Helpmates Harlots and Heroes Womenã¢â‚¬â„¢s Stories and the Hebrew Biblebook Review

By Alice Ogden Bellis
Westminster/John Knox 2007.
2^nd edition, 281 pages.

Reviewed by Susan Campbell

I have always loved the story of Hannah, the woman who, in Alice Ogden Bellis' words, paved the manner for the Israelites' monarchy (one Samuel 1 and 2 in the Hebrew Bible).

Hannah, as you probably know, is a woman much distressed by her inability to have children. Bearing children, as Bellis writes, was a woman's primary responsibility and 1 of the few ways she could exert any ability at all. The scriptures are littered with women who agonize over their infertility only to be answered with what seems like a miraculous pregnancy. Prior to matrimony, a woman was her father's dependent—this, too, from Bellis—and if she married and her married man died, his holding went to her dead husband's family. A adult female was banned from the priesthood, considered "unclean" during her menstrual periods, and divorces only happened at the husband's initiative.

This, so, was Hannah's globe, and the world of so many other unnamed women. Though Hannah's husband doesn't seem bothered past her infertility—he even gently teases her and asks if he is not enough—Hannah prays for a child, and makes a deal: If God will give her a son, she will give that son dorsum to God. In due course, God answers with a son, whom Hannah names "Samuel," Hebrew for "asked of God."

Simply then run your finger down the page from Hannah in Bellis' Helpmates, Harlots, Heroes and you observe the woman of Endor, a soothsayer who is visited past Male monarch Saul for answers (ane Samuel 28:three–25), though he has banned mediums for everyone else. The adult female is suitably fearful that this high-powered man has asked her to perform something illegal—seeing into the future—but on his say-so, she gives him devastating news nearly an upcoming battle. He will lose the battle, his life, and his sons' lives besides. And so, feeling pity, she prepares a feast (including a fatted calf and unleavened cakes) as solace.

That is a story you might have missed, and the exploration of information technology is fascinating. Dr. Alice Ogden Bellis is an ordained Presbyterian minister, also as a much-degreed professor of Old Testament Linguistic communication and Literature at Howard Academy School of Divinity in Washington, D.C. She is also a fellow member of the Club of Biblical Literature. She is a serious scholar with a talent all-too-absent-minded in many writers of explaining things for the rest of us, us non-scholars.

Through the years, the woman of Endor has been called a witch, though biblical texts do not refer to her as such, and on this, Bellis is quite clear. She calls out some other theologian who'd gone out on a limb and given an unflattering physical description of the woman, guessing that mediumship was the only task left to her.

Not true, says Bellis. The woman is independent enough to have servants to prepare a meal. No mention is made of a husband or partner. She is a good baron. She is businesslike. And she's been overlooked through history, because one can't really count on having a idiot box witch (Endora, the cranky mother of Bugged) named later on 1'southward hometown.

These are the kinds of details that pepper Bellis' second edition, which is every fleck as eye-opening, approachable, and thought-provoking as the first. Bellis examines each woman mentioned in the Hebrew scriptures, and is careful to stick to the facts as we know them.

We hear far likewise many Bible stories of women who fit neatly into the helpmates or harlots categories of Bellis' title, and non almost enough about those who adjust the third one, that of heroes. The writer relies on copious work by other noted historians and theologians to bolster her thesis that there are plenty of heroes to be constitute in those pages. Nosotros've merely been overlooking them.

Reading this volume might not convince you that God is a feminist—not if you lot don't already think that, anyhow. But it will give yous a new agreement of the life and times of women of that era. People have been re-examining the stories of the Bible through the lens of feminism for years now, but Bellis is foremost – or she should be – among those scholars. Her writing is clear. Her logic is irrefutable, and she is extremely knowledgeable about the limits of a woman'due south sphere in the fourth dimension of the Hebrew scripture.

This second edition has been out since 2007, and if y'all haven't taken a moment to read it, now'south the time. Bellis writes in her introduction that, in 1994, when Helpmates was outset published, the field of feminist theology was a lilliputian thinner, and Bellis herself spoke a little more than softly. These days, she writes, "Many voices are now singing in this choir…. Now, I want to sing a little louder and with new confidence."

These women are worth some other expect. And another. And some other, and in the hands of a talented author and researcher such as Bellis, that goes double.

© 2015 by Christian Feminism Today

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Source: https://eewc.com/helpmates-harlots-heroes-womens-stories-hebrew-bible/

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