Canter Bridge

The abstract of Shapira’s article reads as follows:

Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1895) is considered the pioneer of feminist literature; after her, in the 1950s, came Simone De Beuvoir (The Second Sex), and the latest crop of feminist writers includes Phyllis Trible, Mieke Bal, Ester Fuchs, Cheryl Exum, Tikva Frymer-Kensky, Ilana Pardes, and many others. These women deal also with the Bible, as they claim that the female characters, such as Eve and Miriam, have a great influence on the personal and social status of women until today. This is especially true in the Christian world, whose cultural base was the Bible.

The article presents an overview of seven areas in the Bible which point up the equality, and even the superiority of women, and our conclusions are: A) The Bible, which is mainly patriarchal, has an additional, parallel direction, in which there is a clear trend of feminine equality; B) The majority in the Bible is religious, that is, equality of the woman as a person before God, like the equality of each person within the human race; C) From this we see that the Jewish religion, as portrayed in the Bible, contains the elements which form the theological and historical base of equality; D) A possible conclusion from this work is that this ‘feminine’ side of the Bible, from Sarah and Miriam, may become the base at this time for spiritual renewal.

Shapira approaches the text synchronically. The author treats the biblical material responsibly, not supposing that conventional conclusions about the biblical text’s ‘patriarchal’ convictions can be overturned. However, Shapira finds a kind of counter-current to patriarchality that can be accessed as an alternative and subordinate biblical ideology that may be employed to construct a biblically-dependent ideology that hints at something like gender equality even if the data do not prove enough ‘to testify to biblical equality between men and women in the sense which modern democracy defines “equality”.

The author appears both to place value upon the biblical data for constructing an adequate contemporary ideology and to reckon with the possibility that this contribution may manifest itself in the minimalistic shape of a discernible counter-ideology in the biblical materials.