Have you ever played the game where people sit in a circle and a story is whispered in someone’s ear, then passed on by whispering to the next person, then the next? If so, then you understand the challenges of biblical translation. By the time the story reaches the end of the circle, the details have usually changed. Sometimes, even the meaning of the story has changed, too.
Translating any language is a tricky job, particularly when it comes to the ancient languages that make up the Bible: Hebrew, Greek, and some Aramaic. Details are often lost in in the great circle of time that spans almost two thousand years of biblical translation. Oddly, the details that seem to get lost the most in the Bible have to do with the stories of women.
In all fairness, when you’re tackling something as monumental as the Bible, you can expect that some stories will just get lost, or rather, hidden in plain sight. After all, the original stories have been whispered from two thousand years plus! It just so happens that many of the stories that have been lost in biblical translation are about women, especially powerful women. Women who were called by God to lead God’s people. The good news for us is that they haven’t been lost forever. These days, women’s stories are being excavated like buried treasure, which helps us locate some of the lost pieces of women’s history. Including some of the hidden fragments of our own stories that have been missing for a very long time.
How did the stories of powerful women, warriors, prophets, and heroes, become so buried in the Bible? Wouldn’t we want to celebrate and honor these women of renown?
One of the main theories that has been developed by biblical scholars such as Wil Gafney, Elizabeth A. Clark, Tikva Frymer-Kinsky, Esther Fuchs and many others, is that gender bias played a huge role in the process of the hiding.
Since most biblical translation throughout history has been done primarily by men, and most often through the lens of a patriarchal culture, women’s stories were largely out of focus, in the background, hidden or completely buried. Nothing against men, but, when a good portion of Christian theology was formed, there were a few influential men who had some pretty twisted theories about women.
Some of these men were responsible for creating the foundational concepts of biblical theology as we know it today. Our beloved church fathers from the fourth and fifth centuries: Augustine, Ambrose of Milan and John Chrysostom,1 among others. They were men of their time, a time in which women were viewed as utilitarian – producing babies and serving men. What they saw in Genesis chapters 1 and 2 oddly enough, looked a lot like the world around them. A world in which women had very few rights.
For example, Ambrose of Milan wrote in his treatise, On Paradise, “even though man was created outside Paradise (an inferior place), he is found to be superior, while woman, though created in a better place (inside Paradise) is found inferior. For the woman was the first to be deceived and she deceived the man.”2 It’s odd logic, but somehow we bought it. The belief that women were inferior to men and should be viewed with suspicion due to their so called “deceptive” nature colored the lens through which our church fathers interpreted the Bible. This belief then colored the interpretations following them, and ultimately many of the belief systems that were foundational for how we’ve practiced Christianity for a very long time.
Some scholars think that the church fathers just didn’t understand Hebrew all that well. It makes sense, it’s a complex and fluid language. Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney, Hebrew scholar, believes that there are many female prophets (and women warriors) hidden in the masculine grammar. 3 What else did they happen to miss?
Through insisting on male dominance as God’s design for humanity and hiding the women who were in leadership roles in Hebrew culture, former biblical interpretations have often created an imbalanced and unfair view of God and people.
On top of that, the insistence of these interpretations as “right” has made for a lot of human suffering for women. But today, all of these things are under the microscope, so to speak, of biblical studies. What they overlooked is changing the way we read the Bible, which is good news not just for women, but for everyone.
