Reframing Her: Biblical Women in Postcolonial Focus

Biblical Theology Bulletin, Winter, 2005 by Mark Bartusch

REFRAMING HER: BIBLICAL WOMEN IN POSTCOLONIAL FOCUS. By Judith E. McKinlay. The Bible in the Modern World, I. Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2004. Pp. 195. $29.50.

In this volume, McKinlay has nicely woven together eight chapters of new and previously-published material into a coherent whole. Judging by this first title to appear, the new series, The Bible in the Modern World, promises to pay attention to how the Bible has been variously used around the world, and how new methods or "postures" of reading and interpretation can offer fresh perspectives on and insights into familiar stories in the Bible.

McKinlay's perspective is shaped by both feminist hermeneutics and postcolonial criticism, highlighting the significance of social location not only for the biblical writers and editors, but also fur the contemporary interpreter. She writes as a New Zealander, specifically as a Pakeha--the label used by the Maori population fur those who are not Maori. This is a comparable position to that of the ancient Israelites, whose narrators crafted stories about their own settlement of the land of Canaan, where they emerged as a dominant "other," while working strenuously to portray the rest of the Canaanite population as the real "Other"--tempting, dangerous, and to be avoided. McKinlay furthermore reflects critically on the missionary history of Christianity in New Zealand where the dominant Christian position has provided the standard interpretation of biblical characters and stories. She writes, then, as a postcolonial critic, but does so from the more unusual perspective of a "settler descendant." As a member of the dominant culture, she is prepared to encounter "some uncomfortable, disquieting and challenging questions of interpretation and understanding" as she approaches the text (ix), which results in a helpful example of what postcolonial criticism looks like in practice.

McKinlay investigates the meaning of selected biblical stories in which female characters or feminine images appear prominently and asks about how one reads these texts in a postcolonial context: how does the dominant Israelite (colonizer) point of view shape the narrator's representation of others (colonized)? How are women used as characters within the narratives in support of a "politics of dominance" (x)? How are the women represented in their roles? And for what purpose is the female imagery being used?

In particular, McKinlay is keenly interested in "how the biblical women and feminine images in the texts ... were used to serve certain interests and wished-fur realities" held by the narrators (x). More specifically, she is interested to see how women are used in biblical narratives to represent the "Other," over and against whom the biblical writers created Israelite identity and maintained Israelite distinction in the land of Canaan. She argues that throughout the biblical tradition the storytellers used female characters and feminine images as "symbols of the threatening powers of disordered chaos," often associated with things considered "foreign" and dangerous to Israel. She highlights a particular rhetorical (and gender) strategy by which a "stock figure," a female embodiment of evil "Otherness," is used to support Israelite (and male) dominance (30). McKinlay identifies Jezebel as the "prime example of that very stock figure of 'foreign' evilness, whose seductive and sinister powers are inevitably deathly" (31). In her story and, in particular, in her death, Jezebel is constructed as a character embodying everything that Israel is not by the narrator who is concerned to establish Israel's peculiar identity in the land.

McKinlay begins with Israelite monotheism, with its deity typically portrayed in masculine terms and images, and the sharp polemic in the Hebrew Bible against the goddesses who appear in ancient Israel's religious environment. In fact, the goddess supplies one of the primary frames through which McKinlay reads the biblical tradition, seeing her in the background of the Bible's representation of Eve, Jezebel, and the woman "clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet" (Rev 21:1-2). She notes the effort on the part of Israel's official storytellers to differentiate Israel from its neighbors on religious grounds, resulting in the attempt within Israel to eradicate the feminine representation of the divine as asherah/Asherah.

But immediately McKinlay wonders how the figure of Wisdom, so positively represented in Proverbs (and in which she sees traces of the feminine divine), escaped the anti-feminine polemic that was directed against Asherah. Her contusion: one finally eradicates a female deity by transforming her into a metaphor (5). Wisdom may be feminine, but she is a feminine expression of some aspect of Israel's male deits. The rest of the volume follows this leitmotif through the Bible. McKinlay argues that this effort to suppress the "Other" (and the goddess) can be traced in the portrayal of women elsewhere in the biblical text. Specifically, she takes up stories involving Eve, Sarah (and Hagar), Rahab and Ruth ("Others" who nevertheless appear positively in Israel's story as heroines because of their having abandoned their Canaanite [Moabite] "otherness" and who speak the words their Israelite narrators have given them), Jezebel, the Syrophoenidan (Canaanite) woman who encounters Jesus at Tyre, and the two cities--Babylon/Rome and (new) Jerusalem--portrayed as women, in the Apocalypse.