| Sexuality, Gender
Roles and the Bible A Feminist Approach by Amy Naylor Women's Studies 399, 2004 St. Olaf College |
| "Passion
for God is good and passion for God is lived through our relationships
on earth...the bible is our wedding contract with God, but that when we
touch our bodies we touch God; when we pleasure ourselves we pleasure
God; when we shed blood, we shed the blood of God; when we are in union
with another we are in union with God..."-Shoni Labowitz |
| Let's face it, sexuality plays a big
role in our lives, but where does
sexual morality come from? For most of us, Jewish and Christian or neither, our views on sexual morality come from the bible. The writings of the Ancient Israelites has shaped the way we live from the way we behave in church, to the way we behave in the bedroom. Despite the prevalence of morality shaped by the bible, is it actually relevant to our culture today? Can a culture that existed thousands of years ago prescribe ways in which we should live? Do we even really understand the stories they told in the bible in the right context? What does it mean to be a woman? The bible gives us many stories about women and how they are supposed to behave. We are raised with these gender roles and are expected to adhere to them. However, the gender roles that biblical women subscribed to were developed out of a culture that is very different from ours. Should we still try to live up to the gender roles these women presented? Should we develop new ones? A History of Research Since the beginning of the Women's Movement in the 70's there has been an increase in women trying to reclaim the bible for themselves. Women such as Shoni Labowitz (1998) have made it a priority to retranslate the bible and claim it for women. Men have also started to join in finding a new way to understand the bible. In his book, Women in Ancient Israel Under the Torah and Talmud, Arthur Ide (1982) provides readers with a very refreshing look at how patriarchal interpretation has shed a negative light on women. He goes through the book of Genesis demonstrating how thousands of years of patriarchal interpretation have given Eve a bad wrap. David Mclain Carr (2002) has also published a book that is revolutionary in its ideas on how sexuality and the bible can fit together and how we are suffering as a result of the denial of our sexual selves. He claims that to honor God and live our lives fully as humans we need to embrace our sexuality. This topic has expanded beyond print and launched to the big screen. The Good Book of Love: Sex and the Bible released in 1999 has also addressed the popular translations of the bible and discussed them in a new light. The documentary looks at popular biblical texts and addresses the sexual undertones of those stories and tries to get its audience to look past the obvious meanings from our modern interpretation and understand them in the context they were written in. Despite the plethora of information on both gender roles prescribed by the bible and new translations and reclamation of sexuality in the bible, none of the current literature except for Carol Myers' Discovering Eve (1998), has attempted to mesh the ancient world with our modern translations. As a result, my research will attempt to expound on Carol Myers' base to find out how Ancient Israel and the writings that came from it, are relevant to our culture today. A New Approach One of the best ways to understand biblical morality is to understand the society in which the Ancient Israelites lived. We need to understand what type of environment they lived in and what was required for survival. By approaching the Israelite culture from an anthropological context instead of a religious one we can be more objective about how gender roles were developed and the context in which they were developed. From this point of view we can determine how similar our two cultures are and decide if the moral codes and gender roles that were prevalent in ancient Israel are still relevant to the modern world. Even though we have set theology aside in our approach to gender roles and morality in the bible it is important to address it as well. The nature of written Hebrew makes it extremely vulnerable to misinterpretation. If we take a look at ancient texts from a feminist point of view as opposed to a patriarchal one we might be surprised at what we find hidden within the text. Through this reinterpretation and reclaiming of the bible as a text for both men and women we can begin to decide if our "traditional gender roles" are actually what God intended. As a result, for this project I have decided to take an anthropological and sociological look at what life might have been like for the women in Ancient Israel. I think that looking at this information that comes from outside a biblical source is valuable because I can get a more objective idea of what life might have been like without the veil of patriarchal interpretation. I also feel that it is important to look at the significant biblical text in their original language to get past the centuries of reinterpretation and discover what the biblical text was written to say. After learning about Ancient Israelite women in context we can approach the issues of gender roles and sexuality from a diversity perspective. According to diversity feminism all women are different and what it means to be a woman in once context is not necessarily that same thing in another context. As a result, we may find that as women in a very different time an place we are very different from the women of Ancient Israel. |
| Sexuality, Gender Roles, &
the Bible |
Ancient Israel in Context |
Translations &
Reinterpretation |
| The Bible, Sexuality & Some New Ideas | Implications & Conclusions |
Works Consulted |
| Contact: stogrl@yahoo.com |