I am reading and rereading the excellent works of Athalya Brenner, on a feminist approach to the Bible. I start with an apology, and some context. It relates both to my PhD thesis and my volume Creating the Old Testament. Please note I am putting this online at http://ancienthebrewmarriage.blogspot.co.uk.
Context first. My PhD thesis was on Ancient Hebrew Marriage and Family Customs. There will be more about that somewhere else. I had studied in Manchester with Arnold Anderson, a new program on Hebrew Social Institutions. It was different and new, and I was newly married, so that was my PhD. There had been little done recently on the topic. What had been done was based on faulty anthropology, so mine was one of the first studies ever to engage with anthropology. More of that later. There was no such thing as feminist study at that time, Phylis Tribble's work came a few years later, which I read in a study break in Lancaster in 1979. My PhD passed unproblematically but it had flaws. It assumed that a socio-historical approach would offer insights. This was then the fashion, influenced by Albright, Bright and others. I now think not. The Old Testament, my focus, is and was a series of narratives which supported a political agenda. History is no way involved. Abraham and King David, and all between, are on a level with Robin Hood and King Arthur. We should read the story to decode the politics.
So, my apology, having just read Athalya's new preface. First, we met and talked around 1985-6 which I see was an emotionally significant time for her. My wife was then vociferously anti-feminist (though in fact was and is an unreflective feminist) and I asked Athalya about this. She was upset, and I am sorry. I now know why. Secondly, I was putting together Creating the Old Testament using scholars in the Society for Old Testament Studies (SOTS). It was a complex book and there was no section on feminist interpretations. This was normal for the time, but I regret it. The book structure militated against it but had Athalya been on the writing team that could have been solved.
On The Israelite Woman, she wonders if her text was tough enough. Bearing in mind we were boldly going where no woman had been before, it's probably a criticism unnecessary to make. I am considering rather if my texts were tough enough. On Creating the Old Testament, Athalya needed to be on the writing team with a free hand. She has more than compensated with here feminist OT studies series, so it was my loss.
On my thesis, there were examples of social justice expressed through the stories of Hagar, Dinah, Tamar and the Levites' concubine (and of course others) but it was inchoate. The fact that my topic was too broad for depth (despite it being close to 200,000 words long) was an issue. Breadth and depth are hard to balance in a PhD. in the 1970s it was a matter of go away and get on with it.
It is hard to know if a man writing on feminist issues would have fared any differently from a woman writing on them. There were no university posts in the 1970s so a decade as a secondary school teacher did not leave much time to do active research. There was no tradition then of publishing raw theses, for which I am grateful. I would not now want the thesis published, but there has been a bit of an explosion of marriage and feminist literature.These posts are my way of getting my ideas on the topic into shape in my head, and into the public domain, but it is too late to hope for a publication.
One last point. Athalya's description of being refused tenure rings a loud bell. I too was refused a professorship for no reason given, though I had the same number of publications as a senior manage who did, and 20 times more than another senior manage who received on, without PhD, or research students, or publications. My crime was to have researched and written on the wrong topics, published in the wrong places. Such professorships, I decided, have no value (though in my case this had no salary implications).
As I now read The Israelite Woman, I am sure I will have points to add, but these will not be hostile.
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