SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Feminist Bible scholar Phyllis Trible died earlier this month just short of her 93rd birthday. Her work affected the way generations of people, scholars and non-scholars alike, understand women in the Bible. Reporter Monique Parsons has this remembrance.
MONIQUE PARSONS: In the '90s, Phyllis Trible was invited to discuss the Bible with PBS journalist Bill Moyers.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON #1: In spelling out so many details, it reminds us that this is a story about real life.
PARSONS: At one point, three scholars - all men - were debating a story about Joseph and the Egyptian woman who tried to seduce him, when Trible interrupted.
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PHYLLIS TRIBLE: Look, I can't take any more of this. This story is misogynist. Where shall I start?
BILL MOYERS: And by misogyny, you mean?
TRIBLE: Hatred of women.
PARSONS: Phyllis Trible was a groundbreaking figure in the field of biblical scholarship. In the early 1970s, she was the first scholar to look closely at Bible stories about women and see deep lessons about the dangers of patriarchy and violence. While some feminists rejected the Bible, Trible's studies unveiled a God who rejected the horrific ways in which men acted toward women in the text.
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TRIBLE: The Bible is not a sanitized book. It does not have a single point of view. It comes to us full of conflicts, full of contradictions, full of problems. This, to me, is one of the great blessings of the Bible.
GALE A YEE: She transformed the field of biblical studies.
PARSONS: Gale A. Yee is a scholar of the Hebrew Bible and professor emerita from Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She says Trible read the Bible closely and challenged longstanding interpretations. In the story of Adam and Eve, for example, she found evidence that Eve's status as a helpmate made her Adam's equal partner. Yee says Trible's article on this from 1973 still resonates today.
YEE: For a lot of women, particularly women who are believers, they find Trible, you know, helpful in that way.
PARSONS: Trible saw the Bible's stories as human stories with insights into the divine. She comes from a school of thought that pays attention to the order of subjects and objects, to names and repetition. Trible noticed who God talks to and who talks back.
SERENE JONES: She changed me forever.
PARSONS: This is Reverend Serene Jones, the president of Union Theological Seminary in New York. She was a student there in the early 1980s when she heard Trible lecture about the Bible stories where women are brutalized. Trible pointed out that the enslaved woman Hagar is the first person in the Bible visited by a divine messenger. She's also the first person who gives God a name, the God of seeing. Trible's lectures were turned into a book called "Texts Of Terror."
JONES: Hearing her deliver those lectures before the book was even out was mind-blowing physically, mentally, emotionally.
PARSONS: Jones says that many scholars justify biblical narratives about harm to women. Others reject the Bible altogether. Trible approached each painful story with a critical ear and an open heart, urging readers...
JONES: To listen for it and see it and read it and engage it. And ask question upon question upon question about what we are being told in this scripture.
PARSONS: Jones says Trible's readings found a God who condemned violence against women. This influenced her own work as a theologian and shaped how generations of Christians understand women in the Bible.
For NPR News, I'm Monique Parsons.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHANCE THE RAPPER SONG, "CHILD OF GOD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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