silenced voices: hearing biblical women through the genesis apocryphon

This Friday I defended my thesis. After two years of work and preparation, it came down to this event. I gave this presentation to share a broad overview of my research, and I loved the conversation that it inspired at the defense. I can't wait to continue finding ways to share this research and its implications. 

             

In the final weeks of writing my thesis, news broke about a globally renowned

Christian leader and apologist who manipulated and sexually abused women for years. The researcher behind the story actually exposed what was happening three years ago, but her reports were dismissed and silenced, and the victim was slandered and disgraced. Only now that an independent investigation has been completed are their voices believed. In a recent interview, that researcher was asked why this kind of scandal keeps happening in the church, and how we can move forward. Her answer was simple: tell women’s stories and elevate women’s voices.

            I believe there is no place where women’s stories and voices have been more absent than in the Bible. Women did not write any of the Bible. Women speak in just 1% of the texts. Women are almost entirely absent from genealogies. Women who have a role beyond that of wife and mother are virtually non-existent. Women who face sexual assault – like Sarah, Bathsheba, or Tamar – are given no voice. These absences and silences have shaped our view of women for thousands of years, implicitly teaching that women are at best secondary, and at worst irrelevant. With this kind of representation of women in Christianity’s foundational text, it should not surprise us to see women still being abused and silenced in the church today.

            How can we combat the silencing of women whose voices were lost over two millennia ago? Is there any way to recover those ancient voices? These questions led me to explore the caves of Qumran in search of women’s voices in writings surrounding the now-biblical texts. In Cave 1, the previously unknown Aramaic text called the Genesis Apocryphon broke the deafening silence of women in Genesis. The Apocryphon retells stories from Genesis involving Lamech, Noah, and Abram, but significantly expands the female characters within these familiar tales. Why did the ancient authors of the Genesis Apocryphon choose to represent the women? What can their expanded female voices tell us about the culture’s changing perception of women? And how can these voices affect our approach to the Bible and women today?

My thesis dives into these questions by employing strategies of both biblical and feminist studies. Biblical studies is less than a century into the study of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and is still in the beginning stages of research around the Genesis Apocryphon’s portrayal of women. Up to this point, there has been no comprehensive study focusing on the women of the Genesis Apocryphon. This thesis compares the Apocryphon with Genesis and other related texts as a means of examining the scribal culture in which these texts were written and received. But beyond simple compare and contrast, my thesis is informed by a feminist approach that amplifies women’s voices and perspectives. In this presentation I will describe how I used this feminist approach, provide a few examples of women’s presence, identities, voices, and agency in the text, and end with explaining the impact this research has on biblical interpretation and the relevance of women’s voices in the church and the wider culture.

            Feminist studies is not merely the study of women; it is a deliberate use of both content and method to pursue the dismantling of oppressive hierarchical systems. Patriarchy is one such oppressive system, but not the only one. Elitism in academics makes much knowledge and research inaccessible to the less educated or less wealthy, and this has contributed to a scholarly echo chamber in which most voices have been white, male, and middle-to-upper class. My thesis pushes back against this system in a number of ways. First, by conducting and writing this research, I am adding another female voice to the world of biblical studies. As of 2017, 76% of the Society of Biblical Literature’s membership was male, demonstrating the still present need for women in this field. Second, my thesis promotes accessibility by writing in a way that welcomes non-expert readers. I avoid use of foreign languages where they are not needed, and provide translations of these languages when used. I begin my thesis with a glossary of terms which are highlighted throughout the thesis to encourage engagement from readers in multiple disciplines or non-specialized audiences. Finally, I have crafted each chapter to center around a female character from the Genesis Apocryphon. While these women are still secondary characters in the text, I make them the subjects by structuring my objectives and outlines around the women themselves and not simply their relevance to the men in each story. For example, Chapter 3 of my thesis addresses the depictions of Noah’s wife Emzara, his daughters, and his granddaughters, but this still emphasizes Noah as the character of concern. I shifted the emphasis by framing Emzara as the main character of my chapter, structuring the chapter around Emzara, her daughters, and her granddaughters. Though a small and simple change, this reframing is an intentional step that demonstrates how to see women in texts where they have often been relegated to the background. These three elements – writing as a woman, promoting accessibility, and shifting the subject – shape the method by which I examine the women of the Apocryphon.

            As I have outlined on the handout, my research finds that in comparison to Genesis, the Genesis Apocryphon provides women with presence, identity, voice, and agency in various ways and for various reasons. The authors incorporate women’s presence and identity in order to address a growing concern for endogamy, and give women voice and agency largely as a Hellenistic influence. I will briefly explain both of these reasons with examples from my research.

            Amplifying women begins on the most basic level: acknowledging their presence. The Genesis Apocryphon does this by including women who are otherwise absent in Genesis, such as the daughters and granddaughters of Noah and Emzara. Column 6 includes Noah’s first person account of the birth of his daughters, who are never mentioned in Genesis. Why was this detail important to the authors? We find out in the next sentence, in which Noah says, “Then I took wives for my sons from among the daughters of my brothers, and my daughters I gave to the sons of my brothers, according to the custom of the eternal statute [that] the [Lo]rd of Eternity [gave…] to humanity” (6:8–9). First, what we see happening here is the practice of endogamy, which is marriage within a specific group. In this case, that group is Noah’s immediate family, which seems a little extreme until we understand the context of the story. The Genesis Apocryphon opened with the story of the Watchers mating with human women, leading to strange and problematic offspring. In light of this, Noah takes seriously the responsibility of ensuring that his children find proper, unpolluted spouses. But what is perhaps more interesting is Noah’s own reasoning for doing this: he explains that he is following an eternal statute laid down by God. As it turns out, no such statute exists in the Torah, and certainly not chronologically before the story of Noah. So what is Noah citing then? Examining the book of Tobit, another popular Aramaic text from this period, can provide additional insight on this idea of a divine mandate to marry endogamously.

The book of Tobit tells the story of young Tobias marrying a woman named Sarah by recommendation of an angel-in-disguise named Raphael. As Raphael encourages Tobias to marry Sarah, he points out that Tobias is Sarah’s closest relative, and says, “[Her father] can be no means keep her from you or promise her to another man without incurring the penalty of death according to the decree of the book of Moses” (Tobit 6:13). Here again we see the practice of endogamy being attributed to a divine command that did not actually exist. Rather, it appears that the scribes in the post-exilic context of the Second Temple period were encouraging endogamy and avoiding intermarriage with other people groups. In the Apocryphon, their strategy was to rewrite Israel’s patriarchs as proponents of this new value for endogamy. As a result, women were suddenly an important part of the conversation, and we see the presence of women who were previously unnecessary to the writers.

            But the promotion of endogamy meant that women weren’t just needed, they also needed to be identified to ensure they were proper marriage partners. This need results in the attribution of names and lineages to women who were nameless in Genesis. Emzara is one such woman. While simply called “Noah’s wife” in Genesis, the Genesis Apocryphon uses her name and tells her parentage. However, the Apocryphon did not make up her name. The text of Jubilees uses the same name and also provides Emzara’s lineage, demonstrating that there was a growing tradition around this character that is not found in Genesis. We can see how the authors’ value of endogamous marriage led them to write in female characters. The inclusion of these women was only a means to an end for the writers, but it still emphasizes the absence of these women in older texts and shows how details and stories changed over time to serve new purposes.

            While women’s presence and identity is important for the theme of endogamy, the Genesis Apocryphon does not stop there. It includes speeches and actions from women that are not attested in any other texts. For example, Noah’s mother Batenosh faces an accusation of unfaithfulness from her husband Lamech. In response, Batenosh defends herself for ten whole lines, a striking amount to be attributed to a woman. The development of her character is remarkable: while she is nowhere mentioned in Genesis, she gains presence, a name, and a voice in the Apocryphon. Why does the Genesis Apocryphon give women voices in the stories? The influence of Hellenistic culture on Jewish literature likely played a significant role. Around the time of the Apocryphon’s composition, Greek and Jewish literature saw growing affinity with each other, and one of the shared characteristics was greater female characterization. For instance, the Greek Septuagint version of Esther includes a portrayal of Esther that is much lengthier and more dramatized than the original Hebrew. Similarly, the Greek addition to Daniel includes the vividly emotional story of Susanna, who protests against her own sexual assault and laments over her unjust accusation before the court.  We can see how the Greek influence may have led to more women’s voices as a growing literary style.

            But the women in these stories don’t just speak. What they are doing with their words deepens the significance of their voices. The women of the Genesis Apocryphon show agency by using their voices to actively resist their own exploitation. The most prominent example belongs to Sarai in the Apocryphon’s retelling of Sarai and Abram’s journey to Egypt. When Abram presents Sarai with the plan in which she will claim to be his sister in order to save his life, Sarai protests with weeping and does not want to go. Upon reaching Egypt, she hides herself for five years to try to protect herself, though her efforts ultimately fail. Sarai’s acts of resistance reflect the Hellenistic influences noted in both Esther and Susanna, but they accomplish far more than that. The portrayal of resistance – even when futile – is actually one of the most important acts of resistance. Juliana Claassens writes that stories depicting women resisting “…hold up female agency… even though it may be slight, muted, or limited in light of the overwhelming show of male power, helping us not further relegate women to a state of powerlessness” (Claassens 2016: 49). The Genesis Apocryphon’s depiction of Sarai’s resistance thus “holds up female agency,” and in doing so creates a stark contrast between itself and Genesis, where Sarai has no action, no speech, and is passed silently between the two men.

These examples have shown how the Genesis Apocryphon’s emphasis on endogamy and Hellenistic influence results in giving women presence, identity, voice, and agency.  But does this two thousand year old manuscript actually have something to offer us today? I believe it does, and I would like to finish by explaining the impact my research has for biblical interpretation and for women’s voices.

The Genesis Apocryphon provides us with valuable insight into the scribal and literary culture surrounding now-biblical texts in a time before canon and Bible. Scholars have struggled to find an adequate genre label for this text, ranging from “targum” to “rewritten Bible” to “scriptural interpretation” and more. The inability to neatly categorize the text tells us that our modern conceptions of “biblical” and “non-biblical” limit our ability to understand the more fluid and spectral approach to sacred literature in the Second Temple period. While Genesis was a decidedly authoritative text for Second Temple writers, that authority did not mean expansion, reinterpretation, and rewriting were off-limits. On the contrary, the significance of Genesis seemed to give the authors of the Apocryphon all the more reason to edit and reinterpret the characters and stories. This critically engaged method of reading the Bible is characteristic of Second Temple literature, and a Jewish approach in general; Rachel Held Evans (2018: 24) wrote that “While Christians tend to turn to Scripture to end a conversation, Jews turn to Scripture to start a conversation.” A greater awareness of texts like the Genesis Apocryphon will help modern Bible readers gain a healthier relationship with the Bible as they recognize the complex culture from which these texts arose.

In a very real sense, the Genesis Apocryphon is a #MeToo moment in a textual world. For too long, only one voice has been heard and believed: the voice of the Bible, and in this case, the voice of Genesis. The Apocryphon pushes back against that voice, and by doing so reveals how dominant that single text has become. My research helps provide a new framework for reading the Bible, a framework that recognizes there are voices missing from our sacred texts, and these voices will add value to biblical conversations, not threaten them.

Finally, I believe the most important impact of my thesis is the elevation of women’s voices. The power of the Genesis Apocryphon is how it identifies the extreme silencing of women that has become far too normal in our Biblically based culture. Growing up as a girl in a Christian context, I heard Bible stories every day, and I soaked them in uncritically. It did not occur to me that Sarai never spoke in a story of her own trafficking. I did not catch that Noah and Lamech were named, but Batenosh and Emzara were not. I barely noticed that women were nonessential to Israel’s genealogies. I did not think to look for the voices that were missing from the Bible. It wasn’t until studying texts like the Genesis Apocryphon that I finally saw these silences and omissions, and by that point how much had my own self-perception been shaped by a holy text that teaches me women are submissive, silent, or invisible? 

This research is desperately needed. This is where biblical studies impacts the real world. Millions of Christians – men and women alike – are being shaped by a text that only represents half of us. More and more scholars and teachers are acknowledging women’s silence in the Bible, and while this is a step in the right direction, it still leaves a gaping hole where those voices should have been. The Genesis Apocryphon begins to fill the gap, painting a picture in which even from the earliest receptions of Genesis, women were not invisible or irrelevant. As a woman, I want to know that our voices do not just matter today in a feminist, progressive culture. I want to know that our female voices have always mattered, and that even two thousand years ago, someone was listening.

The women of today’s #MeToo movement are speaking out not just to criticize and condemn, but to call us forward to a world where all voices, all bodies, and all people are valued. The church has found itself decidedly behind the curve in rising to this call, and I believe the Bible’s portrayal of women is central to this dilemma. The women of the Genesis Apocryphon are giving the church the opportunity to step forward toward acknowledging a history of patriarchy and misogyny that must end. My research tells their stories and amplifies their voices so that person by person, we begin to see women for the powerful, outspoken, and active people we have always been. With their voices, we can raise a generation of girls who know that the women of the Bible had a voice, and so do they.