Welcome back to season five of Enter the Bible, a podcast in which we share "Everything You Wanted to Know about the Bible...but were afraid to ask."
In episode 14 of season 5, our hosts present their sixth Lighting Round!
Watch the video version on YouTube.
Do you have Bible questions you would like answered? Go to our website at https://enterthebible.org/about to get started.
This episode of the Enter the Bible podcast was recorded on July 26, 2023 on Riverside.
Welcome to the Enter the Bible podcast where you can get answers or at least reflections on everything you wanted to know about the Bible but were afraid to ask. I'm Kathryn Schifferdecker.
And I'm Katie Langston. And today on the podcast, we're doing another special Lightning Round, cue sound effects, in which we have the opportunity to take just a few questions that have come in on our website and try to answer them a little in sort of rapid succession, rapid ish succession would say, um, and, and if you, gentle listener and or watcher on the YouTube would like to submit your own question, you may do so by going to Enter the Bible. Org And we try to get to as many of the questions as we can. Most of our episodes are listener submitted questions, so it's a great way to to participate in this project and get some answers to your questions in the process. So please do so. So we kind of clumped three together. That came in sort of as a theme from several different listeners. So we'll take them in this order. One is what do you look for in resources about women in the Bible? Second is, did God instruct Eve directly not to eat the fruit from the tree of knowledge? And third is what does the Bible say about female CEOs where male employees are working for them? So very, very intriguing questions. I'm excited to talk about them. So first, what do you look for in resources about women in the Bible? Kathryn. Well, what do you look for?
What do you look? Well, you look for someone who's reliable, I suppose. Arthur, that's reliable. I assume that the person means, like: Can you suggest resources about women in the Bible?
Sure. Yeah.
So I'll mention a few. And maybe you have some to add, Katie, I think. Well, first of all, if you went to any online search engine or if you went to Amazon or whatever, you would find lots and lots of books on women in the Bible. Some of them, many of them especially on Amazon, probably more devotional and then many that are academic as well. And not that those two are mutually exclusive, but there's, you know, different purposes for each, I suppose. So I'll probably I'm going to talk a little more about the academic side because that's the one I'm more familiar with. But there are plenty of really fine devotional books on women in scripture as well. But let me mention just a few that that are kind of more scholarly or academic. Probably the one that comes to mind first for me is a book called The Women's Bible Commentary.
A stalwart of mine,
Sometimes abbreviated WBC. It's published by Westminster John Knox Press So Women's Bible Commentary. I think it's in it's I know it's at least in the third edition, maybe even the fourth edition. So it's kind of been a really important work in the academic study of the Bible. And it takes it has essays on women in scripture and women in various parts of the Bible. And it has the main part of it is it has an essay, a long essay a chapter on each book of the Bible kind of from a women's perspective or from a feminist perspective. This is a feminist biblical commentary. So they're trying to lift up the voices and the people, the voices of women in Scripture and the perspectives of women especially, because often we don't hear that, or at least you have to search a little bit harder for women's perspective in Scripture than for men's. So women's Bible come in commentaries, really highly regarded and well researched and a good book. Um, there's another book called Women in Scripture. I'll hold it up here. It's a, it's a thick, big book, as is the Women's Bible Commentary. This is a number of different scholars. But Carol Meyers is the general editor who's, again, very highly regarded scholar. The subtitle is A Dictionary of Named and Unnamed Women in the Hebrew Bible, the Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical Books and the New Testament. So long subtitle, but it has entries. It is as a dictionary so fairly short entries on various things like the daughters of Hannah or the mother of Ichabod, wife of Phinas or women attending the wife of Phinas. So it's, you know, both named women and unnamed women in the Bible. And it has brief entries on all of those. So if you're looking for kind of an exhaustive list of all the women in Scripture, look at the book of Women in Scripture and then two more I'll mention. Women in the Bible is a recent publication from 2020 by Jame Clark- Soles. I do not have it on me, but I would recommend that as well. It's again a recent publication, Women in the Bible. And then one that's really interesting is called Rediscovering Eve, which relates to our second question in our Lightning Round. Rediscovering Eve subtitle Ancient Israelite Women in Context. So but that's also by Carol Meyers. The really interesting thing about this is it was first published, I think, in the late 1980s or 1990s, and it was called Discovering Eve. And so this is kind of a re: a new edition called Rediscovering Eve. And the really interesting thing about this particular book is that it takes archaeological and anthropological studies. So it's not just the women talked about or mentioned in scripture, but it's also what Meyers is trying to do. Carol Meyers is to understand what the life of an everyday Israelite woman might have been and looking at archaeological finds like, you know, What did the what's how was the household constructed? What kind of tools do they find that women might have used? So it's a really interesting book. It's, from the title, obviously, Ancient Israelite Women in Context is more concerned with Hebrew Bible or Old Testament than New Testament. But obviously there's a lot of overlap there. So. So yeah, if you want to think about or discover what the everyday women in biblical times might have been doing and their role in society, I would highly recommend that. So those are the ones that come to mind for me.
Yeah. So I kind of took this question a little bit more theoretically. So it's like, what are you looking for in resources about like more like broadly, what are the types of things that you would look for? So I think there's like a few things that for me would be true of a resource, whether it's about women in the Bible or kind of anything, right? Is first of all, I would look for a resource that takes seriously the biblical text that, you know, I prefer resources that are both thoughtful and faithful, right? So they're not afraid to like ask questions about the text, kind of come from a starting point of acknowledging or or believing that the Bible to be the word of God in a kind of very, um, in an important way, right. In a way in which it, you know, matters for our lives. And you can't just toss out the parts that are hard to deal with and also is willing to deal with the parts that are hard to deal with and ask questions. And so that's, that's sort of the space that I like to look for in any sort of resource. This question like and we'll, we'll talk more about this on this episode, but sort of this question about women's roles in the Bible, women's roles in the church, women's roles in leadership. This is a fraught question. Um, and so there can be a lot of material out there that's kind of coming from a particular almost political agenda. And um, it's not that I won't read those sorts of things or I'm unwilling to engage with or think about or have conversations about those kinds of things. But I'm more interested in resources that, you know, that are, are, are willing to ask questions and aren't like super dogmatic on, you know what I'm saying? Like that sort of thing. Which leads me to a question that I'm curious about to explore with you, Kathryn, when you know, you sort of mentioned that the first the Women's Bible Commentary was you called it a feminist kind of a feminist perspective. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, because I think there's. Uh. There are there are ways of hearing this is "this comes from a feminist perspective" or whatever that kind of has certain implications for how the text is read. And I'm thinking particularly friends, I'm going to throw out kind of a big word here and I'm very sorry. We'll unpack it a little bit. But there's something called a hermeneutic of suspicion that comes out of feminist and also womanist, which is looking at the text not just from women's standpoint, but from the perspective of women of color or people that are have been historically kind of oppressed peoples. And and there's this idea of reading the Bible with a little bit of suspicion to say, you know, I don't know that that, you know, that that that wasn't written for me or about, you know, that was written about me but not by me isn't written for me. And I'm going to be suspicious of the text. And so I wonder if you would maybe just share a few thoughts about reading the Bible with that perspective and other alternatives, even as a woman that you might use to, you know, to unpack the text.
Oh, that's a great question, Katie. Yeah. So feminist biblical scholars. There are a lot of them, a lot of really, really fine ones. Um, and have and they've done us a great service in many ways of lifting up voices that we might not otherwise hear, such as just as one example, the voice of Hagar, Sarah's Handmaid sort of, you know, to use the King James version versus the King James term, right? That that Sarah gives Hagar to Abraham and there's all kinds of problematic things about that. And she bears Ishmael So, so Hagar has been the focus of a lot of, for instance, Womanist biblical scholarship and feminist biblical scholarship. And so there's certainly some, some great treasures of feminist biblical scholarship that we would not otherwise get. I think when we when we listen, when we read for and pay attention to these folks in scripture like Hagar, who might not otherwise get much airtime, so to speak. Right? So so there's some great gifts of feminist biblical scholarship. I would probably not call myself a feminist biblical scholar. Not because I dislike it, but because it's not the questions that interest me as much as some others that that I like to pursue. And because, as you say, feminist biblical scholarship operates out of a hermeneutic of suspicion, hermeneutic just being a big seminary word for how you read something, but particularly in this case, how you read scripture. And so a hermeneutic of suspicion approaches the text from, from a suspicious standpoint, right? Like and may even read against the text or and what do I mean by that? Reading the text in a way that the text itself probably didn't or the authors of the text didn't intend for it to be read. That's what I mean by reading against the text. So that hermeneutic of suspicion. It doesn't take the Bible at its word. You might. Or at face value. Maybe that's a way of putting it. And? And it asks hard questions and sometimes rejects parts of the text that just seem beyond redemption. Right. There's lots of feminist biblical scholars, particularly, I would say in the 80s, 70s, 80s, even the 90s that really just rejected whole stories, whole parts of scripture as being anti-woman and not redeemable. And that's why I have trouble myself just speaking personally with with that kind of hermeneutic of suspicion because I. I like what you said earlier, that we that the kind of sweet spot, at least for me, where I where I feel like I can learn the most is a scholarship that is inquiring and critical and you know, and, you know, using your brain and using your reason but also faithful. In other words, also holding up scripture as word of God and reading it or at least trying hard to read it in such a way as not to ignore the hard parts, but also not to throw them out. So to use the example of Jacob wrestling with the angel, right, that I think that sweet spot is wrestling with the text until it yields a blessing. Because you know, if you throw out everything that is uncomfortable or everything that is potentially uncomfortable, you lose a lot of theological richness. And I would I would um, I'm thinking about some of the episodes we've already done, like with Ellen Davis or with John Levinson. I think with John Levinson, we talked about one of those really difficult texts, the binding of Isaac or the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis 22, right? You miss a lot of really deep theological riches if you just throw that out. So I operate, I guess, more out of a hermeneutic of humility before the text or a hermeneutic of generosity, trying to read generously, trying to put the best construction on what the text is saying.
Yeah, I remember when I came to seminary, I was I had I mean, I had completely deconstructed to use like a word that's out there on Twitter or X or whatever it is now that I'd completely deconstructed the faith tradition of my upbringing, which was Mormonism for, you know, I think most of you know that by now that I've talked about it enough on this podcast, but I'd completely deconstructed it. I'd been like, Oh, this, this isn't true. And along with that, I, I just wasn't sure what to do with the Bible at all because on the one hand, I still really believed. I mean, it was, I was a jumble, right? I was a theological jumble, but I still really believed in God and I'd had very profound experiences with Jesus. But also the Bible had been used in ways that were and other Mormon scriptures that they have that had been very hurtful to me and had been used in kind of abusive and coercive ways. And so I, I was very suspicious, you know, of the Bible. And I came to seminary. And one of the things that you said, Kathryn, in our kind of intro to Bible class was you talked about a hermeneutic of generosity, which isn't again, it's not not asking questions and it's not it's not not wrestling with it or it's not unthinking, it's not not having problems with it even and being like, well, I don't like that, you know, like you're allowed to say, I don't like that. That doesn't make sense to me, what's going on here, whatever. But at the end of the day, the question is, how could this be? How could this be good news? How could there be a blessing to be gained out of this? And I have found just sort of personal testimony. I have found that operating from that perspective, I have yet to meet a text that I haven't been able to wrestle a blessing out of. I've yet to meet one. Now, you know, I haven't wrestled with every single passage in the Bible. I'm sure. I don't know some of those Leviticus ones that we talked about with Cory Driver like those were hard, you know, but it's there to be found. And so anyway, this has turned into a bit of a bigger conversation than just like, what do you look for in resources about women in the Bible? But for me, it sort of raised some of these kind of ancillary or additional questions about how do we approach Scripture generally. So
Yeah, I think, I think it's important to talk about that. So thanks for thanks for bringing that up. Cool.
Uh, so, yeah. So. Question two. Yeah. Shall we?
Let's do it.
All right. So I'm going to let you answer this one, because you are the Old Testament, Professor. Did God instruct Eve directly not to eat the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge?
All right. Well,
I thought he did. But am I wrong?
So this the person who submitted this question and thank you to whoever submitted that question is reading the text really closely. And so I commend them for that. Um, so here's here's just the details. So we're looking at Genesis two and three, just a few verses here. So Genesis two talks about the creation of Adam or Adam. The Lord God creates Adam out of the dust of the ground and breathe, breathes into his nostrils, the breath of life. Then in verse 15, it says, The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to till it and keep it. And the Lord God commanded the man: you may freely eat of every tree of the garden, but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You shall not eat. For in the day that you eat of it, you shall die. And then in the very next verse, God says, It's not good that the man should be alone. I will make him a helper as his partner. So it does seem to be the case that God tells Adam, or Adam, this earth creature, this command, before Eve is even created out of Adam's rib. So in that sense, it could. The answer to this could be that no, God didn't instruct Eve directly. Uh, you know, because. Because God gives the command and then Eve is is created. However, in chapter three, you know, the serpent shows up and says, Did God say he says to Eve or the woman did God say, you shall not eat from any tree in the garden? And the woman said to the serpent, we may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden. But God said, you shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it or you shall die. So it's interesting that she adds that, you know, nor shall you touch it because God just says don't eat from it. Um, so. So she knows the command. Whether she heard it directly from God or not is not is a bit ambiguous. It could be that, according to the story that Adam tells Eve about the command, that seems the most likely explanation. But it could also be that God reiterates the command to Eve. The point is, she knows better and Adam knows better. And so don't think you know what I sense from this question is. You know, because God didn't instruct Eve directly, then she doesn't bear any culpability for disobeying the commandment. I don't think you can really make that argument because obviously she knows the commandment and she goes ahead and eats and Adam eats as well. So yeah, I guess that's all I can say about it. You can't. The text does not say God instructs Eve directly, but she knows the commandment, so she must know it somehow. I sense behind this question though, also, you know, this is a long, long, long history of interpretation of Eve. That is not fair. That is really bad, right? Like think of Saint Augustine, who otherwise I love a lot of Augustine, but he really places a lot of blame on Eve for sin, you know, for sin entering into the world. And yeah, I don't think that this story can bear all of that weight. Right. It's not Eve's fault. Uh, she bears some responsibility. Certainly. And so does Adam. But it's not completely her fault that, yeah, Of disobeying this command. I remember in college, one of my professors said something like: You know, if people say. Woman was the last created and the first to sin. Then you should respond to that. You know, to that criticism, you should respond. Woman is the last at the crucifixion and the first at the resurrection. So there's. Yeah. You can't, yeah, you can't lay the blame for sin or evil on the step of any of half the human race and not the other half. Right?
Right. Yeah. Good. Which I think leads to our third question quite nicely, which is, what does the Bible say about female CEOs where male employees are working for them? And my fast answer is absolutely nothing, because there was no such thing as female CEOs in antiquity. Well, CEOs in general. Exactly. CEOs in general, Yeah. Are quite a recent development. So the answer to that is the Bible says nothing about it. However, like you were noting, the question behind the question, what I hear behind this question has to do with female authority. And does the Bible say that women can't lead men? I think that's kind of more the question that this person is asking. And as we are both ordained pastors and also women, I think we have some thoughts about that question.
Actually, we before we hit record, we were laughing a little bit like, does this come from the female CEO? Does this question come from the female CEO or from the male employee under the female CEO who is trying to find some excuse for not being...
To not have to listen to her? Yeah, right.
Yeah. Anyway, thank you for the question. But yes, this is it's a huge topic and probably we well, we certainly can't do justice to it, especially in a lightning round where we are coming towards the end of our time. But so yes, there are some texts, particularly in the New Testament, about female authority. We'll just mention a couple of them, Ephesians ,in Ephesians five, 22 through 30 in particular. This is part of the household codes, as is 1 Timothy 2, especially verse 12. And you know that women shouldn't, basically the gist is women should not be in authority over men, particularly in the church, particularly also in the household. So what do we do with that? And as Katie said, both she and I are ordained female pastors in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. I grew up in a Lutheran church body that did not and still does not ordain women. The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod. I left the Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod because I felt a call to ordination and I thank the ELCA for accepting me. Right. So yeah, I've dealt with this in my own life as well. And there's lots of good writing on this, lots of good, good scholarship. Let's just mention a few things. One is that there are lots of examples of female leadership in Scripture itself, not I should say I said lots, but there's, there's a significant amount, even though obviously both in the Old Testament and New Testament, it's a patriarchal culture. But there are women who take leadership. So one that comes to mind for me as an Old Testament scholar is Hulda. Hulda is a female prophet in 2 Kings Chapter 22. We don't know much about her at all. But what we do know is that King Josiah, who's really one of the best kings in Israel's history, and he's a king of the southern kingdom of Judah. Josiah consults Hulda about a theological matter or about an important matter. The book he authorizes a kind of an upgrading of the temple or a what's the word I want? A renewal of the temple. And as that's happening the book of the law is discovered, which is probably some form, some core of the book of Deuteronomy. And so Josiah King Josiah doesn't know what to do. And so he goes to consult Hulda the prophetess, the female prophet, and she tells him, instructs him on what he should do. And there doesn't seem to be any issue, right? There's no big deal made of that, that this prophet particular prophet is a woman and she..
That she's teling the king what to do and the king's like, okay, yeah, I'll obey. I'll obey you the. Yeah .
I mean that's certainly an example of female authority over not just a CEO, but a king. So that's one example. I would also mention Lydia in the New Testament. And there's lots of other examples of this. But Lydia in Acts Chapter 16 is a dealer in purple cloth, which in the ancient world or in the New Testament world, is very expensive, very expensive textile. And a dealer in purple cloth would be a woman of means, a person of means. And she listens to Paul, Paul' preaching and Paul's companions. And she converts. She becomes a Christian. The Lord opened her heart to listen eagerly to what was said by Paul when she and her household were baptized. She urged us, saying, "If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come and stay at my home." And she prevailed upon us. So much like many of the women who surrounded Jesus in the Gospels and supported him in his ministry. So Lydia also supports Paul in his ministry and has her whole household baptized. She has authority over all those in her household, so she's a woman of some material means. Who is, yeah, is important in the early church.
She might be the best equivalent we have of a CEO in the Bible. Yeah. She happens to be a woman. Yeah. You know. Yeah.
It doesn't say her husband is the merchant. She's the merchant. She's the business woman.
She is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And there's lots of. There's also lots of places where women are instructed to, to teach, to prophesy, to lead. So again, it sort of comes back to how do we read the Bible, how do we read these texts? And so we were talking about in that first question, you know, when we're wrestling a blessing, one thing I tell folks when they are struggling with something is to read the Bible in conversation with the Bible.
Yeah.
So you have here, right? We don't have to be afraid if there are seeming contradictions in the text that that's okay because it is a conversation. The Bible itself is a bunch of different books from a long time in, you know, lots of different people in different cultural contexts and historical periods. And so here there are there are conversations, there are contradictions. And that's part of what it is to be faithful and to wrestle with the texts and to wrestle with our tradition and to wrestle with the faith is we put those things in conversation and we and we ask questions about, you know, well, what could be going on here, What could be going on there? And like Kathryn said there's great scholarship that would talk about how these particular passages that seem to say that women should be silent are probably pretty culturally bound pretty specific, aren't necessarily meant weren't intended to be read as like broadly applicable for all time. But we're like dealing with a very particular situation in a very particular time and place with a particular set of problems that were arising right then and there. And similar to, you know, how we might read Leviticus now or other texts that are we don't necessarily cross apply every single thing that was ever said and like try to like follow all those things right, because we look at the broader thrust of Scripture and can read different texts in conversation with each other and say, oh, okay, you know, that's part of what the discernment process is. It's part of what wrestling with the text is, and that's part of what living faithfully is like. Have some of those questions and to be in dialogue with the Bible, even as the Bible is in dialogue with itself.
Yeah. Yeah. Excellent point, Katie. I think that metaphor of a conversation is really helpful, that the Bible itself is a conversation between different voices, and there's an ongoing conversation both within Scripture and about Scripture through the centuries. You know, I mentioned Saint Augustine earlier in this podcast. He's he's of those voices, but he's not the only voice. I think the other point that you made, I think is worth emphasizing again, too, that a lot of these instructions are kind of culturally bound. So there are other texts in the New Testament that talk about women should keep their hair covered in worship. Well, I know there are churches that take that very literally, very, you know, small churches that take that literally. But you have to remember that though scipture is word of God, it is also from a particular time and a particular place, especially in those instances where it talks about particular customs. So if women didn't have, you know, had their hair uncovered, that would be a scandal to the wider culture. And the message of the gospel would be obscured by that, you know, by that by people being offended by that custom. So Paul says, you know, should, to take an entirely different example, should you eat meat offered to idols, right? And he says, sure, no problem. Right. You can eat meat offered to idols, but there's nothing inherently wrong with that. But if it causes your brother or sister to stumble in their own faith, if they're so offended by that practice, then just don't do it right. Take care of your, you know, the sensibilities of your siblings in Christ. So I see a lot of these instructions in, for instance, in Ephesians in first Timothy in that way. Right. That kind of that was then and this is now that you know, for a woman to have authority over a man in the household or in church might have seemed, would have been so against societal norms that it would have caused people not to actually hear the gospel. That's how that's how I read it. So another really important text before we leave this topic is from Galatians three. Uh, let's start in verse 27. So Paul writes, As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek. There is no longer slave or free. There is no longer male and female. For all of you are one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham's offspring. Heirs according to the promise. There's these divisions, right? Divisions in the ancient world, divisions in today's world and the ancient world is between Jew and Greek or Gentile. Greek was a term used for kind of non-Jews, slaves and free people, male and female, very hierarchical society. We have some of those divisions or similar divisions in today's world, right? So in Christ, though, all or one, those divisions don't matter anymore. It's not that they disappear. There are still, you know, God seems to delight in diversity and in different sorts of people and different ethnicities and all of that. Those divisions don't disappear, but they aren't the most important thing. The most important thing is being a disciple of Jesus, a child of God being called by God, clothed in Christ and free in Christ to be who God has called you to be and to be in community with one another. So in Christ there is no slave or free. There is no male or female because all are one in Christ. And that's where we find our basic identity in in all of these questions of identity. So hopefully that gets at some of the question behind the question a little bit.
Yeah. Cool.
Paul Certainly also, even though he speaks about sometimes in beautiful ways like that in Galatians, sometimes in more hierarchical ways, he also instructs people to respect authority. I think that's another kind of general thing we can say about Paul. So if you have a female CEO, show her the respect that she has earned by her position and her hard work.
Awesome. Well, thank you so much. This has been a rich conversation and appreciate all of the wonderful questions that you have submitted. Thank you for being a part of Enter the Bible, for sending in questions and listening and watching on YouTube. I invite you to head over to Enter the Bible. Org to continue the conversation and to explore more about the Bible and submit your own questions. And of course, if you enjoy this podcast, if you think it's worthwhile, please subscribe. Leave us a review on iTunes and share the podcast with a friend.