Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible
304
Vindicating the Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible
304Paperback
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Overview
Did the Samaritan woman really divorce five husbands in a world where women rarely divorced even one? Did Bathsheba seduce King David by bathing in the nude? Was Mary Magdalene really a reformed prostitute?
While many have written studies of the women in the Bible, this is a new kind of book—one in which an international team of male and female scholars look afresh at vilified and neglected women in the Bible. The result is a new glimpse into God's heart for anyone, male or female, who has limited social power.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780825444135 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Kregel Publications |
| Publication date: | 12/08/2017 |
| Pages: | 304 |
| Sales rank: | 452,113 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TAMAR: THE RIGHTEOUS PROSTITUTE
CAROLYN CUSTIS JAMES, MA
War creates moral dilemmas. In Germany during WWII, a young Jewish girl bravely faced a life-altering moral catch-22. German soldiers were rounding up Jewish friends and neighbors and transporting them to Nazi concentration camps. At any moment, she and her family could be next. Well aware that a concentration camp meant suffering and death to her entire family, she made a fateful moral decision. To rescue her family from a horrific fate, she gave herself to the Nazi soldiers. From that day on, her self-identity changed forever. She saw herself as a prostitute. The successful rescue of the family she loved came at unspeakable cost to her — leaving permanent scars of a trauma she would carry to her grave and a dark secret that, if revealed, would brand her in the eyes of others with an indelible stigma as a Nazi collaborator, an immoral woman, or both. Instead of being hailed as the selfless hero she truly was, she'd be classed as damaged goods. Faced with the moral dilemma of either losing her entire family in a Nazi death camp or prostituting herself to Nazi brutes, she chose the latter.
Bible stories also reveal moral dilemmas. Tamar, the infamous Canaanite daughter-in-law of the Old Testament patriarch Judah, faced a life-altering moral dilemma as well. But it's difficult, if not impossible, for modern readers to view her in that light because, when we read her story in Genesis 38, the word "prostitute" leaps off the page and colors everything else we read or think of her. That one word says it all. Without a pause, the judicial gavel comes crashing down with a thud, and we become incapable of seeing that she is dealing with a complicated situation. Instead, with a single blow Tamar is tried, convicted, and sentenced with no possibility of parole. Never will I forget the awful words of condemnation that thundered from the pulpit of one pastor. "Tamar corrupted the line of Christ!"
If we know anything at all about the story of Tamar and Judah, we know it as one of the most salacious moments in the entire Old Testament. Tamar, the unscrupulous widowed daughter-in-law of the patriarch Judah, disguised herself as a prostitute in order to seduce her own father-in-law. How could the story of Tamar be anything other than a tawdry scandal?
Often pastors preaching through Genesis opt to skip over Tamar's story, which interrupts the far more interesting and better-known story about Joseph, popularized by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice's Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. The gripping story of Joseph, sold by his brothers into slavery in Egypt, carries on seamlessly without her anyway, sparing the pastor from the awkward challenge of trying to explain her bewildering R-rated story. In addition to the obvious concern that such adult material is unsuitable for a general audience, pastors also face the daunting challenge of trying to salvage any useful application or word of inspiration to offer their congregations. Besides, just when suspense is heating up in the Joseph story and folks are hanging on the edge of their seats, it seems counterproductive to switch to a seemingly irrelevant story that will likely take the oxygen out of the sanctuary.
Even those who courageously wade into this perplexing narrative seem to find little more than fodder for warnings about the seductions of manipulative, vindictive women. Some think Tamar was so selfishly determined to become a mother that she was willing to stoop to anything, even prostitution, to conceive a child — a method that allegedly gave her the added benefit of getting even with her unsuspecting father-in-law for breaking his word to her. All of this makes the prospect of rescuing Tamar from her "vixen" status seem unpromising, to say the least. The evidence is stacked against her. But upon examination, the Bible actually contains significant clues that warrant a closer look, and which should raise doubts about any negative opinions of Tamar.
For starters, her descendants don't regard her as a skeleton best kept hidden in the family closet. Moments when you'd think Tamar's shady chapter of family history should remain behind closed doors are precisely the moments when they bring her out into the light. She is publically named in a beautiful wedding blessing at the marriage of Boaz and Ruth, two individuals of sterling character — hardly a fitting moment to broach the subject of a family scandal. Yet, there she is in glowing words of blessing: "Through the offspring the Lord gives you by this young woman, may your family be like that of Perez, whom Tamar bore to Judah" (Ruth 4:12, niv). Significantly, both King David and his son Absalom named their daughters "Tamar" (2 Sam. 13:1; 14:27). In the Hebrew culture, names carried a lot of weight, for parents chose names that gave their children reasons to aspire, not as cause for shame or for them to be ridiculed. Then, of course, the apostle Matthew names Tamar (along with four other women) in the royal genealogy of Jesus (Matt. 1:3) — a noticeable break from the customary exclusion of women from genealogies, and reason to reexamine those other women's stories too.
But by far the most compelling reason to reconsider negative opinions of Tamar is another word that shows up in her story — when none other than Judah himself describes her as "righteous" (Gen. 38:26). How can the shameful actions of Tamar be considered "righteous"?
TAMAR IN PATRIARCHAL CONTEXT
One of the biggest mistakes we make in attempting to understand biblical narratives is failing to take into account the cultural context in which they occur. Biblical stories take place within an ancient patriarchal culture that is utterly foreign to our Western, American, egalitarian culture. This puts us at a serious disadvantage when we interpret Scripture, especially when we come to stories such as Tamar's. Without insight into the customs of ancient patriarchy, we will miss, distort, or trivialize the message.
Unfortunately, the fact that patriarchy appears on virtually every page of the Bible has led to the mistaken conclusion that patriarchy (at least a kinder, gentler version) is the divinely ordained way God means for us to live. But, as I've argued elsewhere, "Patriarchy is not the Bible's message. Rather, it is the fallen cultural backdrop that sets off in the strongest relief the radical nature and potency of the Bible's gospel message. We need to understand that world and patriarchy in particular — much better than we do — if we hope to grasp the radical countercultural message of the Bible."
Patriarchy creates moral dilemmas, too. Tamar's story is a key example of how far afield we've gone in understanding the Bible — and her story in particular — by failing to employ this powerful interpretive tool. Details of the ancient patriarchal culture will surface as we examine Tamar's story. For the moment, it will suffice to mention three elements of patriarchy that shape this particular story and create that dilemma for Tamar.
First, patriarchy ("father rule") invests men with priority, power, and authority over women and relies on female submission. Patriarchy essentially deprives women of agency and legal rights. Females become the property of men and are expected to submit. We will see in Tamar's story that Judah held life-and-death power over her. Without investigating the charges against her and with a blatant double standard, he immediately demands an honor-killing for her sexual "misconduct" — a violent response that occurred back then and still happens today in intensely patriarchal cultures whenever a female is involved (or alleged to be involved) in something that tarnishes the honor of men in her family.
Second, patriarchy invests men with power and authority over other men, with devastating consequences in both directions. Something profoundly unhealthy happens when one man wields power over another. The patriarchs owned other men (and women) as slaves, as well as the children their slaves produced. Primogeniture — described by some as the linchpin of patriarchy — ranked sons by birth order. It established within the family unit a fixed male hierarchy among brothers. Primogeniture elevated a man's firstborn son over his younger brothers, making him something of a crown prince in the family and giving him authority over his younger siblings. The eldest brother also inherited twice as much of a man's estate as his other sons.
Tamar's story makes no sense unless we see how she gets caught in the crossfire of primogeniture, both within Judah's family of origin and among his sons. At the same time, it is important to note how the Bible repeatedly overturns this culturally established order2 in the stories of the patriarchs — most often by God's decree. God chose Isaac, not Abraham's firstborn, Ishmael. Although parental favoritism played a role in Isaac's family (for Rebekah preferred Jacob, and Isaac favored Esau), God chose the younger twin Jacob, not Esau. But things got wildly out of hand when it came to Jacob's sons, for Jacob played favorites and broke primogeniture with his wives and with his sons. His favoritism shattered the family.
Third, under patriarchy a woman's goal in life was to produce sons for her husband. Doing so was her duty as a woman and her sole contribution to the family. Producing a male child was also a matter of honor to preserve her husband's family line. Family survival depended on her producing at least one son. Society determined a woman's value by counting her sons. The gold medal of womanhood was to be acclaimed as "the mother of seven sons." So it was exceedingly high praise indeed when the women of Bethlehem praised Ruth to Naomi as "better to you than seven sons" (Ruth 4:15, niv). Such a cultural value system sheds light on the anguished desperation barren women such as Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Hannah experienced, and why the postmenopausal widow Naomi was beside herself after both her sons died without either of them fathering sons. "To die without a male descendant was to be erased from history" — an utter calamity in the ancient world. And the blame and shame for this deficiency fell on the widow for failing, literally, to deliver.
Although many interpreters view Tamar's actions as her personal obsession to have a baby and fulfill her womanhood, we will soon see that Tamar was motivated by something much deeper.
TAMAR THE CANAANITE
Tamar's story doesn't exist in isolation. Not only is it embedded within the ancient patriarchal culture, it is nested within layers of family history. Understanding both contexts is necessary to make sense of her story. Those other stories are also important to get a clearer sense of Judah, the man with whom she must deal. In addition, they serve to inform us that Tamar's situation as Judah's daughter-in-law was about as far from ideal as a young girl can get. Rather, from the start, the marriage arrangement that placed Tamar into Judah's dysfunctional family also put her at risk from Judah as well as from his sons.
Beyond that reality, even before Tamar entered Judah's story, she had huge strikes against her. Not only was she an outsider to the mainstream story that focused on Abraham and his descendants, she was a foreigner. Indeed, she was the worst kind of foreigner — a Canaanite (Gen. 28:1). Previous marriages in Abraham's family regarded a Canaanite woman as a serious threat to the purity of their calling. Canaanite women were considered a contaminating influence that would draw Abraham's descendants away from God. The patriarchs were dead set against their sons marrying Canaanite women.
When Isaac needed a wife, his father Abraham made his servant swear that he would "not get a wife for my son from the daughters of the Canaanites" (24:3). To avoid that undesirable outcome, Abraham sent his servant back to his God-fearing relatives to find a suitable bride (24:38). Isaac voiced similar concerns when he commanded Jacob, "Do not marry a Canaanite woman" (28:1) and sent him packing to those same relatives. So before we even read the word "prostitute" in her story, Tamar the Canaanite is already giving cause for concern.
In contrast, the name "Judah" is held in high regard throughout the Bible as the father of Israel's largest tribe and of the kingly line of David and Jesus. Consequently, it's easy to gloss over the deeply flawed Judah we encounter in the story involving Tamar. Instead, she often serves as a scapegoat for everything that happens between them. As a result, we won't understand Tamar or the significance of her actions if we don't reexamine the man who collides with her and how colliding with her affects him. Tamar is no sidebar or incidental figure in the Genesis narrative — nor even in the gripping Joseph saga. Events in this often-neglected Tamar chapter, and Tamar's role in particular, hold the key to understanding the story it seems to interrupt. So we must do some serious digging into the backstory before we're ready to talk about Tamar and the pivotal role she takes, but rarely gets credit for, in the story of God's people.
Of the family stories that surround Tamar's story, obviously Judah's is the most immediate. In turn, his story is tangled up with the surrounding story of his younger half-brother, Joseph. And of course, both brothers' stories reside inside the story of their father, Jacob. At the time of events involving Tamar, Jacob was the current family standard-bearer for the covenant promises God gave to his grandfather Abraham and father Isaac. This is the family God blessed and appointed to move forward his redemptive purposes for the whole world.
Despite the fact that at this point in the narrative Joseph owns the spotlight at the expense of Judah and his nine other brothers, God ultimately chooses Judah to be the promise-bearer for the next generation. Judah's branch of Abraham's family tree will produce King David and ultimately Jesus, the promised Messiah. So regardless of how the focus settles on Joseph from Genesis 30 on, the Judah thread that winds its way through those final chapters in Genesis deserves careful attention.
TAMAR'S DYSFUNCTIONAL IN-LAWS
By the time Tamar enters the story, Judah is in a moral nosedive — weighed down by a boatload of dysfunctional family relationships that have left him with a throbbing father-wound and a boatload of resentment.
Judah's family got off to a terrible start when his father, Jacob, married his mother, Leah, unintentionally, instead of her younger, more attractive sister, Rachel. For seven years, Jacob worked for the right to marry Rachel. Since he arrived in Paddan Aram with essentially the shirt on his back, Jacob's labor was a variation on the bride price that he negotiated with her father, Laban. But on the long-awaited wedding night, Laban substituted Leah for Rachel. The unsuspecting Jacob didn't discover the switch until "the morning after." (It must have been very dark on their wedding night, or Jacob must have been very intoxicated.) Needless to say, Jacob wasn't pleased.
When he confronted Laban, his father-in-law pointed to primogeniture. It would be a breach of custom to marry the younger daughter off before her older sister. Undeterred, Jacob demanded the right to marry Rachel too, which he did a week later, locking himself into working seven more years for Laban and the sisters into a fierce and agonizing rivalry. Evidently, primogeniture thinking with respect to Leah stopped there, for although she was Jacob's first wife, Leah was unloved and couldn't win Jacob's love, despite the fact that she produced six sons for him. Jacob's heart belonged to Rachel, wife number two. But for Rachel, no amount of love could compensate for the miserable fact that, unlike her sister, Rachel was barren.
By volunteering their slave-girls, Bilhah and Zilpah, as surrogate wives, the warring sisters produced a grand total of twelve sons for Jacob: six by Leah, two apiece by Bilhah and Zilpah, and at long last Rachel delivered two more sons — Joseph and, finally, Benjamin. Even in this episode, we see another example of the dark side of patriarchy — the sanctioning of sexual slavery. With the birth of Joseph, patriarchal favoritism within the family escalates to a whole new level.
Jacob's flagrant favoritism of Joseph became the proverbial "last straw" for Joseph's ten older brothers, igniting jealousy and a consuming hatred for Joseph that ultimately turned to violence. The text states flatly that Jacob "loved Joseph more than any of his other sons" (37:3, niv). Jacob's favoritism took on public physical dimensions when Jacob gave Joseph a "royal robe"— an overt sign of the preeminent place Joseph held both in his father's heart and in the family.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Vindicating the Vixens"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Sandra L. Glahn.
Excerpted by permission of Kregel Publications.
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Table of Contents
Preface Sandra Glahn, PhD 13
Abbreviations 19
Introduction: The Hermeneutics of "Her" Henry Rouse, ThM 21
Section I The Women in Jesus's Genealogy: More Than Redeemed Sinners
Chapter 1 Tamar: The Righteous Prostitute Carolyn Custis James, MA 31
Chapter 2 Rahab: What We Talk about When We Talk about Rahab Eva Bleeker, MA 49
Chapter 3 Ruth: The So-Called Scandal Marnie Legaspi, ThM 59
Chapter 4 Bathsheba: Vixen or Victim? Sarah Bowler, ThM 81
Chapter 5 The Virgin Mary: Reclaiming Our Respect Timothy Ralston, PhD 101
Section II A Survey of Sexualized, Vilified, and Marginalized Women of the Bible
Beginnings
Chapter 6 Eve: The Mother of All Seducers? Glenn Kreider, PhD 129
Era of Patriarchs
Chapter 7 Sarah: Taking Things into Her Own Hands or Seeking to Love? Eugene Merrill, PhD 149
Chapter 8 Hagar: God Names Adam, Hagar Names God Tony Maalouf PhD 171
Era of Judges
Chapter 9 Deborah: Only When a Good Man Is Hard to Find? Ron Pierce, PhD 191
Era of Kings
Chapter 10 Huldah: Malfunction with the Wardrobe-Keeper's Wife Christa L McKirland, ThM 213
Era of Exiles
Chapter 11 Vashti: Dishonored for Having Honor Sharif a Stevens, ThM 235
Section III Some New Testament Women Revisited
Chapter 12 The "Woman at the Well": Was the Samaritan Woman Really an Adulteress? Lynn Cohick, PhD 249
Chapter 13 Mary Magdalene: Repainting Her Portrait of Misconceptions Karla Zazueta, MA 255
Chapter 14 Junia/Joanna: Herald of the Good News Amy Peeler, PhD 273
Bibliography 287