Blog — Women in the Bible

By Anna Grace Glaize

Dr. Julie Faith Parker’s book, *Eve Isn’t Evil*

Dr. Julie Faith Parker is the author of Eve Isn’t Evil: Feminist Readings of the Bible to Upend Our Assumptions. She holds a Ph.D. in Old Testament/Hebrew Bible from Yale University and is ordained in the United Methodist Church. You can find out more about Dr. Parker at her website juliefaithparker.com.

This interview was conducted on July 22, 2024, via Zoom and has been edited for clarity and length.

AGG: So, you’ve talked about how this [Eve Isn’t Evil] is written in your voice, how you knew it was gonna be a very different style of book, and you also share some very personal stories such as raising your son, who is on the autism spectrum and supporting your daughter, who has bipolar disorder. How does the Bible help you with these challenges?

Dr. Parker: I think it mostly helps me by, first of all, being very honest about how we are. We’re all hot messes in our own ways! The Bible gets that, which I find super reassuring…

“You Think Your Family’s a Mess? Biblical Families Are Us,”[Ch. 3 in Eve Isn’t Evil] goes through the story of Joseph. My daughter realized that Joseph could be seen as someone who’s on the autism spectrum. He’s very good visually, but he’s not so great socially. He has these gifts, he has these skills, he’s able to interpret these dreams, he has these extraordinary abilities that other people don’t, which is often true of people on the spectrum, but he struggles socially. He tells his brothers about his first dream where the sheaves are bowing down to him, and they already hate him. Then he tells his brothers another dream where the sun and the moon and the stars are bowing down to him. It’s like, stop after one dream! Why’d you keep going?! You’re not doing yourself any favors!

AGG: Yeah, read the room!

Dr. Parker: I know! Yeah, that’s right. That’s exactly it. He can’t read the room. So it’s very possible to read him as someone on the spectrum. There’s actually a book that’s been written about this called Was Yosef on the Spectrum? It’s in the bibliography of my book, but it’s an entire book in which Samuel Levine, who’s a rabbinic scholar, goes through the history of rabbis interpreting Jseoph in a way that we can definitely read him as on the spectrum.

That was really helpful to me, because we see how Jacob is giving his son Joseph this special coat, and I think maybe he’s trying to compensate. Maybe he’s trying to help his son because he struggles so much, and the world is beating him down so he wants to raise him up a little bit. I can really appreciate that.

Also, we see that none of us are perfect. You get that in biblical families, too. So it helps me just to be a little less hard on myself. There’s a lot of pressure, especially on women, especially on mothers, to do it all right. To get it all right all the time. But we don’t, and we can’t, and we see that in Genesis, too. To me, it kind of takes off the pressure a little bit. It helps me appreciate the great gifts that my son has in the midst of the challenges that he faces.

…I’ve got another chapter called, “Guns and Psalms.” There I talk about the raw, honest emotion of the Psalms. They just put it out there! Any emotion or feeling you can find voice to in the Book of Psalms. One of the emotions you can see there, one of the states of being, is one of being depressed. The Psalmist just despairing and almost wishing to die. That made me think of my daughter, who has bipolar disorder, and how she has really struggled with depression. Depression is a very serious condition. It’s not, “Oh, I’m having a bad day, I’m so depressed.” It’s really a clinical state that’s hard to get oneself out of. That’s what I see in the Psalmist, and that’s what I’ve experienced with my daughter Mari. Just to see that the Bible gives voice to something so personal and so true to my family is just really comforting and gives me assurance that we can go on if they did.

I’ll just add a little PSA that both of them are doing really well now! My son works for J.P. Morgan Chase. He lives in Brooklyn. Shares an apartment with my nephew, his first cousin. They’re super close, so that’s really wonderful. He’s doing really well. My daughter has just produced a show called “Bipolar Badass,” and she has performed that Off-Broadway to a sold-out house. She’s going to be performing for the National Alliance for Mental Illness later this month and is just giving an honest voice to what she’s going through because she wants to help people.

AGG: Speaking of some of the messiness that we get to see in the Bible, the Bible also has some real challenges for modern readers. In your chapter “Profit from Prophecy,” you talk about women and sexual violence in the Bible. How can we deal with difficult texts in ways that do not inflict more damage, specifically on women?

Dr. Parker: That’s a really important question because there’s a lot in the Bible that’s just awful about women. I wanted to be honest about that and to deal with those texts head-on. I don’t write about this one, but many of us are familiar with this story of the rape of the Levite's concubine in Judges 19.

AGG: It’s a horrific story.

Dr. Parker: Horrific story. You know Phyllis Trible, she wrote the book Texts of Terror, as a lot of us who’ve been to seminary know. In that book, she looks at this story among others. She says that this woman is the least character in all of scripture. That’s one horrific story.

In the book, I look at the story of Gomer and the abuse she’s made to suffer rhetorically here at the hands of the prophet Hosea. Hosea represents God and she represents Israel. It’s just awful. “I’m going to strip you naked as the day you were born, you’re going to be out in the wilderness.” All awful, abusive stuff, and we can’t pretend it’s not there. Because when we do that we do a grave disservice to women who really suffer in these ways. Violence against women is a huge issue still. I wish I could say, “Oh, well fortunately we worked all that out.” Hardly. It’s a cancer in our culture, and it is pervasive, and we don’t talk about it. We certainly don’t talk about it in the church…We ignore these texts because they’re difficult, and they’re awkward, and they make us feel uncomfortable. But in doing that I suggest we are doing a grave disservice to the people that are sitting silently in the pews and suffering.

I think there are a couple of things we need to keep in mind. First of all, we need to be brave enough to talk about these texts. I did once preach on the story of the Levite’s concubine, this woman who’s gang-raped and dismembered, during a Good Friday service. There are opportunities there in the liturgical year to talk about these texts. We can be brave to talk about them.

I think it helps also to recognize—and this is a key lens for me in reading the Bible—that the Bible is descriptive, not prescriptive. It shows us what is going on in the characters' lives in that time and place, a lot of which still corresponds to our lives in our time and place. It’s describing these realities, like the reality of intimate partner violence, but it is not prescribing, “This is what we should do.” It is just showing us this reality. Sometimes, and I say this in the book, the justice is not in the text. The resistance is the real reward. When we resist the reading, when we see how someone is abused and say, “No, this is wrong.” When we feel ourselves reacting in this way, that to me is the power of the text.

Also, sometimes I think we really need to question translation. I can read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek. I usually read it in English because it’s, you know, quicker, but I can read both of those languages…When I do that it blows my mind, Anna Grace! It never fails to stun me. I could give you example after example, but for now, I’ll just give you one. That is Ephesians 5:22. So Ephesians 5:22…the English says, “Wives submit to your husbands as to the Lord.” The Greek says, “Women” (women and wives are the same word, men and husband are the same word) “to your men as to the lord.” No verb, Anna Grace, no verb! Your translators have just helpfully supplied that for you…That verse has been used against a lot of women…It’s not even in the text. Now, in fairness, there are some manuscripts where you’ll find it, and it is in the context of hierarchy, but the most recent scholarly Greek manuscript, the Nestle-Aland 28th Version, does not have the verb in it. And yet this is something where we all “know” the verse. So that’s a more subtle violence that’s done to women. The violence of sexist translation.

AGG: Many people assume that the Bible is against women. As a Bible scholar, what suggestions do you have for women who want to like the Bible but find that very hard?

Dr. Parker: I think a lot of women just get turned off. They just say, “This is so sexist. I have no need of it.”... I think that because it has such a strong cultural presence, it really is our responsibility to grapple with these texts. There are a lot of ways that we can do this.

We can first read to resist. We can recognize that the Bible is descriptive, not prescriptive. Also, as I constantly tell my students, there is no one right way to read the biblical text. We know this ourselves! I mean we read the Bible at one point, then we come back to it ten years later and we see something totally different…So there is no one right way. There are lots of ways you can read the Bible, of course! But there’s a wrong way, and that’s any way that’s harmful to yourself or someone else…

Then there are things like reading books like Eve Isn’t Evil or going to a website like Women in the Bible. Reading the work of feminist scholars. A lot of good work has been done, and I give an annotated bibliography at the end of Eve Isn’t Evil so people can know right away some resources I think might be helpful…

Also, give yourself permission to question the text…“Who wrote this text?” “Why did they write it?” “Whose interests are served in this text?” “Whose interests are served with a particular interpretation?”

And if you’re being told that the text should be used in a way that is harmful to you, say, “Sorry. I don’t believe that,” and move on.

AGG: Love it! In chapter 9 of your book, titled “My Favorite Feminist Jew,” (you have lots of great chapter titles) you describe Jesus’ mission as “tikkun olam” or world repair. Where do you see world repair being done today?

Dr. Parker: I think there is so much of it taking place, Anna Grace, and we just don’t notice it because it’s not in the headlines. I think most people are really good people, and they’re trying day in and day out to make the world better in their own humble ways.

It’s a hard time to be the church now. It’s a really hard time. In some ways that’s encouraging, because when the church was just starting out, it was a hard time. I believe there’s some sort of rebirth that’s going to take place. We’re resurrection people. A lot of the mainline progressive churches are dying on the vine. That’s because we’re in a whole new age. Like when the printing press was invented, you had the Reformation. Now that we’re in the digital age, who knows what the church is going to be next? I think that the church really does a lot of good work on local and regional and national levels. There is good work being done.

AGG: You’re uniquely situated to answer this question because of your work at Marble Collegiate Church and all of your qualifications: Besides reading this book, what ideas do you have about introducing folks in church pews to biblical scholarship?

Dr. Parker: I think just starting by reading the Bible is a really good idea! A lot of folks have Bibles, and they don’t read them. It’s kind of a cultural icon, but they don’t really take it down off the shelf. I get it! I was one of those people for a very long time.

If you can, splurge on a good study Bible. I like The Oxford Study Bible more than The HarperCollins Study Bible because it doesn’t give a heading for each section, which really directs your reading. My students would think, “Oh, this is in the Bible.” It’s not in the Bible! The editors put it there…Get a study Bible and look at the notes at the bottom and the chapters at the beginning. I tell pastors that, too. That’s a helpful refresher. To read the Bible is a great place to start, and the notes will introduce people to the scholarship and the current conversation because those get updated frequently…

Maybe have a Bible journal to write your reactions to texts…Find some good podcasts, and listen to those, as well. I know that Yale does one; Yale Religion. I did another one called Faith and Feminism. There are a lot of great podcasts out there.

Talk about the Bible in everyday life. I think we don’t do that enough, and it relates to so much of our lives. For pastors, to have sermon talk-backs. Sermons are such a one-way conversation, that can help open it up. …Finally, just cherish sacred scripture. Realize that there are a lot of reasons this text has lasted so long. Part of it is its honesty. If these were all idealized people in idealized situations, we wouldn’t be able to relate to them in any way. Instead, we have these really messy stories, really honest emotions, and we see how people have struggled and learned and grown, always holding onto their faith. That can be really helpful for us as we seek to do the same.

AGG: Excellent! Thank you so much, Dr. Parker.

Dr. Parker: Oh, you’re welcome! It’s been such a joy to talk with you. Thank you so much for inviting me…I’d like to mention that if groups read Eve Isn’t Evil, I have a free study guide that is available on my website juliefaithparker.com. They are available to download. I also can be contacted via that website, and I’m glad to Zoom in free of charge for any group that reads the book and answer questions or just have a casual conversation.

Thank you so much to Dr. Parker!

You can find the downloadable study guide for Eve Isn’t Evil here.