 |
| Rebekah gives water to Abraham's servant. Image source. |
So I recently shared this link: Thrift-Store Bibles and the Execution of Renee Good. And I have another thing to say about it.
One of the bibles mentioned in that article is the "True Images Teen Bible For Girls":
Take a gloss on Genesis 24:15-18, for example, a passage introducing Rebekah, wife of Isaac, one of the most fascinating and complex women in Hebrew Scripture (image below). The verses read “Rebekah came out with her jar on her shoulder… The woman was very beautiful, a virgin; no man had ever slept with her. She went down to the spring, filled her jar and came up again. The servant hurried to meet her and said “Please give me a little water from your jar.” “Drink, my lord, she said.”
The marginal note (pictured above) in a Bible explicitly designed for teen girls explains that Rebekah’s virginity is a key element of the passage:
“Okay, so we know that Rebekah was ‘very beautiful.’ But that’s not all we learn about her. The next two words tell us she was a virgin. Obviously this was important, or we wouldn’t have been told that little fact.”Virginity and purity are where Rebekah’s elusive “stunning inner beauty” comes from, because: “after all, good-looking girls are everywhere.” God, like the perfect boyfriend, is looking for something more.
I've been thinking a lot about how marriage and sex are modelled in the bible, and the way misogyny is baked into it, and how completely different it is from how we view those things now, so...
Just now, when I read those verses from Genesis 24, which mention Rebekah being a "virgin", my thoughts were along these lines: Ah, yeah this is coming from a culture which made a big deal about whether or not a woman was a "virgin." It's rooted in the idea that every woman is either a "virgin" or a "whore"- which was really more about whether a woman was viewed by society as properly staying in her place and following gender roles, rather than her choice to have penetrative sex. (For example, it was seen as okay to rape slaves, because they're not part of the class of women who are "good" "pure" "virgins" deserving of men's protection.) This obsession with virginity says more about men's jealousy and possessiveness, the way they viewed women as objects to be owned, than about women's virtues. I don't agree with this view, but I don't really want to get sidetracked into it when reading this bible story about Rebekah. The overall plot of the story is about Abraham's servant going to choose a wife for Abraham's son Isaac, and the role God played in that, and I'm also interested in how Rebekah felt about leaving her home to marry a man she had never met.
(Also, virginity is not even a real thing- by which I mean, the idea that you are a completely different type of person if you've ever had a penis in your vagina, vs if you haven't. Very much not true!)
And then reading the little note that "True Images Teen Bible For Girls" included about this passage, that just takes it at face value- this bible passage portrays Rebekah's "virginity" as a positive thing, therefore it is a positive thing, and *you*, modern teenage girl reading this, also need to be a virgin.
It feels extremely jarring to me, reading this take on this bible verse. It's like... it's like it's coming from a perspective where we believe the bible is just a trustworthy, true source, written to us. That it's just uncomplicatedly True. That it's "God's love letter to you."
I'm reading this bible verse about Rebekah, thinking about the layers of misogyny and how cultural views on sex have changed throughout history and how that is intertwined with the advances in women's rights, and apparently the editors of this teen bible just... aren't.
But this is how the bible is viewed in evangelical culture, isn't it? The bible is good and true, and reading the bible is good, and memorizing the bible is good. And Christians are supposed to read the bible every day. The primary emphasis is on how Christians all need to read the bible, and God speaks to us through the bible.
When I was a teenager, I had an "NIV Study Bible." This means a bible with little boxes of text added here and there, to give some background information about some aspects of the bible which might be hard for modern readers to understand because of cultural differences. And yes, we need that- it's better to have a study bible than to just read the bible without any awareness that it came from an ancient culture completely different than ours. But what strikes me as so bizarre now is the idea that that's enough- that I'm gonna read this ancient document, translated from Hebrew and Greek, but don't worry, occasionally there's a little sidebar next to the text to explain something that might be confusing.
As if overall we can just read it straightforwardly, and the strange things which merit additional explanation are exceptions. No, oh my goodness. The whole thing is weird, the whole bible is weird, you guys.
Okay, maybe I'm oversimplifying it- there are plenty of bible stories which come across as good stories, emotionally gripping stories, even if we don't know anything about the background. There are abstract moral principles which continue to inspire people to do good, like "love your neighbor as yourself," without requiring an understanding of the whole cultural context where those bible verses came from. Still, those passages are deeper and richer when we have a better idea of that context.
My point is, evangelical ideology really downplays the weirdness, and views the bible as something nice and spiritually uplifting, that we are able to understand.
It feels really shallow to me, actually. That there is 0 distance between us and the bible because it's just plain true, inerrant, unlike any other text you might read. I don't even know how to interface with a source that's just objectively true, free of any context, because I'm a specific person with my own cultural background and expectations for how to view the world- if someone is trying to communicate with me, and I don't know any of that background where they are coming from, how can we even understand each other? It doesn't make sense to me- now that I'm not evangelical- to read the bible without thinking about "who wrote this, and why?" Evangelicals aren't allowed to ask those questions because if we believe the bible came from somewhere concrete, historical, a product of human decision-making, then how can it be the word of God?
And now I'm interested in reading more about the bible from an academic perspective. Recently I started reading "Inspiration and Incarnation" by Peter Enns, and there will be blog posts on that. What's striking to me is how this kind of "academic" take on the bible will often take just 1 verse and write a whole essay on it, explaining the cultural background of something that's just an offhand mention in the bible verse. It's like, the overall aim is to understand the big picture, the cultural context, the ancient Near East, and then to situate a bible verse into that context. This is such a different approach than what Christians usually do, which is to primarily read the bible, and pause for a second to read a little explanation of some cultural aspect, and then keep going. (Similarly, in the book "Womanist Midrash", author Wilda Gafney does her own translations of the bible passages she discusses, and each word is carefully translated, carefully considering the nuances of the language and cultural setting.)
Or I could describe it as, the difference between "we're going to read the bible" and "we're going to understand the big picture of where the bible comes from."
But also... if you read the bible, there's no obvious way to know which parts can just be taken at face value, and which ones are "weird" artifacts of the ancient culture they came from. If you're a teenager immersed in purity culture, everyone has always told you that "God's plan for marriage and sex" all along was that everyone must be a virgin until marriage, which ensures that your married sex life will be amazing and you'll be totally emotionally connected to your spouse, and that this is the timeless ideal which is just obviously how it's supposed to be. (My post The Bible and "Purity" points out that the bible doesn't even teach this.) So if you read the bible verse that says Rebekah was a virgin, and that that's important, why wouldn't you just take it at face value?
I guess my view now is... I don't really take anything from the bible "at face value", like it's speaking directly to me, and it just means whatever my first impression is upon reading it. Even the verses that I do think are timeless moral truths, I view as a line running through thousands of years of history, connecting people across different cultures and time periods... Being human, being made in the image of God, means having a conscience, and there have always been people who envisioned a better world, based on principles like love and justice and liberation, even though they and their society didn't live up to that.
Holding the ideas "this was written thousands of years ago" and "this speaks to me." Which feels even more profound than believing that the bible was written directly to us, like it just fell out of heaven onto a shelf at a Christian bookstore, with neatly-typed English words and a pretty pastel cover. Maybe what I'm saying is, I want to be connected to people, to history, to a culture, rather than just connected to an objective, context-free God.
---
Related:
No comments:
Post a Comment