The Book of Books (38 page)

There is more about the perils of forbidden sex than the casualities of unjust, including genocidal, wars. It has been seized on so often and so forcefully to shape and order society in a form not always guaranteed to suit the best interests of the majority. Nor has it been kind to minorities.

Women who have sought abortion, for instance, have for centuries been driven to often criminally inadequate abortionists. They have faced persecution and ostracism. The Bible gives licence for the hounding of these women through its call on the sacred nature of the womb. In Job: ‘Did not he that made me in the womb make him? And did not one fashion us in the womb?' Isaiah: ‘Thus saith the Lord that made thee, and formed thee from the womb.' Jeremiah: ‘Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.' Psalms: ‘By thee have I been holden up from the womb: thou are he that took me out of my mother's bowels; my praise shall be continually of thee.'

There are those who agree with passion and sincerity that life begins once conception is under way and that to abort is to kill a living being. This has Church authority on its side; it has other supporters who see human life as sacred from the seed to the death. It takes no account of rape, accidents whose outcomes carry a variety of dangers and the claim or right of a woman to determine as far as possible the fate of her own body. It has been a bitter struggle and in some countries it still is. But increasingly the blanket negative of the Bible is being ignored. It is a similar story with contraception where again the Church's authority is now largely obsolete. Neither abortion nor contraception carry stigma any more except in a few remaining repressive boltholes. Fornication can still bring public opprobrium even in liberated societies.

‘Flee fornication' urges St Paul to the Corinthians. By which I take it he includes all extra-marital, including pre-marital, sex. To
the Galatians he includes it in a comprehensive listing: ‘Now the works of the flesh are manifest which are these: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lasciviousness, idolatry, witchcraft, hatred, variance, emulations, wrath, strife, seditions, heresies, envyings, murders, drunkenness, revellings, and such like: of the which I tell you before, as I have also told you in time past, that they which do such things shall not inherit the kingdom of God.'

Then there is homosexuality. Once again Paul is adamant: to the Romans he writes: ‘And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly.'

Leviticus was blunt: ‘Thou shalt not lie with mankind as with womankind: it is abomination.' This is in such contrast to attitudes in the classical world which Christianity challenged and then replaced that it is possible to see it as part of a conscious ‘difference', a rebuttal of the superiority of classical claims on the world. It is also worth noting that several commentators see and find homosexuality in the Old Testament – David and Jonathan – and in the New – the closeness of the disciples. The Spartan and the Apostolic elites have been thought to have much in common.

There are gay militants today who tear out of the Bible the page on which that verse of Leviticus is printed. Perhaps it might be better to put a note in the margin instead. ‘David and Jonathan' is one simple suggestion. Yet in some Christian countries – Nigeria is a leading example – Leviticus is held to be right and with St Paul speak for Church law. The Anglican communion is riven between the traditionalist Nigerian faction and a liberated faction determined to have homosexuals as priests and bishops. English Anglicans are uneasily trying to find a middle ground, not least by continuing their own long tradition of unobtrusively accepting homosexuality in their own priesthood.

There is the growing view that the Church should keep out of
private life. The boundaryless world of a hegemonic religion which believed it could direct and micro-manage not only life before birth but life after death and all that happened between these two, is, in the secular world, long gone and not missed. It is good riddance. In this regard, as with its edicts on women and homosexuality, the Bible dogmatists and literalists have suffered in direct proportion to people and nations becoming more tolerant. History is on the side of those attempting the choppy waters of increasing individual liberty and an increasing willingness to take responsibility for one's own destiny. The modern secular world has reached back to the classical world and the waters have closed over certain unsustainable prejudices in the Bible.

 

One of the positive aspects of the last century in Bible studies in the English-speaking world (and elsewhere, though for obvious reasons I am limiting myself to the English-speaking world) is the entrance of the feminist critique. This has not only identified the abuse and marginalisation of women in the Church and in the Old and New Testaments, it has refreshed their stories in the act of reinterpretation.

Some stories are hard to redeem – the rape of Tamar, Jepthah sacrificing his daughter, Lot offering his daughters to the men of Sodom, and the many cases in which women are the property, the enslaved, of men.

At times it can seem that one of the closet aims of the Bible is to calumniate women. Some of the key verses which feminist commentators use to show the Bible in what understandably they see as its true colours include this from Paul's Epistle to Timothy in the New Testament: ‘Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence.' And Paul to Corinthians: ‘Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not
permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.'

Not surprisingly, it was the Quakers, in the seventeenth century, who found an authoritative voice to challenge all this. Margaret Fell, a northerner, known as the ‘Mother of Quakerism', would have none of it. In her book
Women's Speaking Justified
, she found key biblical arguments to support the place of women in Church leadership. As in the British Civil Wars, the King James Bible found itself as ammunition for both sides of the debate.

Curiously, given the apparent obsession in the Old Testament with woman as the source of evil, the wicked seducer, the harlot and the temptress, it is in the Old Testament that certain verses appear which are the pillars for a new non-misogynistic world. Margaret Fell goes to Genesis: ‘And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel.' There is an undeniable equality here.

Margaret Fell also points out that in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Psalms and Revelation, the Church is known as a woman. Therefore to speak against women is to speak against the Church. Christ's teaching mission is also invoked. Mary Magdalene has already been referred to, but Margaret Fell points out that in the Gospel according to St John, Jesus preaches equally to women and to men. He preaches to the Samaritan woman at the well and to Martha, both of whom testified to their belief in Christ as the Messiah at a time when few others accepted Him.

She rebuts Paul's admonitions by imagining that he was speaking of irreverent women and ungodly women only. Margaret Fell appears to have set in motion what has eventually become a thriving and intellectually satisfying re-examination of the place of
women in the Bible and therefore in Western history. It is not difficult to leap from Margaret Fell's seventeenth-century Quakerism to the formidable and numerous feminist scholars of today.

Among them are David Baker who studied the Pentateuchal stories and pointed to the mother-centred voices that challenge the patriarchy which is so much in the foreground. Then there is Musa Shoman-Dube who starts with the adage that when the white man met the African, the white man owned the Bible, and the African the land. Soon it was reversed. This not only brings in the colonialist heritage but, tellingly, includes the story of the Canaanite woman's daughter. In another book which she edits, Musa Shoman-Dube introduces the subject of women in African oral storytelling. In establishing a new balance, it can help to depress the prominence of men.

Barbara J. Essex's book
Bad Boys of the Bible: Exploring Men of Questionable Virtue
subjects to scrutiny the heroic and moral status given to Adam, Cain, Abraham, Lot, Jacob, Jepthah and Samson. Several books examine the women who saved the life of the child Moses abandoned in the bulrushes. Jane Schalberg in
The Illegitimacy of Jesus
suggests that is just what it was – a normal but illegitimate birth. This, if true, would establish an ‘illegitimacy tradition' and could open up ‘fuller human and deeper theological potential'.

James I, whose name is so closely associated with the 1611 Bible, was a biblical scholar, widely erudite, but also, as King James VI of Scotland, a notoriously zealous persecutor and executor of witches. The great majority of these were women and every one, we can safely assume, was innocent. Every one of these women was victimised in large part because of a masculine, controlling, darkly sexually charged obsession with the alleged evil brought into the world by Eve. Four hundred years after the King James's
publication it is a new generation of the daughters of Eve who are rolling back 2,000 years of perverse and destructive prejudice.

It is a vigorous, positive analysis which has reformed traditional ideas by discovering deeper and other possibilities latent in the very stories that once denigrated and all but denied half the human race. The women of modern scholarship have liberated the women in the Bible and led them out of Egypt. Material in the Bible has proved the defence of what was most offensive about it. Those whom it tried to silence have used it to speak out and claim their equal rights.

For centuries, men used the Bible to reduce the great majority of women to little more than objects, vassals, marginal creatures. In the last century, women have used that same Bible to reinforce the liberated, complex, rich history and future of women. When God is referred to nowadays, it is very often as
She
.

THE BIBLE AND WOMEN

A
s early as the seventeenth century, women began to outnumber men in the congregations in the Protestant, especially the nonconformist, churches. Sometimes the attendance was two-thirds women, one-third men. In the more radical groups, like early Quakerism, women were given roles denied them by all other Churches. It became a currency of congregational conversation that, as Richard Allestree, an English clergyman, and Cotton Mather, a minister in Massachusetts, said, women were more spiritual than men. Men, they thought, inverting Eve, were slaves to passion. ‘Devotion is a tender plant,' said Allestree, ‘that requires a supple, gentle soil; and therefore the feminine softness and plyableness is very apt and proper for it . . . I know there are many Ladies whose Examples are reproaches to the other Sex, that help fill our congregations, when Gentlemen desert them.'

Mary Wollstonecraft was to abominate that stereotyping of women, but in one way it was a useful beginning. Without the stereotyping as pliable, docile, devoted, there might have been a lesser chance of women beginning their long journey, still unfinished, to equality in the Church. Those remarks of the Anglican Richard Allestree were radical in that they challenged and contradicted the great Church Father St Augustine – enemy of
Eve – who had condemned the uncontrolled passion of women, their sinful wilfulness.

Women came to see the Church as a place in which they could fight their cause. Politics were barred; universities were barred; the law barred them from its offices. But the Church had chinks in its armour and the rapiers of clever and brave women pierced it. It provided a path both to join and to challenge the Established Order.

Mary Astell, for instance, whom Diarmaid MacCulloch describes as ‘a celibate High Church Anglican Tory with a lively interest in contemporary philosophy', attacked John Locke, whose philosophy of freedom excluded half the human race; and in the 1690s, set out her own version of Christian feminism. ‘That the custom of the world,' she wrote, ‘has put Women, generally, in a state of Subjection, is not denied; but the Right can no more be proved from the Fact, than the Predominancy of Vice can justify it . . . one would . . . almost think that the wise disposer of all things, foreseeing how unjustly Women are denied opportunities of improvement from
without
, has therefore by way of compensation endowed them with greater propensions to Vertue, and a natural goodness of temper
within
.'

A century later, another gentlewoman, from Devon, Joanna Southcott, a Methodist, gave vent to visions and prophecies that led to a large-scale apocalyptic movement which retained female leadership, despite challenges from men who wanted to be at the forefront of this uprising. Joanna Southcott's box of prophecies which caused so much alarm and excitement is still to be opened – but only in the presence of twenty-four Anglican bishops.

There were others. Two Scottish sisters for example, Isabella and Mary Campbell, said to be of rare holiness, spoke in unknown tongues and inspired what became a charismatic and
widespread Pentecostal movement. In 1853, a Congregational Church in New York ordained Antoinette Brown as a minister; the first woman outside the Quakers to hold such an office in modern Christianity. Women volunteered for missionary work, the Great Awakening released into activity thousands of women who made the Church their transport through society and the King James Version their guide. These and many others were the forerunners who pointed the way to the ‘Bible Women' who did so much to alleviate the scarcely credible destitution of the poverty-stricken.