AF Dispatch

Women of the Bible

The "daughters of Eve" play a number of roles in the Old and New Testaments

INTRO
The Daughters of Eve
Most of the women in the Old Testament defy male authority when it is unjust.
OLD TESTAMENT
Eve: The First Rebel
The first woman was a risk taker and a rebel, not a temptress or victim.
Sarah and Hagar: Dueling Mothers
Both women bear a son for the patriarch Abraham, and therein lies the drama.
Zipporah: The Woman Who Stood Up to God
For mystery, mayhem, and plain weirdness, nothing in the Bible comes close.
Bathsheba: Wife, Mother, Queen, Object of Royal Lust
This tale of sex and politics resonates even today: a sly lover, a king weakened by lust.
Jezebel: The Reigning Icon of Womanly Evil
Few in the Bible are more equated with evil, but this temptress had her good side.
Esther: A Clever Heroine
The beautiful orphan who becomes queen of Persia and saves her people from destruction.
Ruth: Mixed Message
It’s a short book, but her story lends itself to a wealth of conflicting interpretations.
Dirty Rotten Men
Biblical bad boys you wouldn’t want to have over for dinner.
Delilah: One Fiesty Femme
Her life is a morality play, a feminist discourse, or a caution to lovesick men.
Deborah: Facing Down ‘900 Chariots of Iron’
In answering God’s call, she became a singular biblical character: a female military leader .
NEW TESTAMENT
In Search of the Real Virgin Mary
The peasant girl from Nazareth embodies Christianity’s thorniest paradoxes.
A Warm Protestant Welcome for Mary
Focus on the mother of Christ is no longer seen as Catholic territory.
Behind the Cult of Mary
Devotion to the Virgin Mother is a surprisingly controversial affair.
Mary Magdalene: A Long Miscast Outcast
Long misunderstood, she was none of the things a pope claimed she was.
Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code
Many significant elements of the popular novel are incorrectly taken as accurate.
Mary and Martha: Two Models of Christian Devotion
New scholarship points to different layers of meaning in the sisters’ story.
Salome: A Deadly Dance
Her seductive and deadly dance has inspired artists and playwrights for centuries.
Phoebe, Prisca, and Junica: Three Stalwart Sisters in Faith
We owe much to her and two other unsung heroes of the early Christian church.
The Feminist Hit List
Here are the 10 Bible verses women most love to hate.
_______________________________________

Daughters of Eve
Posted January 25, 2008

The women portrayed in the pages that follow all played decisive roles during the thousands of years covered by the biblical narrative. What is particularly intriguing about them is that most of them circumvent male authority in a patriarchal society, and some even subvert it. Even more remarkable is the fact that these women, other than the ruthless Jezebel,are never punished for their unconventional conduct. On the contrary, the biblical scribes treat the women with deep sympathy and are sensitive to their plight. All of them, with the exception of Jezebel, are rewarded for their boldness.

Most of the women defy male authority when it is unjust or fails to answer their needs or those of their family or people. They belong to a patriarchal society in which men hold all visible power, and their options are few and stark. Given these circumstances, the women challenge, seduce, and trick.

They take risks, and some, such as Queen Esther and Judah's daughter-in-law Tamar, are prepared to stake their lives on the outcome. Both Tamar and Ruth are widows who would be doomed to a life of poverty and anonymity but for the initiative they take in devising careful plans of sexual seduction. Not only do the men respond, but the descendants of their acts of seduction become progenitors of the House of David generations later. Both women are rewarded for the risk they take to ensure the survival of the family.

We are drawn to their vulnerabilities as much as to their strengths. Like the timeless heroines of the Hebrew Bible, we too struggle to love, to parent, to succeed in relationships, and to make our way through the labyrinth of a dangerous world. In each of the stories, the women are the protagonists around whom the action revolves.

The young Eve speaks to us with her optimism as she leaves the Garden of Eden with her man to start adult life in the real and imperfect world. Our heart aches for Sarah, who, with the best of intentions, puts another woman into the bed of her husband, Abraham, to produce the son she cannot conceive. The illicit and passionate love affair between David and Bathsheba, although it matures into a long-term marriage, raises serious and troubling universal issues. These are but a few of the compelling stories of the women of the Bible whose lives resonate with us today.

Now that women have begun studying the biblical text in substantial numbers, feminist scholars and others have begun writing much about women in the Bible. Some of them feature fighters like Deborah, the biblical Joan of Arc,who leads the Israelites in battle, and the midwives Puah and Shifrah, who save Hebrew male babies despite Pharaoh's edict to drown them in the Nile.

Another heroine is the prostitute Rahab, who risks her life to help Joshua's spies escape from Jericho. While the Bible recounts the actions for which these heroines are remembered, it tells us nothing about their interior lives and processes of decision and thus gives few clues how we can emulate them today.

Except for Delilah and Jezebel, these are women with whom many of us are able to identify and who interact with the men in their lives with surprising results. These intelligent, brave women dare to take the initiative. They are assertive, unwilling to be victims in the face of overwhelming circumstances. They are not looking for ways to raise their self-esteem, nor are their lives directed by a need to "feel comfortable."

What keeps them going despite adverse circumstances is the power of a purpose-driven life and an all-embracing faith—values that demand both a long-term view of history and a decisive, resourceful approach to the immediate present.

One is hard put to find in them a hint of alienation, cynicism, or ennui. On the contrary, they convey a can-do approach to life as they prevail, overcome, and refuse to bow in the face of overwhelming odds. They make and execute their imperfect decisions to the best of their abilities, and they are willing to acknowledge and live with the consequences of their actions—the essential meaning of the responsibility and accountability that accompanies free will, God's greatest gift to humans.

The legal status of biblical women is unequal to the status of men. Women are second-class citizens living under the authority of the head of their family, usually their fathers or husbands. And yet, surprisingly enough, thewomen are neither downtrodden nor crushed by stern, brutal patriarchs.

Within the family, the women wield enormous power. When they see their family or their tribe in danger, and the men fail to act, women fill the vacuum, taking the risks and assuming responsibilities for the destiny of their people.

The narrative also suggests that women are a metaphor for all minorities struggling to make their voices heard. The women's situation is analogous to that of the Israelites, a tough, small people set among more powerful pagan cultures. In biblical times, polygamy was practiced widely. Yet each polygamous family portrayed in the Bible is unhappy. Whether the problem is the rivalry between Rachel and Leah, the two sisters married to Jacob, or between Hannah and Peninnah, both married to Elkanah, or the conflicting demands by David's many wives and their feuding children, the biblical authors subtly point out the disadvantages of a polygamous marriage.

In contrast, Sarah and Abraham form a distinctly monogamous marriage within a polygamous culture, as do Rebecca and Isaac. In the Garden of Eden, too, we have one woman and one man. The narrative makes clear that an intense relationship between husband and wife in a polygamous marriage is nearly impossible. The presence of multiple, contending wives dilutes all the relation-ships within the family unit. The Bible strongly implies that polygamy does not work, that monogamy is a preferable structure. The intensely committed personal and loving relationship between one male and one female parallels the intensely committed relationship between one human and God.

In the Old Testament, sexuality is by no means a secret, sinful, or forbidden subject. Instead, sex is discussed with remarkable openness and with no trace of prudishness. We are carried away by the beautifully written Song of Songs, as it celebrates in explicit terms the sensual love between Shulamite and her lover. The Bible regards sexuality as the Creator's gift, integral to all human life, a tool for strengthening the bonds of intimacy, trust, companionship, responsibility, and commitment.

On the other hand, sexuality can also be abusive and selfish. The Bible's unvarnished realism does not spare us this aspect of human ambivalence. The Israelite hero Samson becomes addicted to Delilah's sexual favors. She hands him over to her people, Israel's enemies, who blind, torture, and imprison him. The worst example of sex as a destructive force is Amnon's inexorable plot to rape his virgin half-sister Tamar, King David's beautiful daughter.She staggers out of his house, her life forever ruined.

The Bible instructs even as it entertains. It does not whitewash any aspect of human psychology or conduct. It draws the reader in by exposing its protagonists' feet of clay. No one is spared critical comment or the depiction of unflattering weaknesses—and no one is above the law. The women, like their men, are responsible for their actions and the consequences. The women and the men are neither saints nor sinners, and, interestingly enough, their actions are treated with equal candor.
The stories of the women in the Bible offer us a prism through which to consider our own lives. After all, human nature has not changed one iota since the day Eve questioned the rules in the Garden of Eden in response to her God-given drive to acquire knowledge and create life. The outcome is the first exercise of free choice and the first lesson in personal responsibility and morality.

In his 1955 book God in Search of Man, Abraham Joshua Heschel writes, "Among the many things that religious tradition holds in store for us is a legacy of wonder." In these words, we hear an echo of the biblical narrators who ,thousands of years earlier, offered a similar observation in the book of Proverbs, attributed to King Solomon:

There are three things which are too wonderful for me,
Yea, four which I know not:
The way of an eagle in the air;
The way of a serpent upon a rock.
The way of a ship in the midst of the sea;
And the way of a man with a woman.

Contemporary readers of the Bible may wish to append a final line: "And the way of a woman with a man."

From After the Apple: Women in the Bible: Timeless Stories of Love, Lust, and Longing by Naomi Harris Rosenblatt. Copyright © 2005 Miramax Books

Eve was a Risk Taker, Not a Temptress or Victim
The first rebel
By Naomi Harris Rosenblatt
Posted January 25, 2008

It all started with Eve, the mother of us all. The story of the first humans, Eve and Adam, opens the Bible with a tangle of loneliness, companionship, desire, and love. It tells how woman, made in the Creator's image, gives up a life of ease in an idyllic setting, along with the promise of immortality, and instead chooses to pursue wisdom and intimacy with her man. Locked within the story of the first couple is a matrix for all the male-female partnerships that follow.

The invisible mover behind the scenes is an all-knowing, loving God who sets all the elements in place: a man, a woman, the lush garden, the talking serpent, the fruit-bearing trees. In the story the Creator teaches us about the exercise of free will, the need to be responsible for the consequences of our actions, and the bumpy road to growing up.

The setting is idyllic. We envision Adam enjoying the company of playful animals. Wonder fills his soul as he watches birds soaring across the sky. He runs with the beasts, climbs tall trees, and skips flat stones on the river's surface. The Garden of Eden is an ideal playground, a place of innocence where life is beautiful and safe, lacking all challenges.

In this lovely setting, however, "no fitting helper for Adam was found." Adam has no other creature that walks upright and is able to contemplate both heaven and earth. No other living being cries or laughs like him. And no other creature talks. Adam has no one with whom to communicate feelings or exchange ideas.

Surveying all he has created, God observes with compassion the loneliness of the human being among the animals. He says, "It is not good for Adam to be alone; I will make a fitting helper for him." The Creator acts quickly, first anesthetizing Adam and then performing surgery: "So the Lord God cast a deep sleep upon the man; and, while he slept, he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh at that spot. And the Lord God fashioned the rib that he had taken from the man into a woman."

Adam is now unquestionably male, and Eve is his female counterpart. Is God aware of the energy he is unleashing by separating the human into man and woman? Or has woman been part of his secret plan all along? The Hebrew word tzela is customarily translated as "rib," but another of its meanings is "side"—as in the side of a house, or an essential component of the whole.

The term suggests that if you remove the "side," the structure falls apart.

That woman is made from man's "side" tells us that they are two halves of a once intact whole. On the one hand, man now has a separate companion from whom he can gain a different perspective. On the other, after they are separated, each half pursues the other, yearning to become one again. As the Bible puts it: "Hence, a man leaves his father and mother and clings to his wife, so that they become one flesh." With this passage, the Bible indicates the potential for man and woman when they join together in mind, heart, and body to pursue a single goal, most fruitfully expressed as offspring.

God did not consult man about the creation of woman. Adam did not ask for a companion; he was not even aware of the deficiency in his life. Woman, like man, is entirely the Creator's idea. Both are created in God's image, which means they have free choice, and both are thus morally and spiritually equal in his eyes.

The Creator "brought her to the man," and he presents her with a courteous flourish. Man is instantly moved to poetry: "This one at last / Is bone of my bones / And flesh of my flesh."

Now man has a "fitting companion," different but equal, who stands upright and laughs and cries and talks like him. Both are naked, but neither is ashamed. They are as innocent as infants romping at the beach.

The Bible introduces the idea of the need for companionship before it even mentions sexuality and procreation. By introducing this concept first, the Bible makes the point that the companionship we offer our mates is the most enduring and rare gift we can bring to an intimate relationship. Sexual desire—although indispensable—may ebb and flow, but the need for companionship is constant. One rabbinical commentary suggests that woman was created second so that man could experience loneliness and more fully appreciate his partner. Another opines that as Adam named the animals as they passed by him in pairs he commented: "Everything has its partner, but I have no partner."

In the Garden of Eden, God designates one tree off limits, and he warns man never to touch its fruit on pain of death. The forbidden fruit is that of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The Hebrew word for knowledge, da'at, means sexual knowledge. "To know" is the biblical verb that implies more than the sexual act alone. It is an elegant euphemism for the intimate and sensitive understanding that evolves over time within a sexual relationship.

Lurking about the forbidden tree is a serpent, "the shrewdest of all the wild beasts." Sidling up to the woman, it asks if God really forbade eating fruit from the trees of the garden. She corrects the serpent: "God allows the eating of the fruits of all trees, except for the one in the middle of the garden." She recites God's edict (presumably told to her by Adam): "You shall not eat of it or touch it, lest you die." The serpent tells the woman: "You are not going to die, but God knows that as soon as you eat of it your eyes will be opened and you will be like divine beings who know good and evil."

The serpent, a phallic symbol and fertility idol in cultures across the world, is a reflection of the sexual yearnings stirring in the woman's body and soul. The serpent cunningly addresses the woman's unconscious and casts doubts. Woman, however, is not easily swayed. She is not rash; she takes her time and deliberates; she is aware that the punishment for disobedience to God will be severe. She is alone when the serpent works to persuade her, but then she is with Adam when she finally reaches for the fruit. "When the woman saw that the tree was good for eating and a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was desirable as a source of wisdom, she took the fruit and ate. Then she gave some to her husband, and he ate."

Eve deliberates before eating the forbidden fruit, but Adam devours it without hesitation and without questioning the consequences. The fruit has an instantaneous effect: "Then the eyes of both of them were opened and they perceived that they were naked; and they sewed together fig leaves" to cover their private parts. Before eating the fruit of the forbidden tree, they had nothing to hide either from their Creator or from each other. But afterward, they become self-conscious, ashamed. Privacy thus becomes part of human sexuality.

The repast of fruit in the garden is a defining moment in the human saga.

Soon the first couple's repertory of emotions expands to include shame, guilt, and desire. Man and woman begin the awkward and painful transition from the innocence of childhood to sexual awareness, awakening, experience, and accountability. It is the beginning of puberty and maturation.

Woman's sexual awakening goes hand in hand with the life force, the drive to procreate. She must attract the man to her because she cannot conceive on her own. God knows that woman will be the first to take advantage of his gift and be drawn to the forbidden tree. In accord with his grand scheme, Eve is biologically, genetically, and mentally designed to perpetuate the species. Like every woman after her, she is born with all the eggs she will need for every child she will ever bear.

Embedded in this charming allegory of sexual awakening is the gap between the female and male sexual response. Woman's arousal is gradual and internal, enlisting all her senses and emotions, as described in Eve'sdeliberations before tasting the fruit. We imagine the process she goes through before she is persuaded to take the ultimate step. "And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food and that it was a delight to the eye, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and did eat," the Bible says. The procreative drive has been awakened and overwhelms all other considerations. For the woman, the consequences of a sexual relationship can be much more serious than for the man. She is the one who becomes pregnant. Her decision is therefore slower and mored eliberate than the man's.

Eve reaches out to Adam, holding the fruit. In contrast to the female, the male is immediately susceptible to any sexual invitation. Observing the ease with which man accepts the forbidden fruit, woman has already learned that man succumbs easily to sexual temptation. The female ignites the flame of his desire by her mere presence or through the subtlest of means—a smile, flattery, the offering of an apple—and the male is immediately seduced. This theme of man's instant responsiveness runs through the Bible.

Hearing God moving about in the garden, man and woman panic and hide. God calls out to man, "Where are you?" He replies, "I was afraid because I was naked, so I hid." God asks, "Who told you that you were naked? Did you eat of the tree from which I forbade you to eat?" Man's immediate defense is to blame the woman as well as God: "The woman you put at my side—she gave me of the tree, and I ate." God then turns to woman: "What is this you have done!" She replies, "The serpent duped me, and I ate."

Both man and woman shirk their own responsibility by blaming someone else. Man could have chosen to protect woman, who has just fed him and given him pleasure. He could have said that she did not force him to partake of the fruit. Woman could have explained that she chose to trade immortality in the Garden of Eden for knowledge and wisdom. Like man, however, she disavows any accountability for her action.

Eating the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is the first independent act by the human beings in the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve cannot be said to have been fully aware of the extent of their transgression because they did not yet have knowledge of good and evil. Theyd o, however, know that God has told them explicitly not to eat of that tree. In that respect, they are like children, who may understand that certain behavior is expected but do not fully understand why.

Like any concerned parent, God wants his children to learn to accept responsibility for their actions, however painful it may be. Indeed, God has lovingly provided all of the arrangements in the garden—a secure life, the edict against one tree—but also the capacity for free choice that will cause Adam and Eve to mature. He knows perfectly well where the humans are in the garden, but he asks his question, "Where are you?" to draw the story out of them and begin the process of moral development.

God becomes angry not so much at the act of disobedience but at Adam and Eve's avoidance of responsibility. Significantly, the word sin is not introduced in the Bible until later, when Cain murders his brother, Abel. It seems that Adam and Eve's worst transgression is their scapegoating, and the couple's moral life will finally begin when they can acknowledge having done wrong.

Seductive and aggressive, a narcissist, the serpent is deemed the archvillain of the story. It proves more articulate than man, and its courtship of woman is as ardent as it is cunning. It is involved with the woman strictly for its own pleasure and gratification. The serpent derives perverse excitement from successfully tempting Eve. It is a villain because of the baseness of its motives, not because of the act it encourages. The serpent began its existence standing erect, an image that suggests sexual enticement, and according to rabbinical tradition, that is how it spoke to the woman. God disapproves of this narcissism and severely punishes the serpent. No wonder we call a sneaky, selfish person "a snake"!

God tells the serpent, "Because you did this, more cursed shall you be than all the cattle and all the wild beasts." God's first punishment reduces the offending serpent's entire species to the humiliation of crawling and eating dirt.

Having meted out his sternest punishment, God then turns to woman: "I will make most severe your pain in childbearing; in pain shall you bear children; yet your urge shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you." Even with modern medicine, giving birth is not free of pain or risk. After birth, however, a protective amnesia sets in, and the life force within the mother prevails. Memory of the pain recedes, and the woman once again desires sexual union with her partner. That, too, is part of God's grand design. The suppression of the memory of pain in childbirth is part of a fundamental optimism about the future, about hope and a new beginning.

Next, God addresses man: "Because you did as your wife said and ate of the tree about which I commanded you, 'You shall not eat of it,' cursed be the ground because of you; by toil shall you eat of it all the days of your life: Thorns and thistles shall it sprout for you. But your food shall be the grasses of the field; by the sweat of your brow shall you get bread to eat, until you return to the ground—for from it you were taken. For dust you are, and to dust you shall return."

Significantly, God's edict that man must till the soil to bring forth food follows immediately after his pronouncement on woman's role—"He shall rule over you"—linking their roles as complementary. It is clear that Adam and Eve's relationship is about collaboration, not subjugation. Woman is to bring forth life with pain, but she will also derive satisfaction from watching her offspring mature. Man is to eke out a living by the sweat of his brow, but he will also be feeding his family with a sense of accomplishment.

The humans' reactions to God's judgments go unrecorded. God's devastating final punishment—"For dust you are, and to dust you shall return"—is followed by an apparent non sequitur: "The man named his wife Eve [Hava in Hebrew], because she was the mother of all the living."

This name highlights Eve as the archetype for all women, whose unique role is to give life. It is the first of rare husband-to-wife compliments in the Bible; it is also hardly the contrite admission of guilt that might be expected in response to God's stern edicts. Instead, man and woman participate in the ritual act of giving a name, which suggests Adam's appreciation for his wife's action. He has stopped blaming her.

The next sentence exemplifies God's compassion and mercy. He upgrades the fig leaves they wear to "garments of skins for Adam and his wife." His gift of clothing protects his children from the elements outside the garden. The garments also portend the beginnings of aesthetic appreciation and, with it, civilization.

Adam and Eve's expulsion from the Garden of Eden is necessitated by a second tree in the garden, one previously mentioned but playing no part in the story thus far. God, mysteriously using the royal we, observes: "Now that man has become like one of us, what if he should stretch out his hand and take also from the tree of life and eat, and live forever!" Now that man has breached the previous demarcation by gaining knowledge of good and evil, the Creator is determined to draw a line between the human and the divine; human beings are henceforth destined to live as mortals. God not only banishes Adam "to till the soil from which he was taken" but also "drove the man out, and stationed east of the Garden of Eden the cherubim and the fiery ever-turning sword, to guard the way to the tree of life."

Eve and Adam leave their father's protective abode, as children must. God knows it is time for them to face life as adults in an imperfect world. The heartbroken parent appoints a guard at the garden's gate to prevent Eve andAdam from regressing to a childhood devoid of adult responsibilities but also to prevent himself from softening and allowing them to return.

The Garden of Eden offers a life that is comfortable and risk free. Yet Eve rejects the stultifying monotony of her perfect, paradisiacal life. As she gazes at the forbidden tree of knowledge, she seems to ask, "What good is life without the wisdom that arises from experience?" Passing by the tree of life, she might muse, "Of what use is immortality without knowledge or growth?" Eve wrestles with humanity's first moral dilemma and takes the first moral action recorded in the Bible when she crosses the limit set by the all-knowing God.

The reader sees Eve and Adam leaving the Garden of Eden full of optimism. They are not at all the tearful, dejected couple portrayed in Renaissance art, expelled by a furious father. The first thing they do is make love and create new life. What better way is there to teach us about pleasure and responsibility, behavior and consequences, than through the knowledge that the fleeting gratification of lovemaking produces a child with whom parents share a lifelong bond?

Generations of male commentators have accused Eve of being a disobedient seductress who led innocent Adam astray, thus bringing pain and suffering and death to all humankind. But a close reading of the Bible actually points in quite a different direction.

The biblical chronicle suggests that Eve's sole motivation is curiosity, the starting point that leads ultimately to wisdom. It is Eve who forces open the gates of Eden so that all of us may benefit from the vast, perilous realm of human potential that lies beyond the garden. It is her daring choice that unlocks the sexual knowledge essential to the creation of new life.

The biblical term "to know" is a graceful summing up of the intimate and in-depth understanding that grows over time in a sexual relationship. Only when a man and a woman really "know" each other over time and under many different circumstances—as companions, partners, lovers—will they risk revealing their most private feelings and responses to each other.

The most sobering sentence in God's judgment is "Dust you are, and to dust you shall return." This is how Eve and Adam learn that life is finite. The words "from dust to dust," however, further proclaim a universal truth that is neither the tragic consequence of the first couple's disobedience nor a punishment. Our goal as humans should not be to try to escape death but instead to embrace life and savor its challenges and gifts.

Eve is the one who chooses knowledge over immortality. She tastes the fruit from the tree of knowledge and forgoes the fruit from the other tree, the tree of life. She manifests no interest in immortality, despite God's concern about humans' pilfering from the tree of life. The narrative implies that the trade-off of immortality for knowledge and experience is complete.

When Adam and Eve become mortal, they become fully human. Death confers a sense of urgency to life; the fact of death tells us that whatever we do is important, that we must not procrastinate.

Contrary to popular understanding, Eve is not a manipulative temptress; nor is she a gullible victim who succumbs to temptation. On the contrary, Eve is a risk taker, a woman who dares to question the limitations imposed on her and her helpmate. She is driven by the need to create new life. She is the one who determines the future of humankind. She is a heroine, and her story is the template for the stories that follow. The women in the Bible are part of a long line of Eve's descendants—women who use their powers to work everyday miracles in a patriarchal world.

From After the Apple: Women in the Bible: Timeless Stories of Love, Lust,and Longing by Naomi Harris Rosenblatt. Copyright © 2005. Miramax Books

Why Scholars Just Can't Stop Talking About Sarah and Hagar
Dueling mothers
By Julia M. Klein
Posted January 25, 2008

Surrogate motherhood. The Arab-Israeli conflict. The oppression of the underclass. Sounds like a roundup of headlines from the nightly news—if the media were in full swing back in biblical days. All of these timely issues can be found in the twist-and-turn-filled story of Sarah and her Egyptian handmaiden, Hagar. According to the biblical account, both women bear a son for the patriarch Abraham. From that starting point, scholars have gone on to explore varying (and sometimes contradictory) layers of meaning in this classic tale of family rivalry.

"On one level, this is the first example of surrogate motherhood," says Naomi Steinberg, associate professor of religious studies at DePaul University in Chicago and author of Kinship and Marriage in Genesis (Fortress Press, 1993). Hagar, a slave, is never asked to consent to bearing a child, so the narrative, Steinberg says, raises the timeless issue of"upper classes exploiting those with fewer options."

While Jews traditionally see themselves as descendants of Isaac, Sarah's son, Arabs and Muslims trace their lineage to Hagar and Ishmael. African-Americans have appropriated Hagar, impregnated by her master and cast out into the desert, as a symbol of the plight of the slave woman. Feminist scholars say the story reflects the male-dominated societies of the times—or that it misrepresents the cooperative relationships that more likely existed among women.

The story of Sarah and Hagar begins in Genesis 11. Sarah, then called Sarai,and Abraham, called Abram, marry and wander the Near and Middle East. A famine sends them to Egypt. To protect himself from rivals who covet his wife, Abram asks Sarai to say she is his sister. An admiring Pharaoh thereupon takes her home and thanks Abram with a generous gift of livestock and slaves. But God afflicts Pharaoh with "great plagues," foreshadowing the story of Exodus. Pharaoh reconsiders and hands Sarai back.

Abram and Sarai end up in the city of Hebron, where he complains to God, who had promised him offspring, that he is still childless. Sarai offers him her slave woman, Hagar, and says: "It may be that I may obtain children from her." But after Hagar conceives, she looks upon Sarai contemptuously—or so her mistress believes. In return, Sarai treats the pregnant Hagar harshly, and she flees into the desert. An angel orders her back, telling her that her "wild" son is to be named Ishmael, meaning "God hears."

When Abram is 99, God comes to him and affirms his famous covenant, renaming him Abraham and promising that he will be "the ancestor of a multitude of nations." He decrees that Abraham and all his male descendants must be circumcised—and promises a child to the 90-year-old Sarai, now renamed Sarah. Both husband and wife laugh at the news.

In Genesis 21, God's promise to Abraham is finally fulfilled, as Sarah gives birth to Isaac. But she frets over whether Ishmael will also be Abraham's heir. God tells Abraham to do as Sarah wishes, so he sends Hagar and Ishmael into the desert with only meager food and water. As Hagar begins to despair, God speaks to her, promising that Ishmael will become "a great nation" and showing her a well that saves both their lives.

Archaeologists have found no evidence attesting to the existence of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar. Yet the story of Sarah and Hagar does reflect real historical concerns, including the paramount importance of inheritance in Middle Eastern societies of the second millennium B.C.

These ancient societies were "patrilineal" and "patrilocal," says Steinberg: Inheritance passed through the male line, and the bride was expected to live with the groom's family. These societies also practiced "endogamy," or marrying within certain kinship limits. "That explains why ultimately Isaac, the son of Sarah, was chosen as Abraham's heir rather than Ishmael, the son of Hagar," Steinberg says. In the biblical account, Abraham at one point identifies Sarah as his half sister, although Steinberg believes a better translation would be "kinswoman."

Alice Bach, Archbishop Hallinan Chair of Catholic Studies at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and author of Women, Seduction, and Betrayal in Biblical Narrative (Cambridge University Press, 1997), says that the taking of secondary wives was a common practice in ancient Israel. "What Abraham did to [Hagar] was completely legal," she says. "If your wife cannot have children, you can have children by your wife's slaves, and the child becomes yours." And polygamy is certainly one way to ensure that a patriarch can reproduce. Abraham converts his "power and resources into women andc hildren," notes Laura Betzig, an anthropologist and historian who has studied sex in the Bible.

The story can also be seen as a reaffirmation of both divine and male supremacy. "One thing women can do that men cannot do is conceive and bear a child," Bach says. But Sarah's conception of Isaac makes clear that "God—who in those days was [considered] male—was more powerful and could open or close a womb."

Miriam Peskowitz, professor of rabbinic civilization at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia, is among those who dispute the traditional picture of Sarah and Hagar as rivals. "I think the story's at odds with the way people would have lived," she says, with cooperation among women being essential to survival in the desert. In fact, she says, "the story is less about Sarah and Hagar and more about the Bible's repeated insistence that only one son can be the favored son."

Muslims, however, see both Isaac and Ishmael as legitimate heirs, says Khaled Keshk, assistant professor of religious studies at DePaul University.

In the Islamic tradition, if a man sleeps with a slave, he says, "the slave is free, and the son is never born a slave." Muslims also believe that it was Ishmael, not Isaac, whom Abraham was told to sacrifice, Keshk says. They credit Ishmael and Abraham with together rebuilding the holy city of Mecca; many of the rituals of the sacred pilgrimage, or hajj—including a sacrificial feast—are symbolically tied to the story of Hagar and Ishmael.

Like the Muslims, African-American "womanists" have redeemed Hagar. Delores Williams, author of Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-Talk (Orbis Books, 1993), says Hagar is "an analogue for African-American women's experience," from slavery to the problems of single mothers today." But she is seen not just as a victim but as a survivor.

Referring to Hagar's miraculous rescue in the desert, Williams says: "We say, 'God has made a way out of no way.' "

Christians also stake a claim to the saga. In Galatians 4, the apostle Paul attempts to convert it into an allegory about the triumph of Christianity.

He says that Hagar's son was born "according to the flesh" while Sarah's was "through the promise." In a passage that remains controversial, he says it is Christians, not Jews, who are the sons of the free woman. By claiming that "followers of Christ are the true inheritors of Abraham's covenant with God," says Elizabeth Castelli, associate professor of religion at Barnard College, Paul is performing "an extraordinary contortionist move" that "inverts the Jewish interpretation of his time."

The complexities of the Sarah and Hagar story continue to make it fertile ground for theological debate. That may be because, at their core, these biblical passages address the question "What does it mean to be a member of society-who's in, and who's out?" says Steinberg. "They're answering identity questions—from long ago and into the present."

Zipporah May be Obscure, but the Wife of Moses Mattered
The woman who stood up to god
By Beth Brophy
Posted January 25, 2008

Bizarre is typical of how biblical scholars describe the tale of Zipporah and her husband, Moses, especially the section in which God attacks Moses, and Zipporah uses a blood ritual to successfully defend her husband and son." For mystery, mayhem, and sheer baffling weirdness, nothing else in the Bible quite compares with the story of Zipporah and the 'bridegroom of blood,' " says Jonathan Kirsch, author of The Harlot by the Side of the Road.

The main plot of Zipporah's cryptic story, which contains a few large holes, is this: Moses, a fugitive from Egypt, where he killed a man for abusing a Hebrew slave, happens upon the seven daughters of Jethro, the Midian priest. The daughters are at a well in the desert, trying to water their sheep.

Using brute force, chivalrous Moses scares off some bullying shepherds who are harassing the girls. A grateful Jethro gives Moses his daughter Zipporah in marriage, despite their religious differences. They marry and have two sons, Gershom and Eliezer.

A few years later, after God speaks to Moses through a burning bush, Moses sets out with his family to return to Egypt to free his people from slavery. During this journey, a strange incident occurs one night in their tent. God tries to kill Moses. Zipporah, somehow sensing that God is angry that their son isn't circumcised, immediately grabs a stone and cuts her son's foreskin. Cutting away the foreskin from the penis is a sign of identification among Hebrews, according to God's covenant with Abraham. Then she flings the bloody foreskin at his feet (whether "his" in the story refers to God, Moses, or the baby is unclear, and feet may be a stand-in or a euphemism for genitals). Then she says: "Surely, a bridegroom of blood thou art to me."

Reading the crucial passage in its entirety doesn't clear up much. "And it came to pass, on the way to the lodging place, that the Lord met him and sought to kill him. Then Zipporah took a flint and cut off the foreskin of her son and cast it at his feet, and she said: 'Surely a bridegroom of blood art thou to me.' So he let him alone. Then she said: 'A bridegroom of blood in regard of the circumcision.' "

To this day, no one is quite sure what Zipporah meant, but it did the trick. She saved Moses, and he went on to lead the Hebrews out of slavery. However, despite her bravery and quick thinking, Moses doesn't treat Zipporah especially well or act particularly grateful. Moses sends her and the children away before the Exodus from Egypt. Later, they reunite, but he may have taken a second wife, a "Cushite" or Ethiopian woman.

Several mysteries in this tale leave experts baffled. Why did Zipporah, a woman, perform the circumcision? Which son was involved? Was God himself the attacker, or did he send one of his minions? Why did Zipporah and Moses separate? Is the "Cushite" or Ethiopian wife of Moses referred to in the text Zipporah or another woman?

Despite the many ambiguities, the main message of the story is clear, according to Kirsch: "The lesson the Bible intends is that God insists on circumcision as the essential symbol of the covenant of his chosen people. God is even willing to murder for failure to comply. He'll even kill Moses after recruiting him on his liberation mission. That's how important circumcision is to God."

In addition, Zipporah plays more than a supporting role in the future of the Israelites. "Moses is God's chosen messenger, the most important biblical figure after Abraham," says Kirsch. Yet, Moses is at risk of losing his life, except for the intervention of Zipporah. The entire fate of Israel rests with her. "She, the pagan daughter of a priest, stood up to God," headds.

Although Zipporah is an obscure figure in the Bible, she is depicted favorably, while Moses is "hapless, a total shirker, full of arguments about why he shouldn't be the one to go to Israel and lead his people out of slavery," notes Kirsch. Zipporah, on the other hand, is heroic, "decisive, fearless, strong, the competent person in an emergency."

Others draw out different themes apart from the importance of circumcision."To me, the main point is to show that the deity is not all benign. It can be dangerous for humans to be in the presence of God, unless they follow religious prescriptions such as circumcision," says Sidnie White Crawford, a professor of religious studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

According to Crawford, the story may also be saying that marriage to foreigners can be a good idea and work out well and that, within the family structure, women may be more active in the religious sphere than men. "Like Zipporah, it may be the women who are responsible for conducting the religious rituals," she says.

A new novel, Zipporah, Wife of Moses, by Marek Halter, puts a fictionalized spin on Zipporah by making her the "Cushite" or Ethiopian wife of Moses. Halter portrays Zipporah as a proud, black-skinned woman who refuses to marry Moses, even after bearing his two sons, until he accepts God's missionto lead his people out of slavery. In this version, it's Zipporah who changes the destiny of Moses and his people. "Zipporah is black, and a foreigner, and she poses the problem of how we relate to the other," says Halter. "Moses is ignorant, so Zipporah becomes his principal adviser." Zipporah, the outsider with black skin, helps Moses fulfill his destiny as a liberator of the enslaved.

Just as there are several interpretations of Zipporah's role in the biblical text, there are various interpretations of the literal meaning of her name.

"Tzipor" means bird in Hebrew. One theory, according to Rabbi Rebecca Alpertin The Women ' s Torah Commentary: New Insights From Women Rabbis on the 54 Torah Portions, is that before she was born, Zipporah's mother intuited that "like the purification offering of two clean, living birds, [her daughter] would be responsible for purifying her house." Another suggestion is that she "would take flight with this strange man, Moses."

In either case, Zipporah stays true to her role as a woman who acts bravelya nd decisively, not one who is acted upon.

Bathsheba is One of the Most Beguiling Characters in the Bible
Wife, mother, queen, object of royal lust
By Jessica Feinstein
Posted January 25, 2008

The setting, on a late afternoon in Jerusalem some 3,000 years ago, could easily be mistaken for the subject of a boudoir painting: A beautiful young woman bathes on the roof under the last rays of dusk, espied by the lustful eyes of a hidden admirer. Perhaps she looks like a Rembrandt nude—all dark shadows and pale flesh. Or perhaps she appears more like a Rubens, partially swathed in dark fabric and tended by her servants.

But no matter the serenity of the vignette—there is something amiss in this vision, a scene that seems wrought with irony. The admirer, King David, is not where he is supposed to be, on the battlefield with his troops, but instead has tarried at his palace. And the woman, Bathsheba, is married. King David inquires after her. He learns her name and the name of her husband, Uriah, a general in his army. And though he is normally a righteous man, with a harem already full of wives and concubines, the king succumbs to his overwhelming desire. He sends his minions to bring Bathsheba to the palace. "And she came in unto him, and he lay with her."

So begins a story of sex and politics that resonates even today. Most recently, President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky drew comparisons to David and Bathsheba: a king, made weak by momentary lust, and his lover, at times both powerless and slyly manipulative. David thinks all is squared away, and then Bathsheba sends word: "I am with child." The cover-up begins.

"The whole point of this story is about the flaws in David as an adulterer,"says Carol Meyers, a professor of religion at Duke University. "Bathsheba's role is part of a larger narrative plan."

David, the first king of a united Israel, conqueror of an empire running from the edge of Egypt to the Euphrates River in modern-day Iraq, is one of the Bible's greatest heroes. His life and his character are documented in the Old Testament's books of Samuel and the first of the books of Chronicles. In many ways, David is the Old Testament's golden child: a charismatic shepherd boy who manages to slay Goliath with a slingshot, a successful warrior, and later a pious ruler. As author Jonathan Kirsch wrote in his biography of David, David is "the original alpha male," the "first superstar." But every hero must have a fatal flaw, and David's unchecked lust for Bathsheba becomes his.

In contrast to David, Bathsheba's thoughts and her character are in most circumstances mute, well cloaked in the sparse lines of the Hebrew text. Some biblical scholars describe Bathsheba as articulate and willful, while others say those accounts consist of unsubstantiated speculation. But one thing about Bathsheba is clear: It is she alone who sparks a sudden transition in David's life. The implications of their affair will dominate his remaining years. Through the life of David and into the life of her son King Solomon, Bathsheba plays many roles: object of lust, wife, mother, and influential queen.

"I think she's among the most compelling and beguiling [women] in the Bible," argues Kirsch. "That's why so many people have been fascinated by her."

Debate over Bathsheba's character begins the moment she first appears on the roof. Was she simply an innocent bather, unaware of the stir she caused at the palace? Or was she something else entirely—a coy exhibitionist with a desire for a more powerful husband? Scholars also disagree over the nature of her bath. Danna Nolan Fewell, professor of Hebrew Bible at Drew University in New Jersey, says some scholars claim that modern notions of bathing—total nudity in a tub of water—do not translate to the historical reign of David. Others say that, because the Bible indicates that Bathsheba was cleansing herself after her menstruation, her bath was of a rather explicit nature. "When you look at the history of art, it's interesting to see that you have both the completely nude Bathsheba composed for the male gaze, and others show her just washing her feet," Fewell says. "You can't nail down whether Bathsheba was a victim or whether she was an agent."

In either case, Bathsheba has no choice but to comply when summoned by the king. And whether the consequence of that meeting—a pregnancy—is welcome to her or not is equally unclear. Bathsheba says only, "I am with child." Yet for so few words, they carry an import she must have understood. "Is that a cry of help, or is that manipulative?" Fewell asks. By confiding in David, Bathsheba actively puts him in a position of responsibility—a smart move, considering that, at the time, the penalty for adultery was stoning.

David acts quickly to conceal the affair. At first, he pins his hopes on Bathsheba's husband, Uriah, inviting him back from the battlefield and twice trying to get Uriah to sleep with his wife, in order to plausibly pass off the child as his. But with his troops still at war, Uriah refuses to enjoy the comforts of home. When all else fails, David orders that Uriah be placed in the front lines of the battle, where he will surely be killed. Once David receives word that Uriah has died fighting, he responds coolly, "The sword devours one way or another."

Once more, the Bible tells us little of Bathsheba's reaction. "The wife of Uriah" mourns for an appropriate period of time, then becomes David's wife. She may even have felt relieved. Certainly, the text does not indicate tha tUriah was a particularly loving husband.

But the sword that devours now hangs over David's own house. "The thing that David had done displeased the Lord," and both he and Bathsheba will pay the price. Soon thereafter, the prophet Nathan tells the king a parable: There are two men in a city, one rich and one poor. The rich man has many flocks of sheep, but the poor man has only one ewe lamb, a lamb he raised with his own children and fed from his own table. A traveler comes to the rich man one day, and rather than kill one of his own flock to feed the guest, the rich man takes the poor man's lamb. Thinking the story is true, David tells Nathan, "As the Lord liveth, the man that hath done this deserveth to die."Nathan replies, "Thou art the man." Delivering the message of God, Nathan recounts David's sins and curses him, saying, "The sword shall never depart from thy house." The shamed king bows his head: "I have sinned against the Lord." But David's admission of error comes too late. Nathan tells him, "The child also that is born unto thee shall surely die."

Although God singles out David as the sinner, Bathsheba also suffers a cruel punishment. Soon after the birth of their son, the child falls ill; on the seventh day, the child dies - innocent blood spilt in payment for sinful parents. It now seems likely that Bathsheba will withdraw into David's harem, a shamed wife, never to be heard from again. But the connection between David and Bathsheba proves to be more than transitory, and instead it seems that the tragedy draws them closer. Miraculously, God grants David a temporary reprieve. Bathsheba gives birth to a healthy son, the future King Solomon.

Most of David's previous marriages were arranged for political alliances.But David is drawn to Bathsheba by a powerful sexual attraction. Popular culture chooses to view their relationship as a classic romance—lust turned to love. In his novel God Knows, Joseph Heller envisions Bathsheba as the love of David's life, as does the 1951 Gregory Peck movie, David and Bathsheba.

But some biblical scholars caution against reading too much romance into the lines of the text. "There are a lot of times when you're told that people love David," Fewell says, referring in part to David's first wife, Michal,and King Saul's son Jonathan. "The word love is never used in the story of David and Bathsheba."

Whether or not theirs is a classic love story, David and Bathsheba share a powerful bond, and Bathsheba has three more children with David. As David lies on his deathbed, a man ruined by family strife, one of his sons, Adonijah, has already claimed the throne. Should Adonijah succeed David, his rival Solomon would find himself in great danger.

As David's power wanes, Bathsheba's grows. She reminds David of an oath he once may or may not have made to her that Solomon would inherit the crown. Even if he is being tricked, the king reproclaims Solomon his heir. In David's "house of intrigue," as Kirsch puts it, Bathsheba has learned how to manipulate the outcome in her favor.

As queen mother, Bathsheba occupies one of the most important positions in the land. Her transformation from a silent object of lust to a politically astute—and vocal—queen, is striking, yet understandable. As an older woman,she displays the wisdom gained from a lifetime as a politician's consort.

Yet, it is as a bathing beauty, and not as a power-player, that Bathsheba is best known. She sits at the head of a long line of sympathetic literary adulteresses: Emma Bovary, Hester Prynne, and Anna Karenina each owe something to the wife of David and the mother of Solomon. But perhaps Bathsheba is best honored by the 31st Proverb, which some traditions hold that she recited to Solomon on the day of his marriage: "Favor is deceitful, and beauty is vain: but a woman that feareth the Lord, she shall be praised."

Jezebel was a Killer and Prostitute, but She had Her Good Side
The reigning icon of womanly evil
By Michael Satchell
Posted January 25, 2008

No two biblical figures are more synonymous with evil than Judas and Jezebel. For more than 2,000 years, they have evolved as such enduring symbols of male treachery and female depravity that it's highly unlikely any Christian children have ever been baptized in their names. The story of Judas, the disciple who betrayed Jesus for 30 pieces of silver, is wellknown. Not so Jezebel's. Across the centuries, in prose, poetry, movies,sermons, and song, this ninth-century B.C. pagan queen of Israel has come to epitomize the wicked woman. Yet the events of her life, as told in 1 and 2 Kings, are probably unfamiliar to all but devoted readers of the Bible.

With its intrigue, sex, cruelty, and murder, Jezebel's story is a rich stew of the historical events, allegorical interpretation, and metaphorical license that make many of the Old Testament's biographical dramas such fascinating reading. At the climax of her long struggle to bring pagan worship to the kingdom of Israel, where the Hebrew God, Yahweh, is the only deity, Queen Jezebel pays a terrible price. Thrown from a high window, her unattended body is devoured by dogs, fulfilling the prediction of Elijah, Yahweh's prophet and Jezebel's nemesis.

To modern feminist authors, Jezebel is one of the most intriguing women in the Scriptures, a bloodstained yet strong-willed, politically astute, and courageous woman. A Phoenician princess who worships Baal, the pagan god of fertility, Jezebel marries King Ahab of the northern kingdom of Israel. She persuades him to tolerate her alien faith, then becomes entwined in the vicious religious conflict that ends in her death. "She became a convenient scapegoat for misogynistic biblical writers who tagged her as the primary force behind Israel's apostasy," believes University of New Mexico biblical scholar Janet Howe Gaines, author of Music in the Old Bones: Jezebel Through the Ages. "[She] has been denounced as a murderer, prostitute, and enemy of God.... Yet there is much to admire in this ancient queen."

After her marriage to King Ahab, Jezebel emerges as the power behind the throne. Their union represents a political alliance, bringing advantages to both nations. It is also an opportunity for Jezebel to foster the spread ofher Baal religion with its many gods, ritual sex, and temple prostitutes.

She hates the monotheistic Hebrew religion, and when she becomes queen, Israelites have already begun worshiping alien idols. Under his wife's malevolent influence, King Ahab protects and encourages pagan rituals, prompting Yahweh to inflict a three-year drought in a land where people are spurning him. Seizing the initiative, Jezebel imports 450 priests of Baal from her native Phoenicia and has many of Yahweh's prophets murdered.

To Jews, Baal worship was the worst sin against God, akin to today's Christians' embracing Satan. Some interpreters see Jezebel as commendably faithful to her pagan religion, but the Kings writers portray her as a dangerous apostate. To settle the question of who is supreme—Yahweh or Baal—the prophet Elijah devises a contest on Mount Carmel. Whichever deity can set afire and destroy a sacrificial bull by divine intervention will be acknowledged as the true God.

For an entire day, Jezebel's 450 prophets "performed a hopping dance about the altar," at times mutilating themselves with lances and swords. Nothing happens. Then it is Elijah's turn to pray, and the response is immediate.

"Fire from the Lord descended and consumed the burnt offering, the wood, the stones, and the earth. When they saw this, all the people flung themselves on their faces and cried out: 'The Lord alone is God.'"

Victorious but far from magnanimous, Elijah then slaughters the pagan prophets—revenge for Jezebel's murder of Yahweh's followers—and the Hebrew God rewards him by ending Israel's drought. The die is now cast between the triumphant prophet and the humiliated queen. After her followers are killed, she sends a venomous message to Elijah threatening his destruction, prompting him to flee to safety.

The drama switches to the royal palace, where Jezebel's husband covets a vineyard owned by Naboth that he wants for a garden. Naboth's refusal to sell his family inheritance sends Ahab into a funk. Jezebel asserts her dominance. "Now is the time to show yourself king over Israel," she says scornfully. "I will get the vineyard of Naboth the Jezreelite for you."

How she succeeds reinforces the eternal image of Jezebel as a scheming, murderous vixen. Forging the king's signature, she sends letters to townspeople falsely accusing Naboth of blaspheming God. When Naboth is publicly confronted, Jezebel urges the crowd: "Then take him out, and stone him to death." Naboth dies, and his property reverts to the royal family.

Jezebel's nefarious plot succeeds, but the inexorable denouement swiftly follows. Yahweh summons his prophet Elijah and instructs him to tell King Ahab that he will be punished. "Say to him: 'Would you murder and take possession? In the very place where the dogs lapped up Naboth's blood, the dogs will lap up your blood, too.' " Elijah dutifully relates Yahweh's prophecy to the king but predicts that Jezebel—not her husband—will be torn apart and eaten by dogs.

And so she was, at the hand of Jehu, a military commander anointed by another prophet, Elisha, to become the new king of Israel. Ahab and one of his sons have now died, and Jehu is ordered by Elisha to destroy the rest of the royal family. On a battlefield, he confronts the couple's son Joram. "Is all well, Jehu?" asks Joram. "How can all be well as long as your mother, Jezebel, carries on her countless harlotries and sorceries?" Jehu replies. With that, he shoots an arrow through Joram's heart.

Aware no doubt that her fate is sealed, Jezebel calmly and courageously prepares herself for the inevitable. As a blood-soaked Jehu gallops toJezreel, she paints her eyes with kohl, dresses her hair, and awaits hisarrival in an upper window of the palace. When he arrives, Jehu orders her eunuchs to toss her out, and in graphic detail, the Old Testament authors describe the end:

"They threw her down, and her blood spattered on the wall and on the horses, and they trampled her. Then [Jehu] went inside and ate and drank." Sated, he orders: "Attend to that cursed woman and bury her, for she was a king'sdaughter." It's too late. "And they went to bury her, but they found no more of her than the skull, and the feet, and the palms of her hands." Elijah's prophecy was fulfilled. "The dogs shall devour the flesh of Jezebel...and the carcass of Jezebel shall be like dung on the ground...so that none will be able to say: 'This was Jezebel.'"

There are other biblical bad girls, such as Potiphar's temptress wife andS amson's treacherous Delilah. Jezebel's reputation, however, elevates her notoriety beyond that of other women in the Scriptures. But how much is true? Old Testament stories originating in the mists of time may be rooted in reality, but they evolved into metaphor and parable with each retelling.

Gaines believes the motives of the 1 and 2 Kings writers—as with all Old and New Testament authors—must be evaluated when considering the veracity of their accounts. The pagan Jezebel, she notes, is crowned queen of Israel at a time of spreading Hebrew apostasy. She conveniently provided an opportunity to teach a moral lesson on the evils of spurning monotheism and worshiping multiple idols, and the writers exaggerate her transgressions accordingly.

Despite the harlot references, there is no scriptural evidence that Jezebel was a prostitute or an unfaithful wife, yet the taint of immorality has branded her a whore for more than 2,000 years. One explanation is biblicala llegory. The Old Testament authors often equated worship of false gods and foreign deities with wanton sexuality.

"Every biblical word condemns her," Gaines says. "Jezebel is an outspoken woman in a time when females have little status and few rights; a foreigner in a xenophobic land; an idol worshiper in a place with a Yahweh-based, state-sponsored religion; a murderer and a meddler in political affairs in a nation of strong patriarchs; a traitor in a country where no ruler is above the law; and a whore in the territory where the Ten Commandments originate."

This biblical character assassination—if that's what it is —succeeded only too well. Jezebel reappears as a New Testament prophet in Revelation 2:20, encouraging servants to fornicate and eat the animals that had been sacrificed to the gods. She has come down through the ages as the primary symbol of wanton, shameless womanhood. She has been limned by playwright William Shakespeare and poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, by 16th-century religious reformer John Knox and novelist James Joyce. Frankie Laine had an international hit single Jezebel in the 1950s, and Boyz II Men sing about her today.

In 1938, Bette Davis won an Academy Award for best actress playing the title role in the steamy melodrama Jezebel set in the 1850s. Jezebel characters have appeared in such television shows as I Love Lucy, Little House on the Prairie, and The Muppet Show. And her name was invoked during the investigation into President Clinton's affair with Monica Lewinsky. From Lady Macbeth to Lizzie Borden, among history's most famous female villains, fictional or real, the pagan queen of Kings 1 and 2 still rules as the most wicked and enduring of them all.

Esther has Shown Jews How to Survive Persecution
A clever heroine
By Beth Brophy
Posted January 25, 2008

The book of Esther tells the story of the beautiful orphan who hides her Jewish identity, becomes queen of Persia, and saves her people from destruction. The tale also explains the origin of the Jewish festival of Purim. But the real meaning of Esther's story, some biblical scholars say, is a lesson about hope and how to deal with assimilation. In Esther, Jews can find a model of strength and determination: one who shows how even in persecution, they can survive and prosper. "Esther provides hope for the Jewish people, in good times and bad. They hope for someone like Esther to deliver them," says Carey Moore, emeritus professor of religion at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.

Esther is unique among books of the Bible because God is never directly mentioned in the original Hebrew version. He is present offstage, though, Moore says, "in the wings, guiding the plot." Also unlike many biblical books, the book of Esther contains nothing supernatural or miraculous. It is seen by many scholars as a work of literary fiction, Moore says, "more like a novella than a historical account."

Esther's story begins in Shushan, the capital of the Persian Empire, probably in the late fifth century B.C. The reigning Queen Vashti is banished from the kingdom for refusing to appear on command before her drunken husband, King Ahasuerus, and his unruly guests. Vashti's banishment is an object lesson to the other women of the kingdom—they must obey their husbands. To find a new queen, the king announces an ancient Persian version of American Idol, a national search for suitable young virgins.

Esther (Hadassah in Hebrew) is an orphan who is being raised by her cousin Mordecai. She joins the harem as a contestant, spends a year beautifying herself, and takes her cousin's advice about keeping her Jewish heritage a secret. The king falls for her and crowns her.

Meanwhile, Mordecai overhears a plot to kill the king and tells Esther, who warns the king, saving his life. The deed is recorded, but the king neglects to reward Mordecai—an oversight that will be corrected later, at a crucial plot point. As a Jew, Mordecai refuses to bow down to Haman, the king's haughty prime minister, as has been ordered by the king. Haman, enraged by Mordecai's insult, gets the king to sign off on a decree to kill all the Jews in the kingdom.

Hearing of Haman's plot, Mordecai goes into mourning, wearing sackcloth and ashes. He begs Esther to go to the king and save her people. Esther balks; for anyone—even a wife—to appear before the king unsummoned can be punishable by death. Mordecai persists. Esther's silence won't protect her from the pogrom, he says. What's more, he says, perhaps she was made queen for this very reason—to save her people. Finally, she agrees to approach the king, although she knows she may die for her efforts. "If I perish, I perish," she says.

Esther's decision to act highlights a "theological" theme, says Sidnie White Crawford, a religion professor at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "In normal life, God doesn't come down in a thunderclap and give instructions. Humans must act, even without knowing the outcome of their actions. It's part of human existence. The story is saying don't be afraid; you won't ever be sure of the will of God. Just do your best."

Another strong theme running through the Esther story is assimilation, says Penina Adelman, scholar in residence at the Women's Studies Research Center at Brandeis University. "Esther could have passed as a non-Jew and blended in, but at the crucial time, she stood up for her people in a dangerous situation."

The king, however, is happy to see her and promises to grant her request, whatever it is. Esther invites him and Haman to a feast. She feeds them and invites them to another feast the following night, where she will reveal what she wants.

That night, after the first banquet, the king cannot sleep. To pass the time, his servants read the book of records to him. The king realizes he never properly thanked Mordecai for saving him. The next morning the king asks Haman for his advice on how to honor someone. Haman, thinking the honoree is himself, says the king should dress the honoree in royal clothes and parade him around town on the king's horse. Haman is humiliated when the king asks him to perform these honors for Mordecai.

At the second banquet, Esther reveals Haman's plot to the king, and she acknowledges her Jewish identity. Furious at Haman, the king storms out. When he returns, he finds Haman pleading with Esther to save him. Haman is on top of her, begging, and the king interprets Haman's actions as rape.

That seals Haman's fate: He is hanged on the gallows he had constructed for Mordecai. (It should be noted that while the Megillah, the scroll that relates the story, uses the Hebrew verb talah, which means to hang, some scholars prefer an interpretation saying that he was impaled on a stake.)

Unfortunately, the king can't overturn his previous pogrom order; he says a decree that is written in the name of the king and signed with the royal signet ring cannot be repealed. So he tells Esther and Mordecai to write a new edict saying the Jews should fight back when they are attacked, and he encourages the gentiles to help them. They do, killing more than 75,000 people, including Haman's 10 sons. Although they are given permission to plunder, the Jews don't take any spoil. After the battle, the festival of Purim is instituted to commemorate the deliverance of the Jews and to celebrate Esther's bravery and cunning.

Purim is traditionally celebrated with great merriment, including a costume party, where people wear masks and dress up as characters in the Esther story. A traditional Purim food is haman taschen—triangular cookies with poppy seeds or other sweet fillings, in the shape of Haman's hat. Crawford compares the Purim masquerade to the physical manifestation of Esther and Mordecai's actions. "They took on the outer trappings of the gentile world they lived in, but they never forgot that they were Jewish," she says.

Crawford sees the story as teaching readers how to live as a minority within a gentile society, by cooperating with others but also by protecting and lifting up the Jews. "The Esther story is a warning that anti-Semitism exists; it's a real danger; but as a Jew, you must be prepared to react to it," she notes. Another underlying message is of the dangers of stereotyping. Not all the gentiles in the story are evil like Haman, Crawford points out.

Many of them liked the Jews and came to their defense. Historically, Esther has been a controversial figure. Some rabbis and others have criticized her for being a bad Jew. She didn't observe kosher dietaryl aws, she married a gentile, and she was vengeful and bloodthirsty; she had Haman's 10 sons hanged, after all. Some feminists scold Esther for accomplishing her goals through her beauty and feminine wiles—by givingd inner parties, manipulating her husband, and taking orders from him and Mordecai. Vashti, they say, is the real feminist heroine, the strong, honorable woman who was unjustly punished for refusing to be degraded by her oafish husband.

Still, the traditional view of Esther as the brave heroine prevails. "Esther embodies feminist ideals: She was brave, courageous, tough, with an imagination equal to the task of saving the Jews," says Moore. Adds Adelman:"Esther had the wisdom to get what she wanted from the king, not by being strident or adversarial, which doesn't get you too far. She succeeded where Vashti failed."

And of all the women of the Bible, Esther recently received the best publicity boost, from pop star Madonna. When the Material Girl became enamored of Jewish mysticism—kabbalah—she changed her name to Esther.

Is Ruth a Lesson in Loyalty or an Excuse for Patriarchy?
Mixed messages
By Thomas K. Grose
Posted January 25, 2008

She was purportedly the great-grandmother of David, Israel's greatest king. But Ruth, the woman from Moab, remains an enigma. Was she a trophy wife who slept her way to economic security? Or a proto-feminist who used her wiles to survive in a male-dominated ancient world? Is hers a story of inclusiveness? Or an apologia for assimilation? For such a short book—just 85 verses—and straightforward tale, the book of Ruth lends itself to myriad and often contradictory interpretations.

"What you see in it depends a whole lot on what you bring to it," says Carolyn Pressler, a professor of biblical interpretation at United Theological Seminary of the Twin Cities.

Certainly the ambiguous writing style employed by the anonymous author of Ruth encourages disparate conclusions. Perhaps the writer was inviting readers to fill in the story's many gaps. Or, perhaps, the author used a kind of contextual shorthand that would have been less baffling to an ancient audience. Despite the head-scratching the book evokes, Pressler calls it a masterpiece of short-story telling. "Art that clobbers you over the head with what it's trying to tell you is not great art. Most classic pieces of art are open to multiple interpretations."

So what happens in Ruth? Not much, and a whole lot:

Famine is devastating Judah, so Elimelech of Bethlehem takes his wife,Naomi, and sons Mahlon and Kilion to live in Moab. (Moabites, by the way, were despised by the Jews, who claimed they originated from Lot's incestuous relations with his daughter. Moabite women were considered loose. So, it was an interesting choice of destination for Elimelech's clan.)

After Elimelech dies, the boys marry two local girls, Orpah and Ruth, but 10 years later, the sons also die. Destitute and starving, Naomi and her daughters-in-law set out for Judah, now free of famine. En route, Naomi kisses them and tells them to return to their people, but they refuse. When she insists, Orpah agrees to turn back. Ruth, however, swears that not even death will separate her from Naomi. "Your people will be my people and your God my God," she vows. When they reach Bethlehem, Naomi meets old friends and tells them she's bitter because "the Lord has brought me back empty."

It's harvest time, so Ruth heads for a field to "glean," or scavenge for bits of grain missed by the harvesters. The field's owner, Boaz, a wealthy man of standing in town, notices her. His foreman tells Boaz who she is and recounts how hard she has worked the field for food. Boaz introduces himself, says he's heard of all she's done for Naomi, and blesses her. He not only tells her to continue gleaning his field throughout the harvest but gives her lunch. She returns to Naomi with about a bushel of grain and recounts the day's events. Naomi then springs a surprise: Boaz, she explains, is a close relative.

After the harvest ends, Naomi tells Ruth she wants to find her a home where she'll be well-provided for and hatches a plan for Ruth to seduce Boaz. Naomi instructs Ruth to put on her best clothes and perfume and go to Boaz's threshing room. Once he's eaten and drunk his wine and goes to sleep, Naomi says, "uncover his feet and lie down. He will tell you what to do." ("Feet,"scholars note, is most likely a euphemism for genitals.)

Without protest, Ruth agrees to the plan. Boaz doesn't stir until midnight, then he's startled by the girl's presence. Ruth identifies herself and asks him to act as a "kinsman-redeemer," or as a provider. Boaz blesses her as a "woman of noble character" and eagerly agrees to her request. But, he adds,there is another closer kinsman who must first be dealt with. He tells Ruth to spend the night, then sends her back to Naomi laden with grain and a promise to settle the matter quickly.

Boaz finds the other kinsman and gathers around 10 elders as witnesses. He tells the kinsman that Naomi is selling a parcel of land that belonged to Elimelech and that the kinsman has the right of first refusal, ahead of Boaz himself. The man says he'll buy it. Ok, Boaz says, but that means he'll also acquire the widow Ruth. The putative buyer balks at this arrangement: It "might endanger my own estate." Boaz then announces that he will acquire the land and Ruth.

They marry and have a son. The village women rejoice that "Naomi has a son,"whom they name Obed. The story ends with Naomi caring for the boy and with no further mention of Ruth. Moreover, it notes, Obed eventually sires Jesse, who is David's father.

The story has its critics. It's attacked by some feminists for excusing patriarchy. Patricia K. Tull, author of Esther and Ruth, rejects that view. A male-dominated world was the only one Ruth and Naomi knew: "It's not as if there were an alternative society they could have moved to. It's not as if they could have started a chapter of NOW—that wouldn't have solved their hunger problem."

The book has also been chided for endorsing assimilation, because Ruth gives up her heritage, her family, and her god, then disappears at the end. But Tull says Ruth made those decisions voluntarily. "There was no proselytizing going on."

A more widespread view, even among feminists, is that it's not incorrect to read Ruth as a tale of feminine resourcefulness, love, loyalty, and strength. And, Pressler says, that's something that ancient readers would have noticed, too, given the paucity of biblical stories about women.

Indeed, there's speculation that the author of Ruth was a woman. Vanessa L.Ochs, director of Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia, finds that theory plausible, though she herself doubts that it is true. "Ruth and Naomi know the rules and how to manipulate them—and that's a story that women tend to tell."

Ochs, however, advises against calling Ruth and Naomi feminist icons, because each has negative characteristics. Naomi initially fails to appreciate Ruth's steadfastness. And Ruth, Ochs says, behaves essentially like a prostitute. "She has to go sleep with an old man—that's the old casting couch." The seduction scene is certainly vexing for modern readers.

"You don't want [her] to be a role model for our children," admits Pressler,who prefers to stress that Ruth acted in service to her family. And Ruth's other good qualities—her kindness, for instance—somewhat mitigate her wanton behavior, Ochs says.

But why was Ruth's story included in the Old Testament? One widely endorsed theory says the story was written to implore Jews to reject xenophobia and welcome foreigners. Ochs, however, says if that were the case, the story wouldn't end with Naomi suckling Obed while Ruth and her Moabite ancestry seemingly disappear. "Ruth is just a vessel," she says. The Jewish Naomi is the real main character, she says, and it's partly a justification of levirate marriage—the ancient practice of having a dead man's brother marry a widow in hopes of producing a son to carry on the dead man's name. "This is Jewish reincarnation."

So what was the original point of the story? Says Ochs: "Though women are pleased to tell it, the story's point is to tell how our hero [King David] was born. If it were only a story of how women worked together to sustain themselves, I don't believe for a minute that it would have been a canonized story. It is a legend used to justify the power of a kingship."

Biblical Bad Boys who make Henry VIII Look like a Feminist
Dirty rotten men
By Jeffery L. Sheler
Posted January 25, 2008

It is probably unfair to hold the men of the Bible to modern standards of gender enlightenment. The patriarchal cultures of the ancient Near East, after all, were not exactly known for producing sensitive males in touch with their feminine side.

Even so, a handful of men are depicted in Scripture as so rotten in their treatment of women that, cultural differences notwithstanding, they make Henry VIII seem like Alan Alda. Here, in the judgment of feminist scholars, are some of the worst.

Adam. Confronted by God for having eaten the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, he heaps all of the blame on his mate: "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." Chivalry and the taking of personal responsibility clearly had not yet been invented (Genesis 3).

Abraham. To save his own neck when he and his wife, Sarah, venture into Egypt, the Hebrew patriarch passes her off as his sister so that the pharaoh can have sex with her. ("You are a woman beautiful in appearance, and when the Egyptians see you, they will say, 'This is his wife'; then they will kill me. . . . Say you are my sister, so that it may go well with me because of you.") The ruse works. Sarah is taken into the pharaoh's harem temporarily, and the pharaoh "dealt well with Abram; and he had sheep, oxen, male donkeys, male and female slaves, female donkeys, and camels." Abraham repeats the ruse later with Abimelech, king of Gerar (Genesis 12).

Lot. Abraham's nephew, he offers up his own virgin daughters to a mob in Sodom who demand sex with two of Lot's male houseguests. "Let me bring them out to you," Lot tells the mob, "and do to them as you please; only do nothing to these men." The guests—who as it turns out are angels of God—intervene, however, and Lot does not have to deliver on his offer. Later, his daughters would get him drunk in order to have sex with him (Genesis 19).

King David. Whether it's rape or seduction, he leverages his authority to have his way with the married Bathsheba, whom he spies upon while she is bathing. When she becomes pregnant, David arranges for her soldier-husband to be killed in battle so he can take her as his wife (2 Samuel 11).

Amnon. A son of King David (who has several wives), he falls in love with his half sister, Tamar. Pretending to be ill, he asks his father to send Tamar to tend to him, and then he rapes her when they are alone. Tamar's full brother, Absalom, would later take revenge by murdering Amnon. David, however, is not pleased, and David and Absalom become estranged (2 Samuel 13).

The Levite. Without a doubt, the worst of the bunch is the unnamed Levite from Ephraim, whose story is told in Judges. On a journey, he and his concubine spend the night as guests at a house in Gibeah. There—as in the story of Lot—they are confronted by a mob that surrounds the house demanding to rape the Levite. "So the man seized his concubine and put her out to them. They wantonly raped her and abused her all through the night." In the morning, the Levite finds the woman unconscious at the door. He throws her on a donkey, takes her home, and proceeds to cut her into 12 pieces and ship the body parts "throughout all the territory of Israel" in order to stir up a bloody reprisal against Gibeah. Scholars say the disturbing episode, along with the Lot story, illustrates an apparently common view in biblical times that the sexual violation of women was less shameful than the violation of men (Judges 19).

The New View of Delilah as a 'Sex and the City' Type of Woman
One feisty femme
By Linda L. Creighton
Posted January 25, 2008

The tale of Samson and Delilah has migrated over the centuries from the realm of Sunday-school stories to its current place in modern culture as—depending on one's perspective—a morality play, a feminine discourse, or a caution to lovesick men. Samson has become a byword for strength, Delilaha synonym for temptress. The crossroads of their lives is a train wreck whose meaning remains open to interpretation.

To recount the basics: Samson is the strong man who defends Israel, meets beautiful Delilah, and falls under her spell. His strength comes directly from God and depends on his hair never being cut, but Delilah pries that secret from him, his locks are shorn, and he falls from God's grace. It is a classic tale of romance and betrayal, complete with violence, money, and special effects. But like most biblical stories, what is not said about Delilah is as important as what is.

Who was Delilah? Was she a pawn, a Judas, or a strong woman and survivor? And what is this story really all about? "It's a story about God delivering Israel," says Susan Ackerman, professor of religion and women's and gender studies at Dartmouth College. Though, she adds, "one of the things that always strikes me about this story is what an unbelievable idiot Samson is."

Samson was an Israelite hero in the 13th century B.C. The Israelites' enemies included the Philistines, a loose confederation of city-states ruled by five lords. Samson's birth was foretold by an angel who appeared to his mother and extracted a promise from her that the boy would be consecrated to God, with this consecration cemented by a vow to refrain from drinking alcohol, touching dead bodies, and cutting his hair. In return, Samson was blessed with extraordinary powers—the long list of his feats well known throughout the ancient world. He became one of the judges of Israel, guiding the Hebrew people.

Samson's deeds now seem extreme in their violence. Whether it was dismantling and carrying on his shoulders the huge gate to the city of Gaza, tearing out two mountains with his bare hands, wrestling a lion to its death, slaying a thousand men with the jawbone of an ass, or tying flaming torches to the tails of 300 foxes to burn down his enemies' grain and olive orchards, Samson was definitely a thorn in the side of the Philistines.

Samson, perhaps predictably, did not have a good track record with women. His name, meaning "sun hero," was an indication of the temperature of his passion in love and in war. He would visit a prostitute, a point singled out in the Bible, and had a weakness for Philistine women. At the rehearsal dinner for his first marriage, he made a bet with his guests, which his fiancée later divulged. Enraged, he slaughtered 30 men to pay off his wager,a nd his bride-to-be was burned to death in retaliation.

Thus it was Delilah's misfortune—or fortune, depending on one's perspective—that Samson's lustful eye settled on her. One of the few women in the Old Testament not identified as a mother or wife, Delilah is unique."She was obviously a powerful woman," says Gale Yee, professor of Hebrew Bible at the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. "She'd be fine nowadays, a real Sex and the City type of woman."

And though Delilah's reputation has been dragged through centuries of interpretation as an evil seductress who brought down a hero, Ackerman tells students to stay open to other explications of the text. "Nowhere in the Bible does it say Delilah is a prostitute, which is very commonly assumed," says Ackerman. "I always say, 'Show me where it says that in the Bible.' "Indeed, Delilah may have been a widow, Ackerman says. "She's clearly a woman who is independent of a man, and widows would fit that description."

Whatever her marital status, her community stature was high enough for each of the five lords of the Philistines to offer her 1,100 pieces of silver if she would discover Samson's weakness so they could destroy him. We do not even know from the Bible whether Delilah was an Israelite or a Philistine.

"Winners write the history,'' says Ackerman. "I think she would come outlooking quite well if we had the Philistine Bible.''

Betrayal is the concept most often associated with Delilah's actions when she agreed to the Philistines' request. But nowhere do we read that Delilah loved Samson; only that he loved her. Yee says the characterization of Delilah is often based on popular culture, pointing out: "There isn't any evidence that she seduced this guy; he fell in love with her." Nor is the image of Delilah as wily temptress supported by the biblical text. Ackerman notes that when she speaks to some alumnae groups, "they think of Delilah as a scantily clad Hedy Lamarr, like in the 1940s movie Samson and Delilah."

In fact, Delilah was direct and aboveboard in her attempt to find out the truth from Samson. "If you read the text, Delilah asks Samson, 'Please tell me what makes your strength so great and how you could be bound so that one could subdue you,' '' says Yee. "Then he tells a lie. You'd think he would clue in that she wants to know how he could be vanquished. He's the one who in his answers lies to her every time."

It's also not clear from the text whether Delilah pressed Samson for the secret of his strength because she was loyal to the Philistines, because she wanted the money offered to her, or because she was strong-armed into it.

"The Bible doesn't give motivation," says Yee. Nor do we know Samson's motivation for revealing the secret on the fourth occasion. "He may be teasing her, or he may have an unconscious wish to be bound and vanquished by this woman," says Yee. "The biblical text engages your imagination so that you have questions about why Samson is nuts enough to do this three times."

In what is one of the most familiar stories of a strong man turned weak in the hands of a woman, Samson lies in Delilah's lap after his confession and is lulled to sleep. While she cradles his head, Delilah calls in a man to cut Samson's hair, robbing him of his superhuman strength and any hope of continuing as the Israelites' warrior. In Ackerman's view, this imagery is profoundly sexual. "Hair is a very sexual motif," she explains, particularly for ancient Israelites. "The whole business of the hair would have been a little bit titillating, as would the reference to Samson's head in her lap."

In spilling his secret to Delilah, Samson breaks his vow and suffers God's consequences. Shorn, humiliated, and the prisoner of his Philistine enemies, Samson is bound, and his eyes are gouged out. In a final blow to his manhood, he is put to work in prison on a job viewed as a woman's chore—milling grain.

The story culminates not long afterward with the Philistines celebrating at an agricultural festival in the Temple of Dagon by bringing the ruined wreck of Samson out to parade around for their enjoyment. Unnoticed by them, his hair has begun to grow back and, with it, his strength. Standing between the pillars that support the temple, he calls on God to give him one more chance at redemption. In a final and impressive show of God-given power, the blind giant pulls down the pillars, collapses the temple, and dies with the 3,000 Philistines who have gathered to mock him.

There is no further mention of Delilah. Some biblical scholars suggest thats he was at the Temple of Dagon to view her handiwork and perished with Samson. If she survived and lived out her days as a rich and vindicated heroine, perhaps she would not care that her actions are now often portrayed as those of a seductress and Judas rather than a clever survivor forever linked to a violent bully who ultimately was beaten by a girl. "I like feisty women, so I like Delilah," says Ackerman, who has named one of her Airedale terriers after the woman who brought Samson down.

As a Military Leader, Deborah is a Rare Biblical Character
Facing down '900 chariots of iron'
By Andrew Curry
Posted January 25, 2008

From her seat in the shade of a palm tree, Deborah looked out over the highlands of Israel. These dry hills were her people's home, and she could see all was not well. In the valley below, armed bands preyed on Israelite peasants. Travelers and caravans, the lifeblood of her region, were too frightened to take the main roads. It was a time of chaos, a time that called for strong leadership.

In answering the call, Deborah became a singular biblical figure: a female military leader. She recruited a man, the general Barak, to stand by her side, telling him God wanted the armies of Israel to attack the Canaanites who were persecuting the highland tribes. Barak was reluctant, and he insisted that Deborah go with him to the battle. Her answer was assertive and prophetic: "I will surely go with you; nevertheless, the road on which you are going will not lead to your glory, for the Lord will sell Sisera into the hand of a woman."

So it was an unlikely commander who led the Army to a decisive battle with the Canaanites. Faced with "900 chariots of iron," the height of military technology at the time, Deborah's army of 10,000 Israelites rushed down from the hills, clashing with the Canaanite general Sisera near the Kishon River.

The "Song of Deborah," one of the oldest in the Bible, says the stars strayed from their courses and the river washed Sisera's armies away in a massive flood. The battle was a total victory. "All the Army of Sisera fell by the sword; no one was left."

Defeated, Sisera fled, taking refuge in an ally's tent. Expecting refuge from the army chasing him, the Canaanite general was greeted by a woman named Jael. Sisera demanded shelter and water. Instead, Jael gave him a bowl of milk—and a tent peg through the skull.

The violence of Deborah's story is a radical departure from standard biblical themes, which rarely place women in roles as warriors and generals.

"Every other instance we have of women acting in a military context is of a woman acting as an assassin, using sexual attraction to lure male warleaders to their deaths," says Susan Ackerman, a religion and women's and gender studies professor at Dartmouth College. "Deborah, in terms of the portrayal of her taking the lead as a military commander, is unique."

Deborah's story would stand out even without her unusual role as a military leader. It's essentially told twice: first in a sort of prose summary in Judges 4 and then in a poem or song in Judges 5. The song may be one of the Bible's oldest texts, "probably composed not long after the original events, possibly by Deborah herself," writes University of Chicago Divinity School Prof. Tikva Frymer-Kensky in Women of Scripture. The song's archaic language also sets it apart. Ackerman says the song's Hebrew is as distinct from the Hebrew in the rest of the Bible as the English of Beowulf is from the modern tongue.

Though the two accounts relate the same basic story, telling details set them apart. The prose account, probably written much later, is more traditional: Deborah is a sort of cheerleader and prophet, urging the troops into battle from the sidelines. Jael kills Sisera in his sleep after slyly convincing him to hide under a carpet.

The older "Song of Deborah," on the other hand, "shows none of this unease about women warriors," writes Frymer-Kensky. In language that is powerful even in translation (and often deeply sexual in the original, according to some scholars) the song represents Deborah as a war leader in her own right:"the peasantry prospered in Israel / they grew fat on plunder / because you arose, Deborah / arose as a mother in Israel." And Jael's murder of the enemy general Sisera is a poetic study in bravery and brutality: "He asked water and she gave him milk / she brought him curds in a lordly bowl. / She put her hand to the tent peg / and her right hand to the workmen's mallet; / she struck Sisera a blow / she crushed his head / she shattered and pierced his temple. / He sank, he fell / he lay still at her feet."

The prose version's differences may be the result of an effort to rewrite history, or at least reshape mythology. Ackerman suggests a later writer,"someone who couldn't go with the song's notion of a woman as a war leader,"reshaped the tale to fit with the more conservative notions of the day.

Yet both accounts underscore what may be Judges' most important message.

Over and over again, Israel's saviors are unlikely heroes. Deborah and Jael were women; mighty Samson was gullible and had a weakness for women; Jephthah was the bandit son of a prostitute; and Ehud was left-handed (things were different back then, apparently). By emphasizing the inappropriateness of the hero, readers were reminded of God's importance."God can do whatever he wants, and if he wants to work through nonsoldiers—that is, women—he can," says Everett Fox, the Allen M. Glick Professor of Judaic and Biblical Studies at Clark University in Massachusetts and the author of a widely acclaimed translation of the first five books of the Bible. "If you can be rescued by a housewife, it just goes to show God works in mysterious ways."

But was Deborah real? For decades, Judges has been scrutinized for clues to Israel's history. The book describes a period somewhere between 1200 and1050 B.C., after the death of the tribal leader Joshua. Fox calls it "the Bible's version of the Wild West," a dark time of chaos and collapse. Over and over again, the people of Israel are defeated in battle or fall into moral decline, only to be saved by charismatic leaders. In the original Hebrew, Fox says, the "judges" of the book's title ( " shofet") translatesr oughly to "chieftains."

Most scholars today think the stories and songs in Judges were collected and written down hundreds of years after they supposedly took place. Working somewhere between 620 and 580 B.C., the writers carefully sifted through traditional hymns and folk tales and selected certain stories to make their points. According to Brandeis University Prof. Marc Brettler's Book of Judges, the book's first goal was glorifying God; the second, justifying the rule of Israel's kings. "What they took from the past seems to be what was most instructive for the present," Fox says. As a result, the authenticity of the figures who are presented in Judges is impossible to verify and in some ways beside the point.

In fact, the ancient language in the "Song of Deborah" has led some tos peculate that Deborah may not have been a person at all. The Bible describes the early history of Israel as a long struggle against the Canaanites, the enemy mentioned in Deborah's story. But a growing school of biblical historians argues that Israelites were in fact Canaanites who converted to a new, monotheistic religion. In her book Warrior, Dancer, Seductress, Queen: Women in Judges and Biblical Israel, Ackerman argues that Deborah may be adopted from Canaanite myths that would have been told around the same time the "Song of Deborah" was written. With its supernatural imagery of stars falling from the heavens and rushing floods, "God isn't just blessing the troops but is quite an actor," Ackerman says. "Deborah might be a sort of demythologized warrior goddess taken from an older mythological tradition."

In Search of the Real Virgin Mary
The bible provides surprisingly little on the mother of jesus
By Richard Covington
Posted January 25, 2008

Inside Paris's Notre Dame cathedral, dedicated to the Virgin Mary, a soprano floats plangently upward in Bach's spectacular Magnificat, the sound hovering in the soaring space before the chorus surges in with joy. "Behold from henceforth, I shall be called blessed by all generations," Mary proclaims in her paean to God, accepting that she will be the mother of Christ.

Inspiration for some of history's most sublime musical, architectural, and artistic creations, the peasant girl from Nazareth also embodies Christianity's thorniest paradoxes. She is a virgin, yet also a mother. She is God's obedient handmaid, yet she is also a strong woman in her own right, a woman of valor, the patroness of victory. She rejoices in the birth of her son, but her salvation comes only through his death.

To the Roman Catholic and Orthodox faithful, Mary remained a virgin throughout her life, and she was herself immaculately conceived—that is,untainted by the original sin of sexual conception. She rose "body and soul"to heaven, the church teaches in a highly polarizing dogma that caused an uproar when Pope Pius XII declared it in 1950. As the mother of God, she sits in heaven with the Trinity; she is above all saints, yet she is human. And that—her humanity—is the key.

Over the centuries, true believers and skeptics alike have spoken to Mary as a protector, a guide, even a friend in a way they cannot with God and Christ. "Closer to the human plane, she is more approachable by those who have reason to fear, or cannot comprehend, the ineffable mystery of God or the stern authority of Christ," writes Cambridge medieval scholar Steven Botterill. Even Protestants, who broke from the Catholic Church in part because of what Martin Luther abhorred as the "abominable idolatry" of Mary, are giving her a more prominent place in their hearts.

In the West, the Virgin Mother is ubiquitous. Mary has been the favorite baptismal name for girls for centuries; the Ave Maria is repeated millions of times daily. Almost certainly, she has been portrayed in art and music more than any other woman in history. Even in Asia, Mary is a growing presence. Churches as far-flung as South Korea and East Timor honor her name with elaborate shrines.

Revered as a symbol that bridges disparate cultures, Mary appears prominently in the Koran, where she is compared to Hagar, the mother of Ishmael, founder of the Islamic nation. In Mexico, where she appeared to an oppressed Aztec Indian in the 16th century, she is Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe, focus of a cult of near-fanatic devotion. Ten million pilgrims a year flock to a shrine honoring the dark-skinned Madonna, a political as much as a religious symbol for the poor and downtrodden, "the mother of Mexico," in the words of the Mexican poet Octavio Paz.

Apparitions. Mystical Marian visions have been reported thousands of times, beginning with the "woman clothed with the sun" of Revelations and cresting in the 20th century with more than 200 apparitions cited since 1930. Such is Mary's power that Pope John Paul II credited her with saving his life when he was gravely wounded in an assassination attempt on May 13, 1981—the same day and hour Mary reportedly appeared to three children at Fátima in Portugal 64 years earlier.

It's a lucky thing Mary inspires, because sketching a picture of her from the meager biblical references requires not a mere leap but an Olympian broad jump of the imagination. In all the Gospels, she appears fewer than 15 times, in accounts that take up a total of less than four pages.

Named for Moses's sister, Mary (Miriam in Hebrew or Maryam in Aramaic, the language she spoke) grew up in Nazareth, a hill town of olive groves, vineyards, and hard-scrabble farms 70 miles north of Jerusalem. Nazareth means "small fort," probably its original function, given the site's commanding view overlooking the Jezreel valley. On an extension of the Silk Road far below, camel and mule caravans bearing silk and saffron made their stately progression from the Jordan River to the eastern Mediterranean port of Caesarea.

Nothing is known of Mary's family, although legends later held that she was the daughter of an elderly couple, Anna and the priest Joachim. In Mary: A Flesh-and-Blood Biography of the Virgin Mother, Middle East historian Lesley Hazleton speculates that Mary may have been a shepherd, herding sheep and goats on the craggy hillsides and learning about healing and herbal cures from village women, techniques she passed along to her son.

In Hazleton's account, Mary considered herself an Israeli Jew from the province of Galilee, a region that had been occupied for more than a millennium by foreign rulers, from Babylonians to Persians, Greeks, Seleucids, Parthians, and Romans. Although she could neither read nor write,she most likely absorbed oral histories of David, Solomon, Elijah, and Ruth from the elders.

Mary certainly witnessed peasant farmers ruined by onerous taxes and saw them beaten and imprisoned by soldiers, a recurrent shame that deepened her indignation at injustice and nurtured sympathy for the poor and oppressed people all around her. The Galileans groaned under the brutal rule of Herod the Great, a shockingly rapacious client king of the Roman Empire who built innumerable palaces while his subjects were literally taxed to death.

Debt-ridden and living on the edge of starvation, Mary's neighbors no doubt served as the inspiration for Jesus's demands in the Lord's Prayer: "Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our debts."

After Herod's death in 4 B.C., Galilean rebels overran a Roman garrison at Sepphoris a few miles from Nazareth. When Roman reinforcements quashed the rebellion and crucified the leaders, Mary probably tended to wounded survivors fleeing to nearby caves, Hazleton says.

It is against this tumultuous background that the angel Gabriel, in the Gospel of Luke, appears to Mary in what has come to be known as the Annunciation—a startling vision mingling alarm, illumination, and willing submission. The earliest representations of the event appeared in the Roman catacombs, and the scene was later interpreted by Matthias Grünewald, Simone Martini, Raphael, and hundreds of artists over the centuries. Although Mary is generally depicted as a woman at least 18 or 19 years old, Hazleton reasons that she was far younger. According to the Vatican, Mary was born around 13 B.C., making her about 13 years old at the time of Jesus's birth.

When Gabriel appears, Mary is betrothed to Joseph, a figure who remains even more mysterious than Mary throughout the Gospels. He is a descendant of King David, Luke says, a crucial element for fulfilling Hebrew prophecy that the Messiah would be a descendant of the royal house of Israel. Trembling inspite of the angel's entreaty not to be afraid, Mary is incredulous when she receives the news that not only is she to give birth, but she is also to bear the Son of God.

"How can this be, since I have no husband?" she asks. "The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the most high will overshadow you," replies Gabriel. With unnerving self-possession, the peasant girl gives her assent. "Let it be to me according to your word," she says.

In a stroke, Mary's obedience to the will of God absolves the disobedience of Eve, maintained second-century theologian Irenaeus. It is significant that Mary, like Eve, acts without compulsion, a sign of God's grace and a promise that human beings would exercise freedom in their destinies.

Some religious historians, like the late Raymond Brown, author of The Birthof the Messiah, argue that early Christians viewed Jesus as becoming the Son of God not at birth but at the Resurrection. The idea of the virgin birth arose later, they theorize, with the Gospels of Matthew and Luke, written after A.D. 60. Others, like Jane Schaberg, a feminist scholar at the University of Detroit Mercy, raise the explosive possibility that Mary was raped. She contends that this is the reason Joseph considers divorcing his pregnant bride in Matthew before an angel reveals that she will conceive the child through the Holy Spirit. Schaberg takes a piece of second-century, anti-Christian propaganda—the story that a Roman soldier called Panthera was Jesus's father—and turns it on its head. If Mary were raped, she says, the Holy Spirit transforms an illegitimate child into God's anointed son and Mary's potential disgrace becomes an exalted grace of redemption. Although some feminist theologians side with Schaberg, conservative Catholics furiously dismiss her proposition as borderline heresy.

Still other historians, like Hazleton, suggest that there was a sort of dual paternity, with Joseph the human father and the Holy Spirit the divine one, a scenario similar to birth legends about Helen of Troy or Alexander the Great, both sired by the god Zeus and human fathers. Certainly, in cults across the Middle East, goddesses like Isis, Ishtar, and Diana who were both virgin and fertile exemplified a commonly accepted paradox.

Strengthening faith. Whatever the literal or metaphysical truth surrounding the virgin birth, the mystery rests intact. The very fact that the concept goes "against nature and against proofs" invests the faith with its power, according to the 17th-century French philosopher Blaise Pascal.

Soon after the Annunciation, Mary visits her pregnant elderly cousin Elizabeth. Her husband, Zechariah, has also had a vision of Gabriel foretelling the birth of a son, later known as John the Baptist. When Mary greets her cousin, Elizabeth feels the child leap in her belly in joyful recognition of the holy infant growing in Mary. "My soul magnifies the Lord," rejoices Mary, beginning the Magnificat. Repeating themes and language used by Hannah in the Old Testament to give thanks for the birth ofher son Samuel after years of infertility, Mary prophesies the revolutionary kingdom to come. In the future, the Lord will act as he has in the past when he "put down the mighty from their thrones, and exalted those of low degree...filled the hungry with good things, and the rich...sent empty away." In this 27-line poem, Mary prefigures "virtually every theme in Jesus's teaching and ministry," Scot McKnight asserts in his book The Jesus Creed.

After staying with Elizabeth for three months, Mary next appears at the Nativity, a miracle of humility enacted in countless Christmas pageants and an amalgam of accounts from Luke and Matthew. Biblical historians now set Jesus's birth sometime between 6 B.C. and A.D. 6.

Summoned to Judean Bethlehem for a census, Mary gives birth in a manger because there are no more rooms at the inn. Shepherds flock to see the newborn child along with three regal wise men bearing gold, frankincense,and myrrh. In Matthew, the couple flee with their baby to Egypt to avoid the massacre of infants ordered by Herod to eliminate the future ruler of Israel foreseen by Hebrew prophets.

In a polemical interpretation, Hazleton maintains that Jesus was born in A.D. 6, not in Judean Bethlehem but in Galilean Bethlehem. Like other scholars, she thinks Judean Bethlehem was named in the Gospels because it was the birthplace of King David and the new Messiah needed to be viewed as his divine successor. Hazleton argues that the Syrian governor Quirinius mentioned in Luke as ordering the census was not appointed until A.D. 6, when, in fact, a census did take place, according to the Jewish historian Josephus. The Bible's "Herod the king" is not Herod the Great, who died in 4B.C., but his son Herod Antipas, she asserts. According to this reckoning, Jesus was 23 years old when he was crucified and resurrected in A.D. 30, not 33 as commonly thought, and Mary was 36, not 46.

Whatever the dates for the Nativity, Mary next appears in Luke during the purification ritual for her baby. A seer named Simeon blesses Jesus and direly predicts to his mother that "a sword will pierce through your own soul also," an ambiguous foreshadowing of Mary's suffering at the Crucifixion as she watches a Roman soldier thrust a sword into her son's side.

Twelve years later, Mary and Joseph lose young Jesus in Jerusalem. After searching for him for three days, they find him at the temple and gently upbraid him for causing them anxiety. "Did you not know that I must be in my father's house?" the boy replies calmly. Mystified, Mary keeps this answer in her heart, along with the puzzling adoration of the shepherds and wise men at his birth, perhaps fearing the ultimate purpose God intends for her and her son.

From then on, Jesus maintains an "oddly uneasy, even antagonistic" relationship with his parents, says Hazleton, addressing Mary not as "mother," but as "woman." At a wedding in Cana, Mary tells Jesus there is no more wine. "O woman, what have you to do with me?" he replies testily. "My hour is not yet come." Patient as always, Mary instructs the servants to follow Jesus's orders. Despite his protest, Jesus draws attention to himself by performing a minor miracle, turning the water brought to him into wine.Mary is also an essential presence at the Crucifixion, where she agonizes for hours, comforted by her sister (or sister-in-law), also named Mary, and Mary Magdalene (as well as Salome, says Mark) as her son dies. As Mary stands next to John, the youngest disciple, Jesus tells her: "Here is your son." These are his last words to Mary. Turning to John, he says: "Here is your mother," binding them together. After he dies, Jesus is lowered into his mother's arms in a scene depicted in Michelangelo's transcendent Piet à.

In Mark and Luke, Mary arrives at the tomb two days later with Mary Magdalene to anoint Jesus with perfumes but is greeted by an angel or angels who bid them to tell the disciples that Christ is risen. She does not actually see Jesus herself. Mary's final appearance in the Bible is anticlimactic. In the book of Acts, she is given a brief mention when she joins the apostles to pray at Pentecost (50 days after Jesus's Resurrection at Easter) in the "upper room," where the Last Supper was held.

From then on, Mary's story is taken up by various Apocryphal and Gnostic texts. Although they recount diverse opinions about where she goes, some placing her with John in Jerusalem, Nazareth, Mount Zion, or Ephesus in present-day Turkey (according to the Eastern Orthodox tradition), mosts ources also place her at the center of a group of female disciples continuing Jesus's message of forgiveness. The Gnostic Pistis Sophia, which means Faith Wisdom in Greek, shows Mary as one of 17 disciples: the 12 male apostles plus Mary Magdalene, Salome, Martha, and her sister Mary of Bethany.

According to the 20th Discourse of the Apocryphal New Testament, Mary, dying of old age, gathers the community of women around her, instructing them to follow Mary Magdalene when she's gone. "Behold your mother from this time onwards," she says. She dies in A.D. 46, aged somewhere between 52 and 59 years old.

On her death, says the text, Christ descends from heaven. "Her soul leaped into the bosom of her own son, and he wrapped it in a garment of light." At Jesus's instructions, the apostles remove her body to the Vale of Jehoshaphat in Jerusalem, the current site of Mary's Tomb. Three days later, Christ returns to raise her into heaven with him, accompanied by a choir ofangels as Peter, John, and the other apostles lose sight of them.

A Warm Protestant Welcome for Mary
By Richard Covington
Posted January 25, 2008

Time was, for Protestants, that the Virgin Mary was a once-a-year thing. "We dragged Mary out at Christmas along with the angels and placed her at center stage," says religious essayist Kathleen Norris. "Then we packed her safely in the crèche box for the rest of the year." That attitude, Norris and other Protestants say, has long denied the mother of Jesus her rightful place in Christian tradition.

Today, more and more Protestants are welcoming Mary back into their spiritual lives. Several new books by Protestant authors have spurred new interest in the Virgin Mother. And a joint Anglican-Catholic commission recently announced a landmark accord on Mary that could help bridge the gap between the two denominations. Mary's story, says Beverly Gaventa, a NewTestament scholar at Princeton University and the coeditor of the book Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, "is a wonderful example of divine grace that Protestants have neglected. It was seen as Catholic territory, but now the lines between denominations are dropping."

Like many Protestants, Norris says she learned next to nothing about Mary from her Methodist and Congregational upbringing, but after spending time in Benedictine monasteries she grew to identify with her. "Like Mary, I am invited each day to bring Christ into the world in my prayers, thoughts, and actions," she says.

At the same time, however, the Mary revival troubles some evangelical Christians, who claim that Mary devotion detracts from a more proper focus on Christ. "Those who argue that Mary offers us a more compassionate understanding of God than is revealed in Jesus Christ alone insult both the person and work of Christ and accept the worst excesses of Catholic piety,"declares R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

La Virgen. Enrique Gonzalez, pastor of El Mesias United Methodist Church in Elgin, Ill., worries that Marian worship has supplanted devotion to Jesus in his native Mexico. "That is the main reason the Protestant church is so liberating to former Catholics—the gospel of Jesus Christ brings freedom from the mistaken idea that we can come to God only through ' la Virgen, ' "he told Christian Century magazine.

Gonzalez echoes one of Martin Luther's key justifications for launching the Protestant Reformation. It is true that Luther considered Mary a paragon of faithfulness, who showed the importance of belief, instead of good works and donations, to achieving salvation. But he deplored her exploitation by churchmen selling indulgences who promised entry to heaven in her name. Said Luther's colleague Philip Melanchthon: Christ is "the only high priest, advocate, and intercessor before God. He alone has promised to hear our prayers."

Princeton theologian Robert Jenson, coeditor of the book Mary: Mother of God, says that the doctrinaire Lutheran pastor of his boyhood—who also happened to be his father—would have been appalled by his recommendation to pray to Mary. But for Jenson, appealing to Mary is not an insult to Jesus or God; it is much the same as prayerfully invoking the name of a deceased friend or relative.

Like Jenson, Gaventa views Mary as "the first disciple," someone who does not simply submit to God's will but who actively chooses to follow him. Other non-Catholics, like Shannon Kubiak, the author of God Called a Girl, find comfort in Mary's vulnerability. "She was a nobody from the middle of nowhere...and God chose to use her for the most incredible task of a lifetime," marvels Kubiak.

The Anglican Communion, which includes the Episcopal Church in the United States, has long revered Mary, dedicating chapels to her, honoring her with holy days, and giving her a place in the liturgy. In its recent accord, "Mary: Grace and Hope in Christ," the special Anglican-Catholic commission affirmed that followers of both religions could pray to Mary and that Catholic teachings on the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption were consistent with Anglican interpretations of the Bible.

Supporting role. Few other Protestant denominations are ready to adopt these doctrines. For them, Mary will continue to play a supporting role. She serves as "a powerful reminder that Jesus was truly and fully human," says Mark Roberts, senior pastor at Irvine (Calif.) Presbyterian Church.

Roberts says that Protestants have long appreciated Mary, but he credits Mel Gibson's movie The Passion of the Christ for taking that admiration to a new level, driving home Mary's motherly anguish and inspiring intense sympathy."Nothing in church history has had a more significant impact on Protestant feeling for Mary than The Passion of the Christ," he asserts. "When we see the death of Jesus through the eyes of Mary, we feel the pain and horror of his suffering in a whole new way."

That doesn't mean that Protestants will be changing their theology or worship, says Roberts. But it does suggest that "the dividing wall of hostility between Catholics and Protestants has come down a bit."

Devotion to Her has long been a Controversial Affair
Behind the cult of Mary
By Thomas K. Grose
Posted January 25, 2008

The Virgin Mary attained cult status in the earliest centuries of the fledgling Christian church. And despite a concerted effort begun by the Vatican 40 years ago to de-emphasize her, the mother of Jesus remains a powerful, albeit polarizing, force within the Catholic Church.

The church's liberal wing claims the Mary cult is an unnecessary anachronism. Others—mainly conservative Catholics—argue that Mary is as popular as ever and want her reinstated as the Queen of Heaven.

Catholicism's internecine debate over Mary's status is nothing new, says Michael P. Carroll, author of The Cult of the Virgin Mary. "Devotion to Mary in the western church has gone through a number of cycles," he says.

Mariology is linked to Mary's important role within the church at its inception, according to Sarah Jane Boss, director of the Center for Marian Studies at the University of Wales-Lampeter. A prayer to Mary, written in Greek on papyrus and found in Egypt, addresses her as the Mother of God, and it dates to sometime between the third and fifth centuries.

But why did the early church feel a need to elevate Mary to a position of worship? Perhaps to help spread Christianity. "Ancient people needed a feminine figure in their worship," Boss says. "They were used to having goddesses." Moreover, virgin births of gods figured prominently in many ancient myths. And pioneering Christians often piggybacked on paganism tos peed conversion. They built churches where pagan temples once stood and often proclaimed holy days that coincided with past pagan celebrations.

Go-to saint. Marian devotion went into overdrive in the Roman west in 431,after the Council of Ephesus agreed that Mary should be called Theotokos (Mother of God) rather than Christotokos (Mother of Christ). The Theotokos label also implied Jesus's divinity. To be sure, there were dissenters who considered the title blasphemous. Nestorius, an early leader of the church in Constantinople, protested that God has always been, so he couldn't have a human mother. In the 11th century, the scholar St. Bernard of Clairvaux gave the cult further momentum when he preached a more emotional, personal faith in which Mary was the prime intercessor.

In her book Empress and Handmaid, Boss notes that the earliest likenesses of Mary portrayed a stern, all-powerful queen. By the end of the 12th century, however, her image softened. Mary became more of a moral figure, humbler and more approachable, the go-to saint for the troubled. "She was someone you could chat to," Boss says. Although the church has always officially portrayed Mary as an intermediary with no supernatural powers of her own, that's not been the case at a grass-roots level, Carroll says. In many countries, such as Italy, different Madonnas are seen not as representations of the same person but as individual beings, each with their own special powers.

Veneration of Mary takes many forms, among them special prayers—including the Hail Mary—shrines, relics, and statues. Many individual clerics pushed devotion to Mary by founding Marian societies, especially during the so-called counterreformation, when the Roman church reacted to the Protestant movement. Mariology got another boost in the 19th century as part of an effort by the Vatican to standardize Catholic practices. In 1854, Mary's Immaculate Conception became church dogma. In large part, Carroll says, the 19th-century church was again reacting to external pressures. Its authority was under assault by popular movements, modernist thought, and various governments.

Marian devotion has certainly helped wrap the Catholic Church in a cloak of mysticism. Marian apparitions have been commonplace and widespread since at least the fourth century. Shrines tend to be built at the sites where reported miracles involving Mary occurred. Charlene Spretnak, in her book Missing Mary, says 66 percent of Europe's Catholic shrines are dedicated to Mary; a mere 7 percent focus on Jesus. Claims of weeping Madonna statues were once very common, too. The number has dwindled since the 18th century, Carroll says, because the church typically failed to acknowledge them. TheVatican has also been reluctant to legitimize claims of visions of Mary.

"The church cannot have hallucinating individuals defining church doctrine,"Carroll explains. "It also tends not to endorse them because it does not want the whole thing trivialized."

Nevertheless, a few well-documented apparitions have gained church acceptance, including Lourdes in France, where, in 1858, teenager Bernadette Soubirous said Mary appeared to her 18 separate times and said: "I am the Immaculate Conception." Since that message came on the heels of the church's 1854 declaration, "Lourdes was a safe one" for it to accept, Carroll says.

According to Spretnak, Lourdes has documented 2,000 miracle cures since the visitation, and the church has accepted 66 of those.

Visions. Perhaps the most famous visitation of the last century was in 1917 at Fátima, Portugal, when several children said they saw and heard Mary. The enduring claim that the Virgin at Fátima warned of Russia rising as a godless world power would later fit into the church's anticommunist mentality, Carroll explains. For more than four years, starting in 1961, children in the Spanish village of San Sebastian de Garabandal said they had visions of Mary. The church has not accepted the Garabandal apparitions, Boss says, "but it has not condemned them, either." More recent unendorsed visitations have been reported in the 1980s in Medjugorje, Bosnia, and Kibeho, Rwanda.

Marian devotion is also conducted at a more personal level. In many Catholic countries there are edicolae—small shrines, or prayer spots—on city streets and along rural paths, and many feature Mary. "Bathtub Virgins" in the United States are lawn statues of Mary, so-called because they're often sheltered beneath half-planted, upright tubs. Home worship, which often includes altars, has long been part of Catholicism in places like Mexico, New Mexico, and Louisiana, Carroll says.

In recent times, the cult of Mary has come under attack from some Catholic feminists. They decry Mary as a male-invented symbol used to subjugate and diminish women. On one hand, the church emphasizes Mary as the ideal mother; on the other, it uses her as a poster girl for chastity. The irony is that a woman cannot become a mother without engaging in sex. "The Catholic religion therefore binds its female followers in particular on a double wheel, to be pulled one way and then the other," says Marina Warner, author of Alone of All Her Sex. Other feminists, however, consider Mary one of the few strong women in the Bible. Indeed, some argue she provides a rationale for the ordination of female priests.

While Mary remains a key figure in the Catholic Church, over the past 40years her importance has been minimized in a Vatican caught up in a wave of ecumenicalism and demystification. The Second Vatican Council (Vatican II) played down the nonbiblical aspects of Marian veneration. Church teaching now maintains that the foundation for Mariology wasn't Mary's motherhood but her agreeing to carry the Christ child. Thus, the church says, she is to be honored as "the perfect disciple."

This thoroughly modernized Mary hasn't gone down well with all Catholics,and many want her restored to her full regal glory. A conservative laygroup, Vox Populi Mariae Mediatric, has collected nearly 7 million signatures on a petition asking that Catholic dogma proclaim Mary as"Mediatrix of All Graces," or the sole dispenser of God's graces, as well as Christ's co-redeemer. The late Pope John Paul II was inclined toward granting the Virgin those titles, Boss says, but was dissuaded by his chief aide, the German cardinal, Joseph Ratzinger, who argued that only Vatican councils—and not popes—should proclaim dogma. Now, of course, Ratzinger is Pope Benedict XVI.

Meanwhile, Spretnak argues that Marian devotion shouldn't be the province of conservatives only. She calls on her fellow liberal Catholics to also seek a return to traditional Mariology. "Vatican II lopped off too much of [Mary's] symbolic, sacramental, mystical, and cosmological aspects, [and] it would be well to restore them." Besides, Spretnak says, many millions of Catholics have simply ignored the new doctrine. Indeed, the world's main shrines to the Virgin continue to attract millions of her faithful.

Thirty years ago, Warner insisted Mary was an "exhausted" icon and predicted that "the Virgin will recede into legend." Warner may ultimately be proved right. But Mary's legions of ardent worshipers will ensure that their queen won't go quietly.

Mary Magdalene was None of the Things a Pope Claimed
A long miscast outcast
By Richard Covington
Posted January 25, 2008

The woman kneels at Jesus's feet, wiping them with her abundant tresses. In Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo's drawing, taken from several passages in Luke, the dinner guests are up in arms, waving in protest that this sinner from the city has the gall to seek forgiveness. Jesus does forgive her and tells the protesting guests, "Her many sins have been released, because she loved much." The 18th-century Italian artist mistakenly calls her Mary Magdalene, but he can be forgiven, too.

Few characters in the New Testament have been so sorely miscast as Mary Magdalene, whose reputation as a fallen woman originated not in the Bible but in a sixth-century sermon by Pope Gregory the Great. Not only is she not the repentant prostitute of legend, meditating and levitating in a cave, but she was not necessarily even a notable sinner: Being possessed by "seven demons" that were exorcised by Jesus, she was arguably more victim than sinner. And the idea, popularized by The Da Vinci Code, that Mary was Jesus's wife and bore his child, while not totally disprovable, is the longest of long shots.

But arguments over whether Mary Magdalene was Jesus's wife, a reformed harlot, or the adulterous woman Jesus saved from stoning pale in comparison with the most rancorously disputed aspect of her legacy—what exactly she witnessed at Jesus's Resurrection. In a new biography of Mary Magdalene, theologian Bruce Chilton contends that Mary witnessed not the resurrection of a flesh-and-blood Jesus but a spiritual visitation. This is one of the principal reasons that she has been sidelined in the New Testament, says Chilton. Like the apostle Paul, who claims that only a "fool" could believe in the physical resuscitation of the body, and Jesus himself, who maintains men will be reborn "like angels," Mary perceives the risen Christ as a"sequence of visions," shared by the disciples, argues Chilton. (Luke, of course, insists that Jesus is bodily resurrected. "A spirit has not flesh and bones as you see that I have," Jesus tells the disciples in Luke, then eats broiled fish to drive his point home.)

Mary Magdalene's nonphysical interpretation of resurrection was ultimately suppressed, says Chilton, because it came uncomfortably close to the view of the Gnostics, a heretical sect of Christianity that flourished in the second and third centuries. But it came to light in 1896 when the second-century Gospel of Mary was acquired by a German scholar. In this fragmentary eight-page papyrus text in Coptic, Mary has a vision in which Jesus tells her she witnessed his reborn image with her "mind." This is followed by a section of likely elaboration that may have been purposely ripped from the manuscript to discredit her, says Chilton. She then urges the apostles to follow Jesus's instructions to spread his teachings to nonbelievers. When Peter angrily scoffs at the idea that Jesus would entrust such an important vision to a woman, another disciple, Levi, rebukes him as "hot-tempered."

But now, after centuries of neglect, outlandish distortions, and outright male fantasies, Mary Magdalene is beginning to regain her place as what Chilton terms "one of the prime catalysts and shaping forces of Christianity." Catholic groups around the country celebrate July 22, the anniversary of her death, as Mary Magdalene's feast day, using the occasion as a way to counter myths surrounding her and promote the ordination of women.

"We're trying to right a 2,000-year-old wrong," Christine Schenk, executive director of Future Church, a Cleveland-based organization behind the movement, told U.S. Catholic magazine.

Mary first appears in the Bible around A.D. 25 in Capernaum, a fishing town on the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is rapidly gaining a reputation as a healer. Afflicted with "seven demons," this single woman is probably 25 or 26. A few years older than Jesus and Jewish as well, she has made her way from Magdala (the origin of her name Magdalene), a cramped, smelly fish-processing town seething with angry, dispossessed farmers 7 miles to the southwest. It's not hard to picture Mary fleeing this hellhole in desperation, full of gratitude for finding someone who might save her from her demons. After an arduous, yearlong treatment, writes Chilton, she is finally cured by Jesus, who exorcises all the unnamed psychological torments.

Although Luke speaks of Mary as one of the women who provide for Jesus "out of their means," the Gospel does not says she is rich, like Joanna, another follower, who is married to King Herod's steward. And it's not easy to imagine anyone wealthy coming from a place like Magdala.

Still, Renaissance painters like Caravaggio and others portrayed the wealthy, fallen Mary as a red-haired siren draped in ermine, silk, and pearls. In these fantasies, the idly rich woman turned to prostitution not for money but for vanity, making her repentance and forgiveness that much sweeter.
After Jesus cures her, Mary becomes the most influential woman in his movement, the oral source for the accounts of other exorcisms in the NewTestament. According to Chilton, she teaches Jesus to use his own saliva for healing a deaf-mute and a blind man, an account that appears in Mark, the oldest Gospel, but is dropped from subsequent Gospels as women's magic.

Mary also figures prominently in rituals of healing and anointing, practices intended to invoke the Holy Spirit. In one episode in Mark, where she seems to foreshadow Jesus's burial, she incurs the wrath of some of the disciples for pouring expensive spikenard ointment over Jesus's head. We could have sold the ointment and used the money to help the poor, they complain.

Sternly upbraiding them, Jesus praises Mary for her beautiful gesture. "For you always have the poor with you," he says, "but you will not always have me. She has anointed my body beforehand for burying."

Mary Magdalene is unquestionably one of Jesus's most faithful followers, witnessing the Crucifixion with his mother, Mary, while the male apostles flee to avoid arrest. In all four New Testament Gospels, Mary Magdalene is the first (either alone or with a group of women) to arrive at Jesus's tomb, where she encounters an angel (or a pair of angels) who instructs her to go tell the disciples that Jesus has risen.

In John, she later encounters the resurrected Christ, who warns her not to touch him, perhaps because he is an intangible spirit, not flesh and blood. In works by Giotto, Fra Angelico, and others, a joyous but frustrated Mary reaches to Christ with intense longing, so near yet so far.

Nine verses further on in the text, Jesus orders doubting Thomas to place his hand in Jesus's side. A possible explanation of this seeming inconsistency is that the first episode stems from Mary herself and the episode with Thomas arises from another witness.

It is not by chance that Mary Magdalene is among the first to learn of Jesus's rebirth. Surely, the divine prophet who forsaw his own crucifixion also forsaw the witnesses of his resurrection; in a sense, Jesus chose Mary Magdalene as the herald of his return. For her pivotal role in the Resurrection, she became known as "the apostle to the apostles," a figure powerful enough to chide the apostles to follow Jesus's command to preach to nonbelievers, despite the risks.

In Eastern Orthodox tradition, Mary Magdalene travels to Rome, where she preaches to Tiberius, then settles in Ephesus in northwest Turkey with Mary ,the mother of Jesus, and the apostle John. Other accounts place her in southern France or even in India with the apostle Thomas. According to Chilton, she returns to Magdala, where she continues preaching, healing, and anointing. In A.D. 67, she becomes one of thousands of victims massacred by the Romans in reprisal for an armed rebellion.

Soon after, the early leaders of the emergent church, including the authors of the New Testament Gospels, written around 70-95, continued the process of erasing Mary Magdalene and other female followers that had begun with Peter and the other male disciples. In one text, the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, Jesus himself makes the astonishing statement that Mary, and indeed all women, cannot enter the kingdom of heaven unless they become male.

In order to offer a moral alternative to the decadent Roman religion, the emergent church trumpeted male-dominated traditional family values. "This allowed Christianity to make great strides in the Greco-Roman world, but a tthe enormous price of forgetting about the movement's influential women,"says Chilton.

In the sixth century, Pope Gregory the Great brought Mary firmly back into the picture—not the way she was but as the church wanted her to be. With breathtaking oversimplification, Gregory conflated Mary Magdalene of the seven demons with the unnamed "sinner" who washed Jesus's feet with her hair in Luke (a close reading of Luke 7 and 8 shows that they are not the same woman) and also Mary of Bethany, who anoints Jesus with nard in John.

Gregory reasoned that if a woman like Mary, who had fallen so low, could be forgiven through faith and the church, her carnality transformed into spirituality, the worst sinners could hope for salvation. Mary Magdalene wiped away Eve's original sin. "In paradise, a woman was the cause of death for a man; coming from the sepulcher, a woman proclaimed life to men,"Gregory declared in his famous sermon in 591. The Eastern Orthodox Church, however, never accepted Gregory's melding of the three women.

In short order, Mary Magdalene soon became identified with the adulterous woman Jesus saved from stoning in John and with another woman who is not even mentioned in the New Testament—Mary of Egypt, a fourth-century prostitute who converted to Christianity and lived in a cave for the rest ofher life.

Historian Jane Schaberg coined the term "harlotization" to describe Mary's negative makeover, a process that disempowered a powerful leader of the faith.

Tales about the hermit Mary clawing her breasts and tearing out her hair in penance for her sins abounded, inspiring the creation of orders of flagellant monks. Churches claiming bodily relics proliferated, with nearly200 boasting a piece of the saint by the end of the 13th century. At Saint-Maximin in southern France, Dominican friars still display her skull with a miraculously preserved scrap of skin where Jesus touched her forehead after the Resurrection.

Painters like the 13th-century Italian Master of the Magdalene, Hans Holbein, and William Blake focused on her role in the Resurrection, while artists like Titian portrayed the saint in ecstasy, barely covering her naked body with long reddish-blond hair.

Victorian photographers posed seminude adolescent girls, many living in charity schools named after her, as "Magdalenes," a prurient mixed message perpetuating the saint's image as the vixenish Lady Godiva of Christianity.

Finally, in 1969, 1,378 years after Gregory fused three New Testament women into Mary Magdalene—and more than 450 years since religious scholars rejected this fusion confusion—the church officially corrected the mistake.

Even so, the legend of the repentant prostitute still exercises a tenacious hold on the public imagination. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese in 1988's Last Temptation of Christ and Mel Gibson in The Passion of the Christ in 2004 keep the fiction alive.

The sexy, reformed Mary Magdalene is a symbol that's proven difficult to abandon. But the visionary Mary, full of faith at the foot of the cross and messenger of the Resurrection, a founding disciple entrusted by Jesus with aspecial mission to spread God's word, carries the greater ring of truth.

Fact and Fiction in The Da Vinci Code
By Richard Covington
Posted January 25, 2008

On July 22, 1209, the anniversary of Mary Magdalene's death, armed Crusaders descended on the French town of Béziers and massacred more than 20,000 people. Their crime? Sheltering heretics who believed Mary Magdalene was the concubine of Jesus. Imagine how Pope Innocent III, who sent the attackers, would have reacted to The Da Vinci Code, the modern thriller based on the same incendiary idea.

The thesis of the bestselling novel is that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had a child whose descendants later founded the Merovingian dynasty. Mary's womb, not the chalice of the Last Supper, was the real Holy Grail, and a Catholic sect is killing people to hush it all up. The book also makes Leonardo da Vinci the past leader of a shadowy order sworn to protect documents proving the existence of Jesus's child. Da Vinci depicts not the disciple John next to Jesus at the Last Supper, the book says, but Mary Magdalene, a symbol of the "divine feminine" principle that the church is determined to obliterate.

The book has spawned heated speculation: Why did the church wrongly label Mary a prostitute? Was she marginalized by a patriarchal church afraid of female leaders? How intimate was she with Jesus? Does the debate over the child obscure a more profound role for Mary in the future of Christianity?

"Most people who read The Da Vinci Code have no way of separating historical fact from literary fiction," says Bart Ehrman, chairman of the religious studies department at the University of North Carolina and author of Truth and Fiction in the Da Vinci Code.

Celibate. Take the book's notion that Jesus had to be married because celibacy was condemned according to Jewish custom. The Essenes, a sect that shared Jesus's expectation of an apocalypse, were unmarried, celibate men, Ehrman points out. Furthermore, there is no mention of Jesus's wife in the Bible or in any ancient sources.

The book's main character, Leigh Teabing, says the Gnostic Gospel of Philip calls Mary a "companion" or spouse to Jesus. But the Greek word the Gospeluses, koinônos, means simply friend or associate, Ehrman says. The text says Jesus kisses Mary, but Jesus kissed all his disciples; the gesture was notc onsidered sexual. Still, the Gospel of Philip does not completely dispel the possibility that Jesus and Mary had a sexual relationship, says theologian Bruce Chilton.

Ehrman also disputes the novel's claim that Jesus intended for Mary Magdalene, not Peter, to lead the church: In the second-century Gospel of Mary, supposedly the source of these instructions, Jesus discusses thes oul's salvation, Ehrman says, not who will guide his mission. Indeed, ina nother Gnostic text, the Gospel of Thomas, Jesus seems to pronounce that Mary must be made male to enter heaven.

Legend. The idea that Mary Magdalene bore Jesus's child, a folk legend for centuries, was given a boost in the 1960s by Frenchman Pierre Plantard, who forged documents purporting to show that that this child was the ancestor of the French Merovingian kings. Plantard later recanted under oath. The 1982 book Holy Blood, Holy Grail popularized Plantard's theories and added that Mary's womb was the Grail. Author Dan Brown lifted much of his conspiracy material from this book, but Ehrman slams it. "Of the hundreds of professional New Testament scholars whom I personally know...there is not a single one, to my knowledge, who finds the claims of the book to be historically credible," he writes.

As for da Vinci slipping Mary into The Last Supper, most art historians agree that the Renaissance master simply painted a feminine John tod istinguish him as the youngest disciple. "Leonardo's preliminary sketches very clearly identify the figure as John," argues Diane Apostolos-Cappandona, a cultural historian at Georgetown University. What about Teabing's assertion that the apostle has breasts? "Just the way the garment folds," she says.

To many scholars, focusing on a Mary-Jesus marriage, however titillating, is a wasted opportunity. "There's a genuine religious impulse to understand a feminine figure like Mary Magdalene and how she understood Jesus's mind," says Chilton, "but there's no need to sexualize her.... To see her simply as a potential vessel for his seed is missing the point." The bottom line, says Apostolos-Cappandona, "is she's an independent woman. She's not the daughter of anyone, the wife of anyone, the sister of anyone, and that's enough. Sometimes, I just want to stand up and scream, 'Why do we have to make her Jesus's wife?'"

Mary and Martha are Biblical Favorites, but Who Were They?
Two models of Christian devotion
By Caroline Hsu
Posted January 25, 2008

In his earliest known painting, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary, Jan Vermeer recasts the biblical sisters of Lazarus as two sturdy young Dutch women. Good Martha, all bustle and industry, is just setting down a woven basket containing a perfect round loaf of golden bread in front of Jesus.

Sitting at Jesus's feet, sister Mary is a picture of repose, one hand propping up her head in a traditional thinker's pose, taking in Jesus's teachings. Above her, Martha and Jesus are locked in a gaze. One can imagine that Martha, hot from the kitchen and exhausted from cooking and cleaning—what must it take to host the Son of God?—has just finished delivering perhaps the most famous sibling whine of all time. "Lord, don't you care that my sister has left me to do the work by myself? Tell her to help me!"

Jesus responds, maybe a bit sharply, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and upset about many things, but only one thing is needed." And here comes the zinger: "Mary has chosen what is better, and it will not be taken away from her."

Painted sometime in the 1650s, Vermeer's version of events reflects what New Testament scholars believed about Mary and Martha for centuries: two sisters in a deep rivalry—one self-righteously busy with women's work and the other in calm discipleship with the Lord. The tale has often been interpreted as a model for two kinds of Christian devotion—a quiet solitary life of contemplation, in the tradition of monkhood, or a life of active secular engagement, as a member of the clergy. As two of the few named women in the New Testament, Mary and Martha have also been beloved by women readers. Even if Jesus might appear to denigrate Martha's domestic work, he also praises Mary for her discipleship—affirming the importance of women taking active personal roles in devotion.

However, new scholarship points toward entirely different layers of meaning hidden within the tired bickering of Mary and Martha. Scholars are questioning just who these sisters were, why Jesus came to their home, and not the house next door, whether they were sisters at all, and why, for two millenniums, Martha has been forever stuck in the kitchen, while Mary sits at Jesus's feet.

"The story has often been read in a very domesticated way," says Warren Carter, professor at the St. Paul School of Theology. "People have often thought that Martha is serving dinner. She's distracted by her many tasks, but these are not the tasks of what vegetables to cook." In fact, Martha's "tasks," translated from the Greek diakonia, related to the verb diakonein, are used throughout the New Testament to refer to both domestic service and Christian ministry—the word deacon is derived from the same noun.

Patriarchal association of women with the domestic meant that scholars routinely missed this important detail. This double meaning opens up a new vantage point where readers can view Mary and Martha.

"It seems likely to me these were two women who were famous among early Christians, perhaps as missionaries, but certainly as leaders," says Mary Rose D'Angelo, associate professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. In Luke 10:38, Jesus and his disciples "came to a village where a woman named Martha opened her home to him." The language suggests that Martha owned the house—not unlikely as women did own property in ancient times. D'Angelo takes the interpretation a step further: "Early Christians didn't have churches; most seem to have gathered in private houses, and perhaps Martha was the host of a house church."

Far from being bickering sisters, Mary and Martha were a pair of missionary leaders. This theory gained support with the advent of the women's movement, when the role of women in church leadership and the question of ordination became important to the changing church. "The church has a very bad history in terms of treatment of women, and I imagine this story has continued to be very significant in our own time because it's a rediscovery of a part of the heritage," says Carter.

In fact, the New Testament points toward extensive female leadership in the early Christian movement. For instance, in the last chapter of Romans, Paul commends 27 people for their missionary tasks—one third of these are women, including the female pair Tryphena and Tryphosa. Missionaries tended to be named in pairs, and male-female pairs are assumed to be married couples.

This assumption has led to some speculation on the nature of Mary and Martha's relationship. In translation, they are called sisters, but in the original Greek, the language is less exact—sisters could mean sisters in Christ, siblings, or possibly even a same-sex erotic partnership. The idea of a same-sex relationship has been bandied about in recent scholarship, but the text lacks support.

Whatever the exact nature of their relationship, the story of Mary and Martha does not end in the book of Luke. The sisters reappear once more in the Gospel of John. Here, they have a brother that the writer of Luke doesn't mention—the famous Lazarus. When Jesus comes to the town of Bethany, Lazarus has already been dead for four days, and Mary and Martha are in deep mourning. Mary stays home, and Martha, again the more active sister, greets Jesus in town and makes the astonishing statement in John 11:27: "I believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, who was to come into the world."

Margaret Guenther, associate rector at St. Columba Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., and a former seminary professor, says that Martha's profession of faith is an underappreciated moment in the Bible. "It's a bold proclamation, and she made it before many of the men did," says Guenther. "We have a special day in January where we celebrate Peter's recognition of Jesus as the Messiah, but Martha doesn't quite make it into the book."

Far from their apparent rivalry in the Gospel of Luke, the Mary and Martha of the Gospel of John work in concert. After Lazarus is raised from the dead, Jesus again comes to their house for dinner. Here, Mary commits an act of great devotion and significance—she washes Jesus's feet with "a pint of pure nard, an expensive perfume" that Judas says is worth a year of wages.

With this poetic act wherein "the house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume," Mary powerfully presages Jesus's death—the oil was saved for the day of his burial. She also provides a model of Christian service and devotion. Christ later echoes her act when he washes the feet of his disciples.

The appearance of Lazarus only in the Gospel of John might raise doubt that the Mary and Martha of Luke are the same as the pair in John. Scholars point out that there seemed to be relatively few personal names in biblical times, and the authors of the Gospels may have recycled the same names for different stories. If so, did these women exist at all? "That there were a significant pair of leaders called Mary and Martha who were well known, I don't see any reason to doubt," says Carter. And to a lay reader, Mary and Martha have always been the same sisters.

What becomes of these women? Popular folklore traces Martha's path from her house in Bethany to the South of France where she supposedly traveled as an evangelist. Some even say that she tamed a dragon along the way. And to this day, several churches in France claim to be the site of Martha's tomb. "It's folk piety," says Guenther. "People want to know more about these women, so somebody makes up these terrific stories, and they grow and grow."

Mary and Martha need not tame dragons to engage the modern reader. Whether one imagines the sisters in a dusty biblical town, in Vermeer's 17th-century Holland, or even as contemporary women, they have much to offer beyond their imagined rivalry. In Vermeer's painting, Jesus points toward Mary, not as a rebuke to Martha but as a gentle reminder that leadership demands both the ability to listen and the ability to act. Finally, Mary and Martha are not at odds but form two parts of a whole.

The Seductive Salome has Inspired for Ages
A deadly dance
By Linda L. Creighton
Posted January 25, 2008

It is hard to believe that the biblical character associated with two of history's immortal phrases— "Bring me the head of John the Baptist" and "The Dance of the Seven Veils"—is not even named in the Bible. Fleetingly mentioned in the New Testament Gospels of Mark and Matthew, Salome is identified simply as the daughter who so inflamed a king with her sensual dancing that he granted her request to behead the prophet who preached the coming of Christ.

Yet she has become a creature of legend, her story commandeered and bent to the imaginations of countless artists, writers, and dancers centuries after she lived.

Maybe it was all her mother's fault.

Salome's mother, Herodias, was a granddaughter of Herod the Great, the King of Judea from 37 B.C. to 4 B.C. In the account of Flavius Josephus, the first-century historian, Herodias's first husband was her uncle, Herod Philip. After the birth of their daughter, Salome, she left Herod for her husband's half brother Herod Antipas, the tetrarch of Galilee.

This rather incestuous union was repeatedly criticized by the prophet John the Baptist. "It is not lawful," he told Herod Antipas, "for you to have your brother's wife." At the same time, the religious movement John began was growing in popularity, threatening Herod Antipas with a rebellion among his subjects. In fact, Herod's military losses in a border war with the King of Nabatea were seen by many subjects as divine punishment for his marriage to Herodias after he had divorced Nabatea's daughter. In an attempt to weaken John's influence, Herod imprisoned him in the remote fortress of Machaerus on the cliffs above the Dead Sea in southern Perea. John's popularity, however, made Herod reluctant to martyr him through assassination.

At a celebratory banquet given at the palace fortress at Machaerus, the story goes, Herodias deviously arranged for Salome to dance for the pleasure of her stepfather. The sensual dance, although it is not described in detail, so delighted Herod—and, by implication, so aroused him—that he offered "even half of my kingdom" to the young girl. Delivering her well-planned coup de grâce, Herodias instructs the girl to make one request: "I want you to give me at once the head of John the Baptist on a platter."

The king, though deeply shocked, is nevertheless unable to retreat from the magnanimous offer he made in front of so many witnesses. So John is retrieved from his prison cell, and his head is cut off. The head, sitting in a pool of fresh blood, is brought to Salome on a tray. She then gives it to her mother.

Gruesome in its details, and even more stunning in its portrayal of the young girl's lascivious dance, the drama of Salome has long been suspect. "Some scholars have questioned the entire story," writes Ross Kraemer in Women in Scripture. Kraemer cites, among other discrepancies, Josephus's account of the death of John, as well as differing dates in the Gospel and Josephus accounts that would have made Salome the wrong age for the role. Kraemer says it seems likely that "the entire narrative is a fabrication."

Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament studies and director of the Carpenter Program in Religion, Gender, and Sexuality at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, also questions the historical accuracy of the dance of Salome. "Her existence—including her marriage to the king of Chalcis—is noted by Josephus," says Levine, "and he'd have no reason to invent her. As for whether she danced for Herod Antipas and his friends, or whether she was involved in the death of John the Baptist—highly, highly doubtful."

Both Kraemer and Levine say Salome's story bears more than a passing resemblance to an earlier Roman narrative. "The story of Salome's dance appears to be modeled on the 2nd-century B.C. story of a Roman senator, Lucius Quinctius Flaminius, who, at a dinner party with a paid attendant—courtesan may be the nicest term—beheaded a man upon her request," Levine explains. "She wanted to see what a decapitation looked like."

Levine says readers of Mark and Matthew, "if they knew this earlier story, would see Herodias in the role of the courtesan." And the dance itself would have been a very improper event, Levine notes, saying a member of the royal household would never have performed for friends of the king. "The ancient world is not like today, where the kids are trotted out to play the piano for guests."

The motivations for the Gospel writings are also open to question, Levine points out. "Mark and Matthew use the story to show the corruption of the Herodian court in Galilee and the weakness of Herod Antipas; he is depicted as ruled by, or at least manipulated by, his wife, much as Pilate is seen as manipulated by the high priest or the crowds." In other words, says Levine, "once we look at the story as part of a narrative, it can be seen to emphasize other Gospel scenes."

Not so fast, says Paul Maier, professor of ancient history at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Mich. "I consider it rather pathetic that any scholar should doubt the historicity of the biblical references to Salome," he says, "since all reports in the Gospels regarding Herod Antipas, his second wife, Herodias, and her dancing daughter accord perfectly with outside information on these people."

Maier points out that Josephus was an expert on the Herodian dynasty, figured out Salome's name, and pinpointed John the Baptist's execution site as Antipas's fortress palace. "The mound still stands today," Maier says, "waiting to be excavated." Details of the Salome event dovetail perfectly with the biblical version, Maier says, concluding, "Any critic who uses this episode on which to superimpose a question mark has chosen a hopelessly wrong target."

Whether Salome's role in biblical history was fictional or real, it was the adoption and adaptation of the story by later painters, playwrights, and dancers that ensured her lasting fame. In almost every medium, artists have explored Salome, from medieval bas-reliefs in France, to 13th-century Italian mosaics, to Gustave Moreau's intricate 19th-century watercolors.

Artists have long been inspired by Salome's holding the head of John the Baptist, finding in the event a compelling story of eroticism and violence.But with the writing of his 1891 play Salome, Oscar Wilde ushered in a new era of interpretation for the story—a portrait of Salome that has overtaken the Gospels. "It was left to Oscar Wilde...to give Salome a fame that would reach far beyond the elite artistic and intellectual circles where she ruled from her distant pedestal," writes author and former New York City Ballet dancer Toni Bentley in her book Sisters of Salome. "Wilde's Salome would become a pop icon."

The play was banned before its first scheduled performance, whipping a waiting public into a frenzy even before the appearance of accompanying erotic illustrations in the 1894 English version by a 22-year-old artist named Aubrey Beardsley. The German composer Richard Strauss used Wilde's text as the libretto for his hugely successful 1905 opera, Salome. Salome's performance finally had a name: The Dance of the Seven Veils, an elaborately sexual unwrapping that makes Herod's lust understandable, though not excusable.

"It's a striptease," says Bentley, who has no doubt that Salome's dance was deliberate. "However you cloak it, whether it's classical ballet or striptease, dance is sexual," she says, noting that women who dance have often been portrayed in history as dangerous women. "I think the Bible sends the message that Salome is a bad woman—meaning sexual woman," says Bentley. "Even though the mother is complicit, even though the stepfather orders John's death, Salome is ultimately held responsible for the death of a holy man—a classic case of blaming the woman."

And what end did Salome herself meet? According to the legend presented by historian Nicephorus, Salome fell through the ice on a frozen lake, the shards piercing her neck and decapitating her—a fittingly dramatic death for a woman who so easily solicited murder. The historian Josephus, however, tells us that Salome led a fairly routine existence, marrying and bearing three children by her cousin Aristobulus, living out her life without further scandal.

What Christians Owe to Unsung Leaders of the Early Church
Three stalwart sisters in faith
By Jeffery L. Sheler
Posted January 25, 2008

Their names may seem unfamiliar and their numbers few compared with the celebrated men of the New Testament. But search the Scriptures carefully, and you will find them: Phoebe, Prisca, Junia, and other strong women of faith who—like the apostles Peter and Paul—spread the Gospel and led communities of believers in the earliest days of the Christian church.

Yet unlike their male counterparts, whose words and deeds were carefully preserved in the Christian canon, relatively little is remembered of these early female leaders. Then, as now, it seems, the role of women in the church was a controversial subject. Given the patriarchal culture from which Christianity and its Scriptures sprang, and the male-dominated church hierarchy that eventually emerged, some modern scholars find it remarkable that their memory has survived at all.

Ironically, it is mainly in the writings of Paul—who was no flaming egalitarian on gender issues—that we learn of these influential Christian women. In the final chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, he includes them in a list of associates to whom he sends his greetings. Although the information he conveys is indirect and scanty, scholars say it reveals important clues to the social status and missionary activity of women in the early church.

Phoebe

"I commend to you our sister Phoebe, a deacon of the church at Cenchreae, so that you may welcome her in the Lord as is fitting for the saints, and help her in whatever she may require from you, for she has been a benefactor of many and of myself as well."

Such a glowing recommendation from the missionary apostle is a clear indication of the high esteem—and, as some scholars argue, the high position—this gentile woman held in the nascent Christian community.

Phoebe is often portrayed as a wealthy, independent woman, probably a widow, who traveled widely on personal business but most likely also in her work as a leader of the church at Cenchreae, a busy seaport east of Corinth. Because she is named first in Paul's list of greetings, many scholars assume she was the bearer of Paul's letter and had traveled to Rome perhaps to begin to arrange for the apostle's planned missionary journey to Spain.

The titles Paul used in the original Greek to describe her are telling: adelphe, or "sister," indicating he considered her a co-worker in the faith; diakonos, or "deacon," the same title Paul applied to himself and other men engaged in preaching and teaching; and prostatis, often translated as "patron" or "benefactor," though it may also mean a presiding officer, guardian, or leader.

As a woman of means, scholars say, Phoebe probably owned a home large enough to accommodate Christian gatherings. It is likely, therefore, that she was the patron and leader of a house church and perhaps offered hospitality and financial support to traveling Christians, including Paul. That would help explain why Paul felt so indebted to her.

Some commentators have attempted to cast Phoebe in a more limited and traditionally feminine role, perhaps as a minister to women only. Some English Bible translations call her "deaconess" or simply a "servant." But as Prof. Jouette Bassler of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University points out, the word Paul uses (diakonos) has "no gender distinctions" and "clearly points to a leadership role over the whole church, not just part of it...Phoebe is thus a church official, a minister of the church in Cenchreae."

Prisca

"Greet Prisca and Aquila, who work with me in Christ Jesus, and who risked their necks for my life, to whom not only I give thanks, but also all the churches of the gentiles."

Prisca, also called Priscilla in the book of Acts, and her husband, Aquila, a tent maker from the region of Pontus on the south shore of the Black Sea, were known by the early church as important and well-traveled missionaries and occasional traveling companions of Paul.

They also were among the first Jewish Christians in Rome, where scholars say they established a house church and probably taught in the synagogues as well. According to Acts, they were forced to leave Rome when the Emperor Claudius expelled all Jews from the city in 49. That expulsion also was noted by the Roman historian Suetonius, who described it as a response to "disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus"—a reference, many scholars believe, to riotous quarrels in the synagogues between believers and nonbelievers in Christ.

From Rome, the couple moved to Corinth, where they set up a tent-making shop. It was there that they first met Paul, also a tent maker, who probably worked and lodged with them. After a year and a half in Corinth, they accompanied Paul to Ephesus, where they once again set up a house church.

The house church in those early days of Christianity, notes Prof. Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza of Harvard Divinity School, was "the beginning and center of the Christian mission" in a city or district. "It provided space for the preaching of the Gospel and for worship gatherings, as well as for social and Eucharistic table sharing." Prisca, Schussler Fiorenza and others contend, probably functioned as the leader of the house church in Ephesus.

"The fact that Prisca's name appears first in four of six New Testament references" to the couple, notes Bassler of smu, "probably points to her more active role in the life of the church."

While in Ephesus, the couple apparently saved Paul's life and exposed themselves to danger in the process. Although the incident is not explained, it was no doubt similar to several other episodes reported in Acts in which the feisty apostle was chased, beaten, or jailed by his opponents. Prisca and Aquila's unspecified intervention won them Paul's endless gratitude.

After the emperor's edict was lifted in 54, Prisca and her husband returned to Rome, where they re-established a house church and presumably labored for many more years. According to one legend, the fourth-century St. Priscae church on the Aventine Hill in Rome was built on the site of the couple's home. Others have suggested that Prisca authored the anonymous New Testament letter to the Hebrews. While neither legend can be confirmed, as Bassler notes, "they attest to the power of her memory in the early church."

Junia

"Greet Andronicus and Junia, my relatives who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles, and they were in Christ before I was."A female apostle? So it seems, although not everyone agrees. The name of Junia appears once in the New Testament and scarcely anywhere else in church writings except in occasional discussions over the years as to whether she, in fact, was a she.

Assuming that Junia was a woman, as many modern scholars do, she probably was a freed slave who took on the name of her slave master and was subsequently granted Roman citizenship. Paul described her and her missionary partner—possibly her husband—as "relatives," which scholars say could mean blood kin or may simply mean fellow Jews.

That Paul describes her as an apostle is of greatest import to many modern readers. To Paul, it meant she had seen a vision of the risen Christ, as he did, and was engaged in missionary work. Some others in Paul's time and later have defined apostles as those who were chosen by Jesus as disciples and who saw him after the Resurrection—in other words, the original 12 (all men) less Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Jesus, plus the one chosen as Judas's replacement.

But for many, the question of gender is the stickler. As Bernadette Brooten, professor of Christian Studies at Brandeis University, has noted, early church writers "either explicitly interpreted Junia as a female or did not comment" on gender at all. It was not until the 13th century that church leaders began to assert that the person in question was not Junia but Junias, a man.

What reason did they give for this change? "The answer," Brooten writes in Women in Scripture, a dictionary of women in the Bible, "is simple: A woman could not have been an apostle," and therefore, "the woman who is here called an apostle could not have been a woman." Further, she notes, while the female Latin name Junia has been found over 250 times in inscriptions from ancient Rome, "we do not have a single shred of evidence that the name Junias ever existed."
The implications for modern Christian women, says Brooten, are unmistakable. "If the first-century Junia could be an apostle, it is hard to see how her 20th-century counterpart should not be allowed to become even a priest."

Ten Biblical Teachings Women Love to Hate
A feminist hit list
By Jeffery L. Sheler
Posted January 25, 2008

Are the Bible's teachings on women to be taken literally? Or should they be interpreted, and perhaps discounted, as vestiges of an ancient patriarchal culture? U.S. News asked a dozen biblical scholars, all female, to identify passages they consider to be the most problematic for modern American women.

Here are the 10 most frequently cited.

Genesis 3:16
Eve's punishment for eating the forbidden fruit: "In pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."

Exodus 20:17
In the Ten Commandments, the wife as property: "Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's house, thou shalt not covet thy neighbor's wife, nor his manservant, nor his maidservant, nor his ox, nor his ass, nor anything that is thy neighbor's."

Numbers 5:12-28
A test for women suspected of adultery: "If any man's wife goes astray and is unfaithful to him...and there is no witness against her since she was not caught in the act...then the man shall bring his wife to the priest...[who] shall make her take an oath, saying, 'If no man has lain with you, if you have not turned aside to uncleanness while under your husband's authority, be immune to this water of bitterness'... When he has made her drink the water, then, if she has defiled herself...[the water] shall enter into her and cause bitter pain, and her womb shall discharge, her uterus drop, and the woman shall become an execration among her people. But if the woman has not defiled herself and is clean, then she shall be immune and be able to conceive children."

Deuteronomy 22:23-24
A rape victim's rights, Old Testament style: "If there is a young woman, a virgin already engaged to be married, and a man meets her in the town and lies with her, you shall...stone them to death, the young woman because she did not cry for help...and the man because he violated his neighbor's wife." [If the woman is not engaged] "the man who lay with her shall give 50 shekels of silver to the young woman's father, and she shall become his wife."

Ephesians 5:22-23
The apostle Paul on husbands and wives: "Wives, be subject to your husbands as you are to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the church."

1 Corinthians 14:34-35
Paul on women's conduct in church: "Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak... And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home."

1 Timothy 2:13-15
Paul on why women should be silent in church: "For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor. Yet she will be saved through childbearing, provided [she] continue in faith and love and holiness, with modesty."

Titus 2:3-5
Paul on how to instruct women: "Likewise, tell the older women to be reverent in behavior, not to be slanderers or slaves to drink; they are to teach what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be self-controlled, chaste, good managers of the household, kind, being submissive to their husbands, so that the word of God may not be discredited."

1 Peter 3:1-7
The apostle Peter on women's conduct and status: "Wives...do not adorn yourselves outwardly by braiding your hair, and by wearing gold ornaments or fine clothing; rather, let your adornment be the inner self with the lasting beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit... It was in this way long ago that the holy women who hoped in God used to adorn themselves by accepting the authority of their husbands. Thus Sarah obeyed Abraham and called him lord."

Revelation 14:1-4
The 144,000 who will be chosen at the Second Coming: "Then I looked, and there was the Lamb, standing on Mount Zion! And with him were 144,000 who had his name and his Father's name written on their foreheads...It is these who have not defiled themselves with women, for they are virgins."

Source: US News & World Report

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