What Women Want In a Man (An Analogy)

Originally posted by Ullr
googlefudge you are out of line with this. I think Episcopalians deserve a lot of credit for their rather sane and open minded approach to Christianity and the bible and the fact that they are not only ahead of the curve on social issues compared to not only every other Christian denomination (that I know of) but also to most of society in general. Here we ha ...[text shortened]... ws even believe in evolution or are at least willing to talk about it with some rationality.

Certain Christian groups (“fundamentalists” and “evangelicals” ) seem to claim that the normative reading for biblical texts (absent some specified exception) is as literal-historical or descriptive-factual discourse. Some “secularists” (for lack of a better term at the moment, and with no pejorative intent), perhaps based on some modernist understanding, seem to accept the claim that that is how such texts ought to be understood—that is, they accept that normative claim. Under such a view, anyone who offers an alternative reading is seen as taking a marginal position –e.g., to some they are not a “True Christian™”. [I am not going to participate in any debate over who is, or who is not, a “True Christian™”. That’s not my place, and I don’t venture into NT territory much anymore.]

That hermeneutical view seems never to have been the norm in Judaism (one reason why Judaism is not “the religion of the ‘old testament’—to the contrary, as one scholar puts it: “Judaism as opposed to Biblical religion”*). The norm for Jewish exegesis is midrash, which, while recognizing the radically polysemous character of the Hebrew, also has a “post-modern” flavor.

From a literary-critical point of view, there are many types of discourse in the Hebrew Scriptures (written, as opposed to oral, Torah**): mythological (broadly: symbolic narrative; more broadly: story), allegorical, poetic, proto-dramatic, elicitive—none of which are necessarily exclusive of the others. One of my favorite translations of the written Torah is that of Everett Fox (The Five Books of Moses), because he shows that most of the Torah is, in fact, narrative poetry—and it is naïve to think that poetry can be read the same way as historical/descriptive narrative.***

In all this, I find no need to defend such monstrous atrocities as murder and genocide (or the suppression of women by the patriarchy), whether committed by God or humans—or the celebration of same in ancestral myth. A just person (a tzaddik) condemns such things whether committed by her/his God, ancestors, or myth-makers. On the other hand, I am not responsible for naïve readings—or claims that such naïve readings are normative—by others.

[Exegetical Note: A careful reading of the texts often uncovers internal judgments on such things (in reading the Torah texts, it is often the small things that are intended to set the perspective on the larger narrative). And I would commend The Book of J, by Harold Bloom and David Rosenberg, for an insight into the “subversive” (vis-à-vis the patriarchy) feminism by the author (which Bloom believes was a woman) of the “Y” (Yahwist) strand of the Torah (I think one could also look to Judith Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai; but it’s been a long time since I read it).]

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* Reuven Hammer, The Classical Midrash: Tannaitic Commentaries on the Bible, Paulist Press, 1995.

** “Torah” can refer to a number of concepts: Natural torah [which could be called “law” in the sense of natural laws (e.g., gravity), but not really in the juridical sense (which is halakha)—and could broadly be thought of as something like the Tao]; the written Torah (first five books, and sometimes, by extension, all the Hebrew Scriptures); the Oral Torah (with the historical templates of the Talmuds and the Midrashim, but continuing as an ongoing and open-ended oral tradition from those templates, continuing the arguments exampled therein—in many ways, I think Judaism could be described as essentially an oral tradition today); the “existential torah”—the torah that includes me, and anyone else, with my unique personal history, cultural influences, aesthetic sensibilities, reasoning abilities, etc. It is this last concept (that I first encountered in Marc-Alain Ouaknin’s The Burnt Book: Reading the Talmud) that means that Torah cannot be “closed” until all of our unique existential portions are included.

*** And a professor of OT at Vanderbilt University whom I once knew casually claimed that it was the best translation for capturing the character of the Hebrew.