When I was cleaning out my mother’s garage after her death a couple of years ago, I found boxes of things from our childhood that she had saved for each of us, one box each. One sister’s was filled with horse objects, objects my sister had collected as a child – she was horse-obsessed then and still is now, to her great success – and objects from my mother’s own horse-obsessed childhood. Another sister’s was filled with things specific to her childhood. Mine contained two white-leatherette bibles, gifts from my uncle the pedophiliac priest and his doting mother. Two identical white-leatherette bibles that they gifted me at the time when other little Catholic girls my age would be participating in their first communion and confirmation, both of which I dodged. They had sat, untouched and unread, on my shelves, although I attended Catholic school and was, in theory, learning about the Catholic religion, which I learned almost nothing about in Catholic school. All I learned, in the end, was that organized religion was not for me. And yet, when my mother put my box together for me, it contained these two identical bibles. Which I promptly tossed in the trash. I own various editions of the bible, including traditional Christian editions, the Nag Hammadi and the Tanahk; but I knew I could never bring myself to read these particular bibles or house them on my shelves.
I rediscovered the bible in college, when I took a course on the old testament, taught by a rabbi, which was great because in Catholic school, I only learned about the new testament, specifically the death of Jesus, and the old testament was only mentioned when it was needed to reinforce or testify to events in the new testament (such as translating old testament passages containing the word “maiden” as “virgin” to “prove” that Jesus was the messiah). That course rekindled my interest in the bible, not as a testament to the religion itself, but with the same obsessive curiosity that I devote to things that puzzle me, things like ghosts, aliens, bigfoot, psychopathic serial killers, and the like.
Sometimes my interest takes me in the direction of Erdman, a textual analysis, observing the unintentional (and sometimes intentional), mistranslations of the words, the stories, that have come to form what we now know of as the bible. Sometimes it takes me more toward books like Holy Blood, Holy Grail, a conspiracy theory of post-biblical history that introduced the whole Priory of Sion thread that The DaVinci Code popularized.1 Sometimes it takes me in the direction of Isaac Asimov’s Guides to the Old and New Testaments2, which take a more historical approach, looking at each passage and identifying what it says about the movements of a people, putting them in historical context, the evolution of the people of Israel from a nomadic herd of wanderers who invade and take over a foreign land and fight their neighbors to keep it, to – for a brief moment – a unified nation; and then the fall of that nation and its domination by the superpowers of its day.
And then there are books like this one, which I read, I think, only once, but has held a treasured place on my shelves since then. This treasury of essays by women reflecting on the bible, contains works by Rebecca Goldstein, Fay Weldon, June Jordan, Cynthia Ozick, Elizabeth Swados, Louise Erdrich, Amy Clampitt, and Ursula K. LeGuin, anthd many others. That alone, is a reason to to give it a shot. Any book that contains essays on similar topics by Weldon, Ozick, Erdrich, and LeGuin is worth reading.
The essays span topics from The Psychopathology of King Saul to Job: He’s a Clown to Looking Back at Lot’s Wife to Our Dream of the Good God. They look at the women of the bible, Eve, Hannah, the Queen of Sheba, Ruth and Naomi, Rachel, Rebekah, Jezebel, and what women find fascinating about these women, how women sometimes see these biblical women, what these biblical women’s stories say to real women, beyond what religious authorities tell us we should learn from them. The essays also look at the men of the bible, Lot, Isaac, Moses, Samson, David and Jonathan, Samuel, Saul, Elijah, Job, etc. etc. and how women see them, beyond what we have been told to think about them.
The book ends with a beautiful story by Ursula LeGuin, in which all the animals that Adam had named, abandon their names and Eve abandons hers, too, resulting in a situation in which “the hunter could not be told from the hunted, nor the eater from the food”. When Eve tells Adam, who is busy doing something important only to himself, that she is leaving, he replies, “Put it down over there, OK” and goes on with what he’s doing. She tries again, “Well, goodbye, dear, I hope the garden key turns up.” and he, trying to fit parts together, says “without looking around, ‘OK, fine, dear, when’s dinner?” A conversation that may sound familiar to women who are trying to tell their husbands or partners something, only to have them not hear because they are absorbed in something, anything, from Wordle to a YouTube video to cleaning gum off the sole of a shoe.
I have a theory. They have scientifically proven that men, speaking generally, do not notice clutter the same way that women do. Partially this is nurture, women are trained and expected from childhood, to keep domestic spaces clean and organized; the expectations for men are not as high, unless they go into military service, when it becomes a method of enforcing rule. And women have also become the “finders of things” that men are looking for (“Honey, where’re my pants?”). My theory is that the reason men can’t find their pants (or anything else they’re looking for) is the same reason that men don’t see clutter. Perhaps this is evolutionary, man as hunter went out and became super-focused on following an animal’s tracks, focused exclusively on that one animal. And woman as gatherer, was exploring the world around the camp, her gaze sweeping across the plants, the nuts, the small things nearby with an open mind towards pulling in things that might be useful, what could be put together, combined, to make something new. And that eye towards seeing what’s around them gives women a natural ability to know where things are and put hands on objects quickly, when men suddenly decide they need them.
Which has nothing to do with the bible, per se.
I was shocked recently, when I took a college-aged niece to a museum, and we were looking at a painting or sculpture that referenced a biblical story, to discover that she had never heard of the story, didn’t get the reference, and was missing a whole nother level of meaning about the art piece; she was blind to a subtext that was clear to anyone who knew that story. Even if you don’t believe in something, even if you disagree with what people have told you it means, understanding it lets you into secrets that you wouldn’t otherwise have.
Reading this book inspired me to write a whole story about Lot’s Wife myself, about who she was before she met Lot, about how they met, about what it was like living with him in a land where they were the strangers, about what happened to their daughters before Lot offered them to be raped in place of his visitors, about what happened when they left their city, and about turning her back on him, drenched in tears of salt, to look back at a place she had made home.
If you’re interested in or curious about the bible, I encourage you to read this book and then to write your own essay, your own story, on the topic. Think about your relationship with the people, the stories, of the bible.
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