’s words reveal a latent subtextual desire for connection with Bathsheba, for a community of women.
Inevitably Abigail must join Michal and Bathsheba, the other wives of David who experience moments of narrative power. A clear illustration of gender politics is found in the biblical portrayal and scholarly interpretation of David’s wives. Seen through the stereotyping lens of male authority, each of these women typifies a particular aspect of wife; Michal is the dissatisfied daughter/wife of divided loyalties; Abigail is consistently the good-sense mother-provider, and Bathsheba, the sexual partner. There is no interdependence of the wives of David, although in their actual lives there might well have been.13 Nor is any of the three women portrayed as a woman with depth or timbre. In the text as traditionally interpreted, as well as in their lives, the wives of David cede to male domination, and in ladylike fashion allow biblical literature to privilege male gender and to demystify their own. However, by rerouting the circuits of conventional comparisons, we can clarify and restore the identity to each woman through her relation to an other who embodies and reflects an essential aspect of the female self. We can imagine alliances based upon affiliation instead of kinship and filiation.
As the only female character in her story, Abigail’s isolation is apparent. When, however, we join her story to and make it part of and a link with Michal’s story (Michal is essentially erased from David’s life when Abigail is inserted into it) and then link Bathsheba’s story to the previous two, we see female power, or self-identity, asserting itself. We can bring the women together by altering our usual chronology of reading with a Lacanian moment of mirroring. This strategy allows the women to reflect one another as whole bodies, and deflects the bits-and-pieces views we get from glimpsing a shard of each woman in the Davidic mirror, where she appears as a distortion of the male image. Such revisioning provides the reader with a method to probe the ideological assumptions which have resulted in the polarized "good wife, bad wife" stereotypes, the popularly held view of the women within the Davidic narratives.
Abigail: The Good-sense Wife
Abigail is labeled the good-sense wife, the embodiment of sekel in contrast to her husband nabal, the fool. The connection to the book of Proverbs where the use of the word sekel is the most extensive in the Bible is immediate. The portrait of Abigail at first glance seems to be a narrative interpretation and expansion of the qualities attributed to the good wife of Proverbs 31, who provides food for her household, and "opens her mouth with wisdom, and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue" (v 36).
Providing us with some of the details of the life of an upperclass wife, Proverbs offers a clue to Abigail’s many accomplishments. She considers a field and buys it; she perceives that her merchandise is profitable she spins, she takes care of the poor, she makes all manner of garments and sells them. Clearly she does not eat of the bread of idleness (when would she have time!), while her husband sits in the gates of the city. Not surprisingly her children call her blessed. She is rated far more precious than jewels. Perhaps Nabal thought his good-wife Abigail was a glittering gem until the morning she told him that she had appeased the greedy son of Jesse. Discovering that his precious jewel had sided with the young brigand struck the undefended hungover Nabal in his heart with the force of a stone.
Traditional interpretations of 1 Samuel 25 have consistently focused upon Abigail’s good-sense works as advantageous to the men in the story: as appeasing David in his anger, thus saving the lives of her husband’s workers; preventing David from committing bloodguilt by killing her husband, and of course providing quantities of food for David and his men. The moral code reflects patriarchal values: a woman’s personal payoff for virtue is connecting herself to a "better" husband, one as beautiful, pious, and pleasing to God as she is herself. The rabbinic view of Abigail expands and escalates her biblical goodness. In b. Megillah she is considered the most important wife of David, equal with Sarah, Rahab, and Esther, as the four most beautiful women in biblical history.14 In the women’s Paradise, Abigail supervises the women in the fifth division, her domain bordering those of the matriarchs, Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah.15 Josephus also emphasizes Abigail’s goodness and piety, referring to her as gynaikos d’agathes kai sophronos.16This description of Abigail is close to that of the ethical paragon par excellence, Joseph, a model of sophrosyne, "self-control," for both Josephus and Philo. In both stories, of course, there is the motif of sexual restraint bringing divine rescue. It is understood by the rabbis also that Abigail’s moral goodness and self-control cools David’s ardor, thus distinguishing her from Bathsheba. The mere sight of Bathsheba enflames David to sin, whereas encounter with Abigail cools David’s fervor to kill Nabal.
Kyle McCarter’s summary of the narrative unit is typical of the traditional patriarchal response to the portrayal of Abigail as necessary piece in the grander Davidic mosaic: "the partnership of such a wile bodes well for David’s future, not only because of her good intelligence and counseling skills, but also because she is the widow of a very rich Calebite landowner."17 Jon Levenson characterizes Abigail as one who "rides the crest of the providential wave into personal success."18 His view of her as an opportunistic surfer is no more complete than McCarter’s wife of mergers and land deals. The pleasure of her text comes from acknowledging both these aspects of Abigail and celebrating her subtleties and contradictions.19
Although the biblical author describes Abigail as wipat to‘ar, her beauty is apparently not the sort to inspire sexual desire (pace to the ancient aggadists who have dreamed on paper of her) since there is no hint of a sexual relationship between Abigail and either husband. We are riot told of any children from her marriage to Nabal, indeed if Abigail had had children with Nabal, they, not David, would have inherited their father’s important estate. The biblical narrators/writers are not interested in Abigail’s son from her marriage to David, referring to him as Chileab (2 Sam 3:3) or Daniel (1 Chron 3:1).20 The text emphasizes Abigail’s importance as the wife with the goods, the flocks and herds, detailing the quantity of every delicious item of food and drink she brings to the outcast David. His sexual hunger will be satisfied by another wife.
To illustrate the textual denial of sexuality to Abigail we might compare how the themes of sexuality, nourishment, and death are developed in another story, that of Judith, a different story to be sure, but one with striking similarities. A woman rushes from the security of home to halt the destructive action of a male. Unlike Abigail, Judith spends a long time dressing to please the male, to seduce him into helplessness. Once in the presence of Holofernes, Judith tantalizes him with possibility. She stays in a tent adjoining his for three days, offering words that are sharply double-edged, meant to fool her enemy into believing that she is preparing for a sexual banquet and that she has come to lead him to victory, when the audience understands she plans the opposite. Taking with her the same items as Abigail does, a skin of wine, barley cakes, loaves from fine flour, and dried fruit (Jdt 10:5), Judith brings the food to nourish herself, not to appease the appetite of Holofernes. Food in the book of Judith functions as a symbol of impending death; Abigail’s vast amounts of the same food serve the opposite function. The gift of food comforts David and permits him to accept her words of prophecy. Abigail does not deceive David with words or with food. Judith serves tempting words and is herself the tasty dish.
Another textual silence concerns Abigail’s lineage, for she is not the wife of important bloodlines. That connection with Saul’s house is achieved by David’s marriage to Michal. After Abigail’s prophecy, assuring David that his own house is secure, v 28, the mosaic is altered, the royal connection to Saul is no longer necessary. As if to underscore his awareness of David’s relentless rise to power, Saul, flailing in his own impotence against the challenger, gives Michal to Paltiel (v 44).21 From the chronological order of wives in David’s life, one can posit a setting of priorities of male ambition. First, the connection with the royal house, then the acquisition of personal wealth and the assurance of kingship, and finally a pleasurable sexual liaison.
Casting Abigail in the role of mother-woman represents a view of woman as a respite or dwelling place for man. She functions "as a kind of envelope [for man] in order to help him set limits to things."22 in its positive aspect, as we have noted, Abigail helps David set limits to his fury. While this envelope or place sees the female body as offering a visible limit or shelter, it also views her place as dangerous: the man risks imprisonment or murder within the villainous other unless a door is left open. Thus, to protect himself from the possibility of her engulfing him, the man must distance himself from her, and place limits upon her that are the equivalent of the place without limits where he unwittingly leaves her. After acknowledging that Abigail has stilled his murderous sword, "unless you had hurried and come to meet me, truly by the dawning of day not a single man would have been left to Nabal" (v 3.4), he must limit her power. Serving David’s unconscious will, the narrator turns down the heat of the female hero. Our last image of her is as she is riding subdued toward David’s house, in the company of female servants, playing her role as traditional wife, obeying the will of her husband. How different from that passionate ride down the mountainside in the company of male servants! Shut away from the action of the story, Abigail is no longer
a threat.
Mieke Bal has noticed a similar framework expressing the unconscious fear of woman in the story of Abimelech by connecting six motifs (identified by Fokkelman): death, woman, wall, battle, shame, folly. Bal interprets the linking of these images as a strong chain of warning from male to male to keep his distance, to proceed with caution. "One dies a shameful death as soon as one is so foolish as to fight woman when she is defending her wall/entrance from her mighty position as the feared other."23 Abigail has defended her entrance with words instead of violence. By offering David all her goods, she keeps her own body secure. Ironically David does not risk imprisonment in her house, indeed does not even show curiosity about what might be within. Instead he sends messengers to her in conventional fashion to define her as wife, as though her moment of power and prophecy had never occurred.
As Abigail’s absence in the subsequent text of the Davidic narrative proves, David is more successful than Nabal in keeping Abigail shut up in his house, within her own limits.24 Only when she breaks free of the container of Nabal’s house, does she become all-powerful, simultaneously saving and threatening the men in the story. The story is resolved when the narrator serving the male characters puts Abigail in her place.
A feminist reading intent on restoring dimension to flattened characters must account for pieces that do not fit. Abigail the woman resists being dismissed as a literary type, "the exemplum, the perfect wife."25 Nor is equating Abigail with mother-provider congruent if we understand Mother to be the Earth Mother, the well-spring of fertility. Abigail, the good wife of Nabal, is the mother of none. As the wife of David, she is the mother of a son, whose name Chileab, "like [his] father,"26 removes him from her influence and control. Abigail is clearly the mother-provider of transformation. She turns the raw material provided by her destructive husband into salvific nourishment. She is not the tender of lambs, but of dressed sheep; she does not offer grain, but baked loaves. Model wife? She refers to her husband as a fool (v 25), sides with his enemy, and does not even mourn his death.
The Women
In introducing the character of David, Meir Steinberg has observed that the biblical author provided a complete, formal, and ordered portrait of David through "summary epithets" in the glowing report Saul’s servant makes about "the young son of Jesse, skillful in playing, able in deed, a man of war, wise in counsel, a man of good presence, and the Lord is with him" (16:18).27 Most biblical portraits, unlike this one, are the product of the reader’s gap-filling activity; one collects shards of information as the narrative unfolds. Usually the biblical text provides the reader only a partial picture of each character. This is certainly the way in which interpreters have read the relevant texts in the Davidic cycle in which female characters are present. Critics consistently define women as foils for David’s development. As we have noted, female characters tend to have their identity stolen.28 Traditional commentary has failed to fill out the identity of Abigail, Michal, and Bathsheba, binding them by their gender to the overpowering portrait of David. In Steinberg’s schema the entire personality of marginal characters gets telescoped into one or two words: churl and paragon.29 Thus, he robs the story of elements of paradox. A reading that lingers over the collisions and conflicts between characters adds pleasure to the text.
Assigning to each of David’s wives her summary epithets provides us with a male-produced map of each woman’s place in the larger landscape. Michal’s summary epithet states that she loved David, a fact not revealed about his other wives. Next the narrator tells us that Saul gave Michal "as a snare for him" (18:21). The language of her epithets is clear. Described as daughter of Saul and snare, she is to spell death for David, although her love for him keeps her from snapping the trap. Abigail, as we noted earlier, is the good-sense wife. She is also wise and beautiful. But neither her name nor her epithets are presented until after a description of her husband’s flocks. Nabal is mentioned first. David hears that Nabal is shearing his sheep and sends his men to ask for the payoff. David seems unaware of or uninterested in the beautiful wife inside the landowner’s house. In contrast is a later David, inactive, no longer a fighter or outlaw, watching a beautiful woman in her bath. In this case Bathsheba is mentioned before Uriah. Immediately after identifying Bathsheba as the daughter of Eliam, the wife of Uriah, David30 sends for this other man’s wife and lies with her. In this narrative the biblical author develops themes of sexual power: in contrast to his earlier stories of David’s marital alliances, which are really male power struggles.
Bathsheba’s epithets are the most telling of the three products of male fantasy. For her creators, Bathsheba certainly provided pleasure in her text. Through the eyes of the focalizer David we see beautiful Bathsheba bathing: we observe her having sex with him. Then the narrator takes over, revealing that she is at the beginning of her menstrual cycle and then that she has just conceived a child. Bathsheba’s first spoken words, "I am with child," could serve as her summary epithet. But the language of sexual intimacy continues. We learn that Uriah will not have sex with her. After his death she mourns Uriah, is brought to David’s house, becomes his wife, lies with him (again), and bears him a son. The explicit details of Bathsheba’s sexual life stand in sharp contrast to the absence of any sexual language in the story of Abigail. Thus, the biblical author exposes private matters to paint the portrait of Bathsheba as the wife who inspires improper desire; he uses the language of prophecy and deference to describe Abigail, the wife of legitimacy and public acquisitions.
Examining these summary epithets provides major clues about the fate of each woman. The daughter of death inherits death (in a woman figured as barrenness) from her father; she does not pass on death to her husband. In the concluding episode about Michal (her stories are split as are her allegiances), she is scornful of David, uncovering himself before maidservants. David, Michal’s husband, triumphant in his sexuality, is a sharp contrast to the dispirited figure of Saul, Michal’s father, holding in his hand his spear, a symbol of male potency, and failing to kill David with his ineffectual shaft (1 Sam 19:10). As Saul’s life force wilts, David’s grows stronger. Deprived of David’s sexual energy, Saul’s household is powerless: in the first episode, Saul cannot stop David from playing his lyre until Saul hurls his spear at him; in the second Michal cannot stop David from ecstatic dancing. Since there is no sexual life between Abigail and David, Abigail enjoys no further textual life either. Only Bathsheba, the wife of sexual intimacy, participates in the ongoing story of David’s reign. The length of female textual life seems to be directly connected to the extent of sexual pleasure she provides her male creators.
Another contrast among the women is the way in which David wins each of them: within the consistent framework of fragmented episodes about the women, there are full reports of how David gains these wives: Michal through violence against the Philistines; Abigail through withholding violence against Nabal; Bathsheba through violence against Uriah. While Abigail prevents David from acting against Nabal, Michal has no part in the deal struck between her father and David. She is the reward of a struggle between men doing violence to men. Bathsheba, a casualty of David’s sexual imperialism, has no part in David’s death-dealing plan. Only Abigail actively opposes David’s violence.31 In her story, David refrains from the impetuous act of killing the unpleasant Nabal and so gains Abigail through YHWH’s will; in the episode of Bathsheba, after he has gained the power of kingship, David arranges the death of Uriah in order to assure with his own actions that he may possess Bathsheba. When Saul set the bride price of Philistine foreskins for his daughter, he hoped the violent encounter would kill his enemy David (20:21). Rather David triumphed through sexual slaughter. David himself sent his enemy Uriah into battle, again the prize being a woman. David kills the Philistines with the sword; Uriah is also killed by the sword. In Abigail’s story, David and his men strap on their swords but never unsheathe them in battle. It is the only one of the three stories in which sexual violence does not lead to marriage. It is also the only one of the three in which there is no allusion to sexual union, or nonunion in the case of Michal. After Nabal’s death, David sends his messengers to collect Abigail, "to make her his wife" (v 42). After Bathsheba’s period of mourning for Uriah was over, "David sent and brought her to his house, and she became his wife, and bore him a son (2 Sam 11:27). Saul gave Michal to David as a snare for him, but with the help of the wife who loved him, David escaped the snare and fled. And Michal was left with an empty bed, stuffed with teraphim, an imitation man. David escapes Michal’s bed; Bathsheba is ensnared in his.
Fathers and Son
In his vigorous examination of the literary history constructed by the Deuteronomistic Historian, Samuel and the Deuteronomist, Robert Polzin uses a strategy of "allusive readings" to make interbiblical connections among episodes within 1 Samuel. Through his comparisons of Saul and Nabal, he makes a convincing case for Nabal’s death as proleptic of Saul’s. Earlier David Gunn concluded that "one of the important functions of Abigail’s speech, in the context of the story as a whole, is to foreshadow Saul’s death."32 But it is Abigail herself who first made this connection explicit in telling David, "Let your enemies and those who seek to do evil to my lord be as Nabal" (v 29). Following their lead, let us test connections between foolish men.
As Polzin notes, one of the major themes of the first book of Samuel is the establishment of kingship in Israel. Read through a psychoanalytic lens, this translates into a taut chain of fathers and sons, tensions of male power. Beginning with the birth of Samuel, spiritual father to both Saul and David, and ending with the death of Saul and his sons, and the kingship or coming of age of David, 1 Samuel can be read as a record of war games of slaughter and betrayal. The cycle of doom is compressed into a question in a Margaret Atwood poem:
Aren’t you tired of killing
those whose deaths have been predicted
and who are therefore dead already?33But the struggle is inevitable. Until the father is vanquished, the son cannot flourish. David Jobling sees the motif of heredity as the most important aspect of continuity between the books of Judges and Samuel.34 The sins of Eli’s sons lead to the rise of Samuel as Eli’s surrogate son; David, the one who can soothe Saul when the dark spirit comes upon him, becomes a surrogate son to Saul and a brother to Jonathan. Jobling understands the rise of monarchy under Saul as a move toward continuous and hereditary government. There is, however, no mention of kingship as hereditary in 1 Sam 8:4-12:25. As Jobling recognizes, the theological code supports monarchy in circumstances much like those of the judge-deliverers. The king unifies Israel and does not appear as a dynast.35 For a dynasty is "a direct negation of divine initiative in the raising of Israel’s leaders."36
Struggles between fathers and sons abound throughout the biblical narratives. Within the scope of this paper we can only glance at those that involve David as son. As we have noted earlier, the son of Jesse refers to himself as son to two surrogate fathers: Saul and Nabal. This self-designation underscores the liminality of David’s situation. No longer the child-shepherd guarding his father’s flocks in the hills of Bethlehem, not yet ready to discard the time of sonship.37 We can contrast another son connected to David, his "brother," Jonathan, who struggles against his father, but dies alongside Saul, never to escape the role of son.
From the time David flashes his sword against the Philistines to capture the bride price for the daughter of Saul, assuring himself sonship to the king, the woman-mother is the prize for the murder of the father. Michal never quite achieves this status; she remains a transitional figure, the link between Saul and his successor. Her divided loyalties mirror the difficulties of the reader in deserting Saul and taking up emotional residence with David. Although David may be the ultimate Father’s chosen son, the biblical author’s ambiguous feelings toward him remind the reader that David is not always the popular choice. Abigail like Michal stands between David and a father figure. On first reading, the author’s response to Nabal’s wife appears to be different from his response to Saul’s daughter. After all Abigail is the subject of an entire chapter in the narrative. And she is rewarded with a son, even if an "unimportant" one. David flees the daughter of Saul, and neither her husband nor the biblical authors praise her for her courage in helping David escape her father. Michal, the companion of David’s liminal period, is discarded like an outgrown garment. She remains childless, a daughter until the day of her death.
However, there is a similarity between the two women David has taken from older men: he seems to lose interest in them after he has possessed them and overcome the fathers their husbands represent. They are his public wives, as he publicly wrenched power from their husbands. Bathsheba, the wife of his bed, with whom he mourns the death of his infant son, is the wile of adulthood and privacy. David’s victory over Uriah was born in an act of concealment. The only benefit from that marriage was Bathsheba herself. No kingship, no land, no wealth. Of course there is a future benefit for David from Bathsheba herself. From her womb comes the son Solomon, who will rule after his father.
Mother-women are at the center of the father and son battle from the first chapter of the book of Samuel through Elkanah’s question to his wife Hannah, "Am I not more to you than ten sons?" It is also possible to imagine the question posed to Abigail by the young man who has introduced himself to her husband as bineka, "your son." Standing as intercessor between him and the father, she answers his question with resounding affirmation. Presenting him with the goods of the father, she tells him that his house will be secure, unlike the houses of his predecessors, Saul and Nabal. And she plans to follow him into the house. Lest he be overcome with her devouring power, she calls herself amateka/shiphateka, signaling that he will be the ruling father, and she will be his obedient mate. David acknowledges this transfer of power by telling Abigail that he has heard her voice and granted her petition (v 35).
Earlier in the narrative David instructs his men to ask Nabal for a payoff because they had not harmed his shepherds. In other words David wants a reward because he behaved correctly. He had not invaded the older man’s territory; he requests recognition from the father: "give whatever you have [in] your hand to your son" (v 8). At the rejection of the father, David responds in anger and pain and threatens to kill him. Abigail holds up the mirror to the son David in this episode, assuring him that he is good. It is the father Nabal who is evil and who must die.
The death of Nabal marks the end of this liminal period for David begun with the death of Goliath, also felled by a stone. In the next chapter, in what is to be their final meeting, David possesses Saul’s spear, the metonymic weapon of sexual power, and receives acknowledgment from the father, "Blessed be you, my son David." Not believing Saul’s words. David flees the borders of Israel, but the record of Saul’s pursuit of David has ended. The transitional time of David’s struggle to overtake the older king, which began with his battling Goliath in Saul’s name, conc
