Approaching the Divine Feminine: a male, Jewish Hebrew-Bible translator's musings

     The differences between our two versions [of the creation account in Genesis] are so pronounced that by now some readers may be inclined to conclude that what I have proposed as a complementary relationship is in fact a contradictory one. If, however, we can escape the modern provincialism of assuming that ancient writers must be simple because they are ancient, it may be possible to see that the Genesis author chose to combine these two versions of creation precisely because he understood that his subject was essentially contradictory, essentially resistant to consistent linear formulation, and that this was his way of giving it the most adequate literary expression. Let me explain this first in the notorious contradiction about the creation of woman, and then go on to comment briefly on the larger cosmogonic issues.
     It may make no logical sense to have Eve created after Adam and inferior to him when we have already been told that she was created at the same time and in the same manner as he, but it makes perfect sense as an account of the contradictory facts of woman's role in the poet-edenic scheme of things. On the one hand, the writer is a member of a patriarchal society in which women have more limited legal privileges and institutional functions than do men, and where social convention clearly invites one to see woman as subsidary to man, her proper place, in the Psalmist's words, as a "fruitful vine in the corner of your house." Given such social facts and such entrenched attitudes, the story of Eve's being made from an unneeded rib of Adam's is a proper account of origins. On the other hand, our writer -- one does not readily think of him as a bachelor -- surely had a fund of personal observation to draw on which could lead him to conclude that woman, contrary to institutional definitions, could be a daunting adversary or worthy partner, quite man's equal in a moral or psychological perspective, capable of exerting just as much power as he through her intelligent resourcefulness. If this seems a fanciful inference, one need only recall the resounding evidence of subsequent biblical narrative, which includes a remarkable gallery of women -- Rebekah, Tamar, Deborah, Ruth -- who are not content with a vegetative existence in the corner of the house but, when thwarted by the male world or when they find it lacking in moral insight or practical initiative, do not hesitate to take their destiny, or the nation's, into their own hands. In light of this extra-institutional awareness of woman's standing, the proper account of origins is a simultaneous creation of both sexes, in which man and woman are different aspects of the same divine image. "In the image of God He created him. Male and female He created them" (Gen. 1:227). The decision to place in sequence two ostensibly contradictory accounts of the same event is an approximate narrative equivalent to the technique of post-Cubist painting which gives us, for example, juxtaposed or superimposed, a profile and a frontal perspective of the same face. The ordinary eye could never see these two at once, but it is the painter's prerogative to represent them as a simultaneous perception within the visual frame of his painting, whether merely to explore the formal relations between the two views or to provide an encompassing representation of his subject. Analogously, the Hebrew writer takes advantage of the composite nature of his art to give us a tension of views that will govern most of the biblical stories -- first, woman as man's equal sharer in dominion, standing exactly in the same relation to God as he; then, woman as man's subservient helpmate, whose weakness and blandishments will bring such woe into the world.
     --Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative, pages 145-46

The quotation above is fascinating, especially as it makes exactly some of the same points as does Shawna R. B. Atteberry's new self-published e-book, What You Didn't Learn in Sunday School, Women Who Didn't Sit Down and Shut Up, reviewed here.

Alter has his readers "recall the resounding evidence of subsequent biblical narrative, which includes a remarkable gallery of women -- Rebekah, Tamar, Deborah, Ruth -- who are not content with a vegetative existence in the corner of the house but, when thwarted by the male world or when they find it lacking in moral insight or practical initiative, do not hesitate to take their destiny, or the nation's, into their own hands."  Atteberry has her readers do the same.

The quotation above is also fascinating because it gets to the literary that resists Western, Aristotelian thinking.  In the first place, the writer of Genesis clearly values females as equals to males -- whereas Aristotle by his logic (his tightly-boxed up "objectivity") must conclude that females are merely inferior to males, are botched beings of human and of animal species.  In the second place, the literary style of the writer of Genesis defies how Aristotle wanted his male-only Greek-only elite-only students to write.

Michelle Baliff, not a male, not a Greek, not a writer like Aristotle but more like the writer of Genesis, can better help us remember, as Robert Alter does too.   She and the writer of Genesis, as Robert Alter reads him, helps us remember history in relation to "a remarkable gallery of women."  Proper writing doesn't have to abstract out the women and it doesn't need to make, in some legislative or scientific vacuum, disparaging proclamations about the lack of females or the need to contain their speech, their writing, or their stories, which intersect with ours, whoever we are.  Thus, when focusing on histories of men and of women, Baliff recalls, with some protest agains Aristotle, the following:

According to Aristotle’s aesthetics, a narrative must be arranged according to some organizing principle.... Aristotle also offers us the classificatory system of binaries to help us order our stories, to order our experiences, to order ourselves.... But perhaps Woman can (un)speak in the unthought, not-yet-thought, non-spaces produced by alternative paradigms, by new idioms, by paralogical and paratactical and, thus, illegitimate discourses. What... if our narrative had no syllogistic, metonymic, linear or triangular structure? .... What if Truth were a Woman... what then? Cixous replies, Then all stories would have to be told differently....
     --"Re/Dressing Histories; Or, On Re/Covering Figures Who Have Been Laid Bare by Our Gaze," (Rhetoric Society Quarterly, v22 n1 p91-98)

rhetoric of Ruth

Spread your wings over me, I reply
and his cloak billows high.

Now he clasps my foreign hand
and kisses the tips of my fingers
now skin glides against skin
and the seed of salvation grows in me
the outsider, the forbidden

With these lines, Rachel Barenblat helps her readers hear the poetry in the voice of someone called

רות המואביה

Ρουθ ἡ Μωαβῖτις

"Ruth, the Moabite."

Just after the Bible introduces her to readers as such, and just before it introduces her to a real insider (the more familiar man who discovers her), it complicates with race, class, and gender a considerably difficult rhetorical situation:

So Naomi returned, 
and Ruth the Mo-Abit-ess, 
her daughter-in-law, with her, 
who returned out of the field of Moab
--and they came to Beth-lehem in the beginning of barley harvest.

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names and significances:

Naomi, "Delight of Mine," calling herself "Mara" or "Bitterness"

Ruth, "Friend"

Mo Abite ess, "Father? what father does this female have?"

Mo Ab, "Father? what father?"

Beth-lehem, "Bread-house"

Rape and Ruth: the woman and the text

      Marriage is a contentious category in the United States as some are asking who can and should marry, others are demanding the right to marry as a fundamental civil and human right, and still others are insisting on preserving a particular biblical paradigm.  But marriage is a normative category in most of Africa and Asia.  At the same time, the normative experience of black women in the Americas who do not marry shapes a reading of [the book of] Ruth that may not be congruent with Africana readers in other contexts for whom marriage is normative.  Asian and Africana readers frequently share a sense of cultural familiarity with the story of Ruth because of the focus on the mother-in-law/ daughter-in-law relationship, the cultural and societal vulnerability of widows, and the necessity of producing live offspring, preferably male, to secure a woman's status and economic well-being and that of her family.
      As an Africana reader, I am particularly interested in how issues of translation affect how scriptures are read, heard, understood, and interpreted in the broader African diaspora.  In a working paper on African feminist postcolonial biblical interpretation, Musa Dube notes the rarity of women on committees responsible for major translations of the scriptures (such as UBS; this is also true for NRSV, JPS, and others) and the tendency for translators and their translations to advance the aims of empire.  Construction of gender and gender roles, including marriage and motherhood, is one well-attested aim of empire.  An Africana translation-sensitive reading of the book of Ruth calls into question the virtue and value of Ruth's marriage to Boaz even as it recognizes the import of marriage in the ancient and contemporary African and Asian contexts from which the scriptures emerged and in which they continue to be venerated.
      The normative portrayal of marriage in Ruth is a particular problem for English readers because it masks sexual and domestic violence in a text that has been canonized as scripture for Jews and Christians.  There are at least three indicators that Ruth was abducted into marriage:  (1) the use of the verb ns', "lift," with "woman," instead of the standard lach, "take (as wife)," (2) the long-standing Israelite practice of abduction or rape-marriage, and (3) the preferential abduction of foreign women for rape-marriage.
      The verb in Ruth 1:4, vayis'u, from ns', "to lift" or "pick up," may be taken to indicate that Ruth and Orpah, both Moabite women, were abducted into marriage.  I translate the first three works of Ruth 1:4, "They-abducted for-themselves Moabite-women. . . . "  The verb ns' occurs 661 times in the MT.  The primary meaning of ns', according to The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament (HALOT), is "to carry" or "to lift."  In virtually every translation of ns' in which the object is not a person, the verb is rendered with some form of "lift," "carry," "take," or something similar.  Any thing or person may be the object of ns':  the hand (Deut. 32:20), prayer (Jer. 7:13), or sin may be lifted off of a person or community (Isa. 53:11), and so forth.  In Ruth ns' is also used to indicate lifting grain in 2:18.  Women are the object of ns' five times:  Judges 21:23; Ruth 1:4; Ezra 10:44; 2 Chr. 13:21 and 24:3.  Note that in Judges, the context is the abduction of sexually naive girls from Shiloh into forced or rape-marriages for the purpose of progeny.  The verb chtph in Judges 21:21, "to catch" (women), functions as a synonym.  In Ezra, the women in question are specified as foreign.  In 2 Chr. 13:21, Abijah's collection of women and the resulting offspring is cited as evidence of his strength in the previous verse, suggesting that these were abduction-marriages....
      The normative verb indicating marriage in the Hebrew scriptures, lach, "to take," with a woman as the object, indicates in every case in the Hebrew scriptures socially sanctioned union (Gen 4:19; Exod. 6:20; Jer. 16:2, and so on)....  Rape-marriage as a normative practice is introduced in Numbers 31, where sexually naïve girls are abducted as "booty," shalal.  It is codified subsequently in Deuteronomy 20,21, and 24.  Among the modifications introduced are the shift of focus from any outsider girl whose people are designated as "enemies" (as in Num. 31:19) to "beautiful" women and girls among the enemy (Deut. 20:11).  Deuteronomy20:12-13 also calls for the abducted women and girls to be stripped, their heads shaved, and their nails cut....
      .... The very name, "Moab," literally "from [my] father," evokes the alleged incestuous and therefore despicable nature of all Moabites according to the Israelite account of their origins in the Genesis 19 account of Lot and his daughters.  As a result, Moabites, particularly Moabite women, are highly sexualized in the scriptures of Israel, as are many contemporary Africana women readers of those same scriptures.
      Given the specific vocabulary deployed in the text and Ruth's identity as a Moabite woman -- which she never escapes -- Ruth is multiply marginalized, socially and sexually vulnerable.  Ruth and Orpah's marriages, therefore, hide dirty not-so-little secrets, covered up by generations of male translators.  Yet the experience of abduction-marriage and forcible pregnancy is not unimaginable to contemporary Africana readers.  In some parts of Eastern and raped into marriage.
      The Associated Press (AP) ran a story on June 21, 2005, under an Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, dateline in which a twelve-year-old girl, kidnapped by men who wanted to force her into marriage, was rescued by three lions that chased off her abductors and guarded her until police and relatives located her.  Sergeant Wondimu Wedajo of the local police reported that the men had held the girl for seven days, repeatedly beating her:  "Often these young girls are raped and severely beaten to force them to accept the marriage."
     The AP report noted that in Ethiopia, kidnapping has been part of the marriage customs for quite some time and that the United Nations estimates that more than 70 percent of marriages in Ethiopia occured by abduction, particularly in rural areas where the majority of the country's population lives.  (The AP report did not delineate its sources).
      Interpreters appealing to biblical narratives to describe idealized marriage have in many cases legitimized violence in marriage.  Religious authorities (Bible translators, pastors, seminary professors) have been negligent (and, I argue, criminally so) in failing to expose the ways in which the biblical narrative sanctions and contributes to the abuse of women in general and wives in particular.  By highlighting Ruth's embrace of Naomi and Naomi's god, interpreters of the book of Ruth have regularly overlooked the colence with which Ruth was initiated into marriage (and relationship with Naomi), as specified by the Biblical Hebrew vocabulary of that union.  Biblical interpreters, like all readers, are shaped by their own constructed cultures, which they in turn lay onto the text even as they identify "biblical principles" for marriage.  In doing so, lay and professional, clergy and academic interpreters of the Bible overlook the violence in which many women live, particularly in their marriages.  Men in every part of the world rape their wives.  According to Molly Egan and Jason Wood's 1999 Lehigh University report, The Abolition of Marital Rape Exemption, in the United States, spousal rape was criminalized by only seventeen out of fifty states in 1996.  By 2007, all fifty states and the District of Columbia had criminalized spousal rape.  (The state of New York relies on the ruling of an appeals court in 1984, People vs. Liberta, because an exemption for married men accused of raping their wives remains on the books.)  Spousal rape affects all people in the United States and beyond, including those in the African dispersion.
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above, an excerpt from the section "Marriage," in the chapter "Ruth," by Wil Gafney, in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora. 

HT David Ker

female trafficking in the bible?

[Our] Western, American, middle-class point of view can actually interfere with our understanding of God's Word. The story of Naomi and Ruth takes place against the backdrop of an ancient patriarchal culture. If we want to grasp the message, we must enter Naomi's world. We can do this better with the help of our sisters in the Third World whose cultures more closely resemble the ancient biblical culture.
--Carolyn Custis James, The Gospel of Ruth (p 30)

What if one of our sisters is from Malawi and is helping us? What if she's "a child of the third wife in a polygamous marriage"? What of "her experience as a widow and mother of three" might inform ours, if we're willing for ours to be so informed? What if she's encouraging us "to think of the trafficked women in Geneva and not to forget that contextual Bible study is about transformation"? What if we start to have some "thought about how few choices trafficked women and men have?" And then what if we began reading the Bible, the Book of Ruth, and chapter 3?

Well then, we may just do what the wonderful Jane Stranz is doing and now encourages us to do: to "read it with the idea that Ruth could be seen as a trafficked woman - that Naomi could be seen as a formerly trafficked woman who encourages another woman to follow the same path, because of course there is no other path." Jane has been listening to Fulata Mbano Moyo, her "brilliant colleague," sharing with us her insights again.

Would we really be doing injustice to the Bible? As importantly, if we don't consider the possibility, then are we doing injustice to Ruth and to Naomi?  Or don't we remember those lines of John Keats's "Ode to A Nightingale" which go like this:

Thou wast not born for death, immortal Bird!
    No hungry generations tread thee down;
The voice I hear this passing night was heard
    In ancient days by emperor and clown:
Perhaps the self-same song that found a path
    Through the sad heart of Ruth, when, sick for home,
        She stood in tears amid the alien corn;
                The same that oft-times hath
    Charm’d magic casements, opening on the foam
        Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn.

If Keats is not thinking of the tears of the trafficked human, he nonetheless conveys how "forlorn."  If we're reluctant to listen to Mbano Moyo, then how about Keats?  If not a feminist like Jane (who has reminded us of the problem of trafficking in our world), then how about a Bible translator like David Ker (who also continues to remind us)?  Ancient Israel of the bible, or Geneva, Glasgow, Tokyo, Congo, Africa, Europe, Asia, the Middle East, the East, and the West.  We do well to listen to the silences to the cries to the voices, our own and others', when we read.

Now, to be sure, Carolyn Custis James (whose book I quote from to start this post) doesn't necessarily advocate reading the bible to see Ruth or Naomi as trafficked humans.  But in her chapter, “When Women Initiate and Men Respond” (on pages 173-174 The Gospel of Ruth), Custis James does get us thinking about how to read "Arthur Golden’s best-selling novel, Memoirs of a Geisha"; she's getting us to consider how we, women and men in the Western world, initiate and respond.  How do we respond to the experiences and the stories of trafficked girls and boys?

Custis James reads how Memoirs of a Geisha:

chronicles the life of a young Japanese girl sold into slavery by her desperately poor parents—an appalling transaction in human flesh repeated in real life thousands upon thousands of times throughout the world’s sordid history and still happening today in shocking numbers. Sayuri is trafficked into the world of the geisha—the upper-class counterpart of the common prostitute. She is destined to become a “butterfly in the night.” Her youthful beauty, artistic accomplishments, and virginity will go to the highest bidder from among a coterie of Japanese businessmen. The Chairman—the elegant man approaching her now—is one of them.

Their first meeting seems innocuous enough. He wipes her tears with his handkerchief and sends her skipping on her way with a coin to buy a shaved ice treat, never to forget his kindness. Like a radiant full moon against the blackened sky, it is a snapshot of contrasts—two human beings dwelling in the same universe, simultaneously inhabiting separate worlds. She is female. Powerless, dependent, vulnerable, voiceless, and (except for the coin he just pressed into her small hand) penniless too. He lives in the privileged world of men and is possessed of power, self-determination, education, and wealth. The disparity between them will never go away and stirs up subliminal questions. What will he do with his advantages? Will he exploit her too? Or is he her ticket to freedom?

So as we think about these questions, we might bravely apply them to ourselves.  We might consider the story of Boaz and Ruth ("What will he do with his advantages? Will he exploit her too? Or is he her ticket to freedom?").  Won't we do well to hear the voices of African women and not forget the forlorn hidden away from among us by men who would traffic and own them?