Phyllis Trible was an extraordinarily sensitive reader of scripture
“Her vision defied centuries of biblical interpretation in which, for male scholars, it went without saying that men alone are made in the image of God, and in which, for feminist critics, the Bible was irredeemably patriarchal and should therefore be looked at askance.
Dr. Trible, who was conversant with many languages of biblical times, rejected both points of view.
“Two things are beyond question for me: I am a feminist and I love the Bible,” she told the journalist Cullen Murphy, who profiled Dr. Trible in his 1998 book “The Word According to Eve.”
The challenge for her, as she told Mr. Murphy, was to reconcile her feminism with her belief that the Bible remained, in his words, a “repository of spiritual sustenance for women.”
“Dr. Trible gave examples in the article, writing that “feminine imagery for God is more prevalent in the Old Testament than we usually acknowledge.”
Referring to the God of the Hebrew Bible, she added that “murmuring themes focus often on hunger and thirst. Providing food and drink is woman’s work, and Yahweh assumes this role.”
She pursued this “appropriation” further in “God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.” She argued, as Professor Collins noted in his 2005 book, “The Bible After Babel,” that the Hebrew word for the first human being, “ha’adam” is not gender-specific, suggesting that the first being is not necessarily male.
Woman, whom Yahweh “builds” from the rib of Adam, was not an “afterthought” at all, in Dr. Trible’s interpretation, but the “culmination" of creation.
“The Hebrew verb build (bnh) indicates considerable labor to produce solid results,” she wrote. “Hence women is no weak, dainty, ephemeral creature.”
Professor Collins said, “I think she was quite right that the text wasn’t proclaiming the subordination of women.”
In “Texts of Terror,” Dr. Trible rescued minimally recognized and therefore widely forgotten women in the Bible like Adah, the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite; she is sacrificed by her father in thanks for his victory over the Ammonites.
“Though not a ‘survivor,’ she becomes an unmistakable symbol for all the courageous daughters of faithless fathers,” Dr. Trible wrote of Adah in the Michigan Quarterly Review, a year before her book was published.
“The God of scripture is beyond sexuality, neither male nor female, nor a combination of the two,” she said in a 1989 interview with Sunstone, a journal of liberal Mormon thought. “Many places in the Bible, God is described as a male and a few places as a female. But that is not to say that God as God is male, or female, or male and female.”
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