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Reframing Her: Biblical Women in Postcolonial Focus
by Judith E. McKinlay
Sheffield Phoenix, Sheffield, 2004. 195 pp. $60.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-905048-00-9.
A settler-descendant resident of Aotearoa New Zealand, Judith McKinlay takes up the painful task of engaging in a postcolonial feminist reading from the perspective of the colonizer. She analyzes the ways in which biblical narratives about women function to construct a relationship with the Other/Outsider that legitimates the identity and power of the Insider Israel, regularly interweaving these biblical perspectives with issues in the historical and contemporary relationships between Maori (indigenous) and Pakeha (colonizer/settler) groups in her homeland. In her work she gives extensive attention to Sarah and Hagar, Rahab and Ruth, and Jezebel and other non-Israelite women in the Elijah-Elisha cycle (the most extensive section). She also examines the story of the Syro-Phoenecian woman of the New Testament Gospels and the female figures of the Book of Revelation. Each of these women is “reframed” not just once, but over and over again, as each is considered from different perspectives of multiple cultural settings within the biblical period and Aotearoa colonized/colonizing settings over time.
This is an important book. McKinlay takes up in a significant and respectful way the challenge set most notably by Musa W. Dube (in Postcolonial Feminist Interpretation of the Bible, 2000) that women from a colonizer’s social location should take up the self-critical task shown them by the interpretations of biblical characters done by colonized peoples. McKinlay’s distinctive style in presenting her work is especially appealing. Writing in the first person, she guides her reader along her own journey of exploration of the texts, indicating her questions, then possible answers, often deliberately setting aside one question until another can be explored, then returning to the first when more data is in hand. Students could learn much about the art of exegesis through her example. Working with cultural contexts over time and reading intertextually, McKinlay treats us to reprise after reprise of these biblical narratives, each time opening our eyes to fresh possibilities.
It must be said that this is not comfortable reading. The very purpose of the book calls for reading “against the grain,” questioning the rightness, for instance, of our easy praise of Rahab for assisting the Israelite conquerors, or of Ruth for her willingness to “assimilate” to Naomi’s world. Yet in today’s world of clashes among cultures and faith traditions, in which the balance of power is perpetually uneven, readers in both church and academy must give attention to the hard questions McKinlay raises for us.
Katharine Doob Sakenfeld
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey
Constituting the Community: Studies on the Polity of Ancient Israel in Honor of S. Dean McBride, Jr.
edited by John T. Strong and Steven S. Tuell
Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake, 2005. 331 pp. $49.50 (cloth). ISBN 1-57506-078-7.
It is not often in the critical study of the Old Testament that a scholar writes a single, brief, programmatic essay that fully establishes the identity of the scholar and that invites an entire generation to engage with and respond to a single hypothesis. But so it is with Dean McBride, who in 1987 published a rather small, not very technical article in Interpretation that has since preoccupied scholars. In that article, he proposed that the Book of Deuteronomy was not sermonic or instructional, but was intended as an offer of a public polity, a constitution that proposed an ordering of public power in Israel through a separation of powers that would curb aggressive and acquisitive authority and thereby protect the life and future of individual persons. McBride further proposed that this offer in Deuteronomy stands as a primal and original model for what eventually became a theory and articulation of democratic constitutionalism in the modern world. (Norbert Lohfink had made a parallel argument, only his interest was primarily in curbing the authoritarian tendency of the Roman Catholic Church).
This present book in honor of McBride is a collection of critical essays by the most influential people in the field, most of them senior now (alas!) and close friends and coworkers with McBride. Along with the new essays, the volume reprints classic articles by Frank Moore Cross, his Harvard teacher, and by James Mays, McBride’s colleague at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond.
The articles are organized according to the three conventional canons of the Hebrew Bible. The focus variously is upon the authority of Torah, the power of kingship and the counter claims of prophecy, the power of priesthood, and the organization of social power in the postexilic community. The essays by Paul Hanson and Sibley Towner move the argument somewhat toward contemporary issues.
In a season in our society in which the Bible is popularly reduced to the thinnest and most individualistic ideological reading, it is bracing to have such witness to the public dimensions of biblical faith and practice. The contemporary need to curb large concentrations of power, corporate as well as governmental, is beyond doubt. The perspective of this book provides a basis for such biblical interpretation; even though the essays themselves do not carry the argument very far toward contemporaneity, the invitation is there for such work. The book is a formidable one, befitting the singular and formidable work of McBride, who is properly honored here by his most distinguished colleagues.
Walter Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary
Decatur, Georgia
Rewriting Moses: The Narrative Eclipse of the Text
by Brian Britt
T&T Clark, London, 2004. 208 pp. $49.95. ISBN 0-567-08087-0.
Brian Britt analyzes biblical and post-biblical representations of Moses in order to explore ancient and contemporary ideas of scriptural tradition. By “narrative eclipse of the text,” Britt means the tendency to efface biblical details and complexities in favor of related, but different, stories. Part I shows how ideology, aesthetics, philosophy, and politics lead modern novels and films to “rewrite” Moses, drawing attention away from biblical portrayals to latter-day visions of Moses as a great man, revolutionary, or magician. An “interlude” focuses on Moses’ veil, surveying and interpreting its appearances in—and disappearances from—the Bible and Christian art. In Part II, Britt turns more fully to the biblical Moses, analyzing Moses’ speech impediment and, at some length, the closing chapters of Deuteronomy.
This volume serves multiple functions for diverse readers. Anyone interested in modern representations of Moses will appreciate the chapters on Moses in novels and films, and Britt provides a helpful overview of modern biblical scholars’ approaches to “legend” and “history” in the biblical stories about Moses. Readers interested in artistic representations of biblical characters and theological concepts will also benefit from his analyses. Part I and the Interlude thus enrich any study of the influence and impact of biblical and post-biblical Moses traditions. Britt’s exegeses of passages from Exodus and Deuteronomy in Part II are the best (and most straightforward) part of the book and would be helpful to anyone studying those texts.
Reading Rewriting Moses can be fascinating, but also somewhat frustrating. Some sections flow smoothly, but others make for difficult reading. Readers should be prepared to interrogate Britt’s unexplained presuppositions. Britt occasionally cites certain theorists, especially Walter Benjamin, almost as if their judgments were authoritative, self-evidently correct pronouncements in need of no justification. Some readers may judge that Britt uses psychoanalytic and post-structuralist concepts too freely. For example, Britt maintains that films that end before Moses’ death repress that death, and Moses’ veil and speech impediment turn out, in his analysis, to somehow thematize the relationship between authority, speech, and writing. Yet even readers who disagree with some of Britt’s approaches can benefit from the book, for it does hold value for anyone studying perceptions and portrayals of Moses in the ancient, medieval, and modern worlds.
R. Christopher Heard
Pepperdine University
Malibu, California
Leviticus–Numbers
by Lloyd R. Bailey
Smyth & Helwys, Macon, 2005. 648 pp. $65.00 (cloth). ISBN 1-57312-060-X.
This commentary on Leviticus–Numbers is the ninth volume to appear in a new series by Smyth & Helwys, beginning with Walter Brueggemann’s commentary on 1 and 2 Kings in 2001. The series uses a multi-media format including art, charts, maps, a complex series of sidebars, and a CD-ROM that facilitates a wide array of searches. The goal is a series of commentaries that are more easily accessible to a “visual generation of believers.” The result is an attractive, though hefty and expensive, volume with numerous illustrations, charts, and boxes that allow the reader a wide variety of entry points.
Lloyd Bailey has the difficult task of not only luring readers into the strange world of Leviticus–Numbers, but addressing why two books so fundamental for the synagogue have become so overlooked by the church. He does so in a wide-ranging style that includes extensive discussions of levels of meaning in the scriptures and proper relationships between the testaments. His primary focus is on the final form of this material, located in a setting of exile, when matters of worship, dress, and diet, and the challenge to trust and obey God, became the primary means of survival for Israel. Seen from this perspective, “every morsel of food raised acutely the question of identity, of obedience to God” (p. 147).
Repeatedly and provocatively, Bailey asks whether a strategy that has proven vital to the synagogue in the past should be so easily set aside by the church in the present. “It may well be true that Christians ‘ought not to need such tangible reminders.’ . . . Nonetheless, the fact is they did need them, and the fact is that Christians need them today as well. ‘Ought not’ is a poor predictor of reality” (p. 148).
The urgency of this argument, as well as the depth and attractiveness of the presentation, make this commentary worth the price, and the space—even on already full shelves.
Richard Boyce
Union-PSCE
Charlotte, North Carolina
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