three minute thesis

Last week I got the chance to compete in my university's Three Minute Thesis (3MT) competition. The goal is for students to summarize their MA or PhD thesis in less than three minutes in a way that engages and interests a non-specialist audience. I competed with students in Psychology, Interdisciplinary Humanities, Nursing, and more. I was grateful to have the chance to figure out not just what my thesis is about, but why it matters. And more than ever I believe it matters. I'll be working on fleshing this out into a hundred pages over the next 10 months, but here is the text of it in three minutes!

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I want to tell you a woman’s story.

An economic crisis forces a woman and her husband to flee to a near, but dangerous country. The husband recognizes that his wife’s beauty could entice foreign men to take her for themselves and kill him, so he tells his wife they will claim to be brother and sister. The woman recognizes the vulnerability this will place her in and begs and reasons with her husband against this plan, but he does not listen. After their immigration, the woman hides herself for five years in order to avoid being seen and taken by another man, but word of her beauty still spreads until it reaches the country’s ruler who takes her away by force, but offers the “brother” financial compensation, which he accepts. Eventually, the truth of their relationship comes to light, and the ruler returns the woman to her husband, giving him even more money to make amends. They leave the country, the woman used and abused, (juxtapose) the man unharmed and prosperous on her account.  

This may sound like a modern story, but it’s actually two thousand years old. It was found among the Dead Sea Scrolls in a scroll we now call the “Genesis Apocryphon.” However, the story may still have felt familiar because the couple is Abraham and Sarah, and another version of this same story is found in Genesis 12 of the Jewish and Christian Bibles. But there is a striking difference between the two versions of the story. While the Apocryphon version shows Sarah distraught and resisting her impending exploitation, in the biblical account she is completely silent, an expressionless object passed between two men.

My thesis employs the lenses of both biblical and gender studies to compare the Genesis Apocryphon scroll to the biblical book of Genesis and ask questions that have never been asked in Dead Sea Scrolls research. Why did the ancient authors choose to either represent or silence the voices of women in these texts? Why did the silenced version of the story eventually become Scripture? Does it matter that the Bible’s accounts of women are more silent than other writings of their time? And perhaps most importantly, how might the silencing of exploited women in the Bible have laid a foundation for our own cultural moment? The Genesis Apocryphon is an ancient #MeToo story, one that was lost for two millennia until its discovery in the last century. It reveals that while we are not the first culture to silence women, we are also not the first to make their voices heard. When the Bible was written, it was not the only voice; how could things look different today if we broaden our understanding of the world behind the Bible? How might the future look different if we drew upon this forgotten past? Imagine if from our earliest sacred texts, the voices of women had been heard and believed. Imagine the impact that would have had on how history has unfolded. With the Dead Sea Scrolls we have the chance to retell foundational stories and begin to make the world we imagine a reality.

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I was so honored to win First Place and People's Choice! And I owe so much to Dr. Perrin and Dr. Healey for their contributions, questions, and encouragement.