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Women and the Word: Leaving Women SpeechlessTo begin with, we will have to acknowledge that the Scriptures themselves are marked by gendered asymmetry. The textual representation of women in our scriptural canon, after all, is clearly limited. One example will have to suffice: only about ten of the nearly three hundred instances of recorded prayers, or allusions to prayer, in the Hebrew Scriptures purport to be those of women.11 Although nothing would lead one to assume that women invoked the Holy One with any less frequency or fervor than did their male counterparts, the Scriptures give us only a small number of women's prayers in comparison to those of men. The content of the recorded prayers also speaks to the power of gender in shaping faith. The majority of prayers put in women's mouths in the Hebrew Scriptures are related to women's reproductive and maternal roles. This androcentric bias of the biblical witness, moreover, is heightened by the choice of passages for reading in the liturgy. The lectionary that governs the choice of readings in my ecclesial community simply has not attended carefully enough to biblical stories about women and their faith.12 (I take as my material the Sunday lectionary for the Roman Catholic dioceses in the United States.) The story of the two Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah, who set the scene for the Exodus by defying Pharaoh, is simply cut out from the liturgical reading of Exodus 1:8-22. The lectionary reading of this passage jumps from verse 14 to verse 22, thus "disappearing" Shiphrah and Puah from sight. As a result, the liturgical assembly does not hear the stories and names of these women, although in a wonderful irony of history the biblical witness does remember their names, while it has forgotten the name of the pharaoh. Other omissions have rendered invisible, among others, the Hebrew prophet Hulda (2 Kings 22:14-20). Hulda's story is that of a temple prophet who is asked to validate a scroll found in the temple during repairs. Feminist scholars argue that through this validation, Hulda, in fact, authorizes what will become the core of our Scriptures: "Her validation of a text...stands as the first recognizable act in the long process of canon formation."13 The lectionary, however, thinks nothing of Hulda's authoritative act. The lectionary, furthermore, makes women's stories "optional" in a number of readings. That is, these women's stories form part of a longer biblical passage that may be shortened by the presider if he [!] considers the passage too long. The presence of the prophet Anna at the presentation of Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:36-38) thus is rendered optional—the biblical writer already having left her speechless, giving only Simeon a voice. Optional is also the fate of the woman with a hemorrhage who is healed by Jesus (Mark 5:25-34). The same applies to the beautiful parable in which Jesus likens the coming of God's reign to a woman baking (Matthew 13:33); it too is optional on the only Sunday when it might be read, although it is one of the few biblical texts that show Jesus drawing on women's everyday lives to image God's reign. There are yet other ways in which women's presence in the Scriptures and the lectionary readings come to be veiled. Take the reading of Proverbs 31 as just one example: the lectionary omits precisely those verses that show the woman to be a powerful and productive household manager, and focuses instead on her service to her husband. |
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