Deborah's Ghost (original) (raw)
Related papers
Now Deborah, a prophetess, a fiery woman..." A gendered reading of Judges 4:4
2022
This article is inspired by an article published by Reverend Bongani Finca of the Uniting Presbyterian Church in Southern Africa (UPCSA) in 1994. Rev. Finca’s article is an adaptation of an address he gave on gender inequality at a Decade conference in East London, South Africa. Specifically, this article is challenged by his remark that he knows a number of men who struggle with the gender exclusivity in the language of the Church, especially in the reading of the liturgy. He then continues to say; “how many of us are working seriously at finding alternatives and revising the liturgy itself to be more gender sensitive”. It is this remark that prompts this article to swing into action. For that reason, this article responds to Rev. Finca’s challenge from the biblical point of view. This article thus intends to read Judges 4:4 alternatively. It intends to dispute the designation of Deborah as the wife of Lappidoth, arguing that it legitimises patriarchy.
The Feminine Voice of God: Women as Prophets in the Bible
Priscilla Papers, 2007
Author: Ronald W. Pierce Publisher: CBE International When God speaks in the Bible, it is with authority—and this is no less the case when God speaks through women. Sometimes it is privately through ordinary women like the matriarch Rebekah (Gen. 25:25) or the young woman Mary of Nazareth (Luke 1:26-38). Elsewhere, women serve as public heralds of Israel’s deliverance (Ps. 68:11, Isa. 40:9), and later of Christ’s resurrection (Matt. 28:1-10, Mark 16:1-18, Luke 24:1-12, John 24:1-12). In the book of Proverbs, the very wisdom of God is personified as a woman who calls the foolish to repentance and the wise to obedience. She also provides an idealized model for a person of wisdom as the “woman of valor” in the poem that King Lemuel’s mother taught him (Prov. 31). And throughout biblical history, the official “thus saith the Lord” of the prophets is heard through courageous women like Miriam in the exodus from Egypt (Exod. 15:20-21,Mic. 6:4), Deborah during the era of the judges (Judg. 4-5), Huldah at the time of the kingdom’s fall (2 Kings 22:14-20, 2 Chron. 34:22-28), as well as the New Testament examples of Anna (Luke 2:36), Philip’s daughters (Acts 21:9), the unnamed women who prayed and prophesied at Corinth (1 Cor. 11), and the prophesying daughters of Israel in the last days announced by the prophet Joel (Joel 2) and celebrated by the apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost (Acts 2:17).
Female Prophets and Prophetic Activity
This was written for a project, Handbook of Feminist Biblical Theology, that unfortunately was not completed. I had been asked to write the entry on "Prophet and Prophecy." The article considers the phenomenon of prophet and prophecy in the biblical text from a feminist perspective and how to broaden our understanding of women's prophetic roles in the Bible.
Women Prophets in the Old Testament
Priscilla Papers, 2018
Author: Christine Marchetti Publisher: CBE International This article investigates the female prophets of the OT, offering a close examination of their texts and contexts. First, the words “prophet” and “prophecy” will be defined. Then, each of the female prophets named in the OT will be discussed, with attention paid to the ways biblical writers, redactors, and commentators may have minimized their impact. Other women in the text who performed prophetic activities will be identified, and the article will conclude with a reflection on female prophecy in ancient Israel.
(Un-)Writing the Self: Authorial Strategies in Seventeenth-Century Women's Religious Prophecy
Compared to the average conforming Anglican woman, seventeenth-century women prophets arguably enjoyed greater freedom of speech and public agency (cf. Zwierlein 79; Berg and Berry 37). Indeed, as Elaine Hobby makes clear, these women's writerly output accounts for "[w]ell over half the texts published by women between 1649 and 1688" (Hobby, Virtue 26). Radical sectarian groups such as the Fifth Monarchists, the Baptists, the Ranters, or the Quakers paved the way for women's public utterance by propagating each individual's responsibility for their own salvation, assuming a genderless soul, which women and men alike needed to tend to by seeking unmediated spiritual communion with the divine. Women's prophecy was further legitimized by Biblical passages such as "God's promise in Acts 2.17-18 (repeating Joel 2.28-9) that in the last days before the most apocalyptic event in human history, Christ's Second Coming, 'I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy" (Hobby, Prophecy 264). A closer look at some of these exceptional women prophets' careers, however, shows that they nonetheless faced multiple obstacles both inside and outside their respective religious communities. They also constitute a group of writers far more heterogeneous than is evident at first glance. Thus, while the Civil War period was particularly conducive to the creation and dissemination of religious, mainly sectarian, women's texts, female visionaries were active throughout the entire span of the seventeenth century. These women mostly, though not necessarily, belonged to various radical sects, their degree of acceptance among these groups and English society at large oscillating between veneration and condemnation. Their works ranged from political warnings to purely spiritual revelations; from ecstatic oral deliverance to soberly-argued and carefully edited scriptural commentaries; from pro-Royalist outpourings to radical millenarian rapture. Not all women prophets were protected by their religious affiliation and some were even expelled because their prophetic utterances interfered with the respective group's values or doctrines. 1 Others may have found support in their religious communities, but 1 To give just one example, in the 1670s Anne Wentworth was accused by her fellow Baptists of being "a proud, passionate, revengeful, discontented and mad woman, […] one that has unduly published things to the prejudice and scandal of my husband, and that have wickedly left him" (Wentworth, Vindication 185).
Prophetesses in the Hebrew Bible
J. Day (ed.), Prophecy and Prophets in Ancient Israel: Proceedings of the Oxford Old Testament Seminar (LHB/OTS 531; New York: Continuum), 65–80, 2010
There are five references to individual prophetesses in the Hebrew Bible, 1 though other passages refer in a more general manner to women prophesying as well as men (e.g. Ezek. 13.17; Joel 3.1 [ET 2.28]). 2 Despite the once widespread assumption, especially on the basis of Isa. 8.3, that the relevant Hebrew word h)ybn could be used to indicate the wife of a prophet, 3 it is now more generally agreed that a h)ybn is a prophetess in her own right. 4 While there is not space here to lay out the linguistic arguments for this conclusion in full, it will become clear from the following survey of its specific application to the five named prophetesses in the Hebrew Bible that only this conclusion accounts satisfactorily for what is said about them. In turning to the relevant texts in order to learn more of the role of prophetesses, we may begin with the most obscure, namely, Noadiah in Neh. 6.14: 'Remember Tobiah and Sanballat, O my God, according to 1. The Talmud lists seven prophetesses, of which only three coincide with those explicitly so designated in the Hebrew Bible: Sarah, Miriam, Deborah, Hannah, Abigail, Huldah and Esther; cf. b. Meg. 14a. 2. Fischer (2002) adds to this number those whom she thinks are implicitly prophetesses even though the specific vocabulary is not used of them: the 'witch of En-dor' (1 Sam. 28) and the women at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting (Exod. 38.8; 1 Sam. 2.22). Later she speculates that Noadiah (Neh. 6.14) may have been associated with the successors of this latter group (p. 265). Kessler (1996) reaches a similar conclusion by including practitioners of the forms of divination and the like prohibited by Deut. 18.10-14; see too Gafney 2008. 3. Gesenius (1821: 528) states: 'Der Name h)ybn setzt wohl nicht voraus, daß die Gattin des Propheten selbst Prophetin war…sondern des Gatten Amtsname ist wohl…auf die Gattin übertragen'. 4. This is rightly stressed with regard to Isa. 8.3 by Wildberger (1980: 318 [ET 1991: 337]), for instance, though his assumption that she was nevertheless Isaiah's wife is not stated in the text.
Old Testament Women In Public Leadership: Deborah
Wynkoop Center Resource: Women in Leadership in the Old Testament, 2007
Wesleyan theology of gender equality based on Hebrew scriptures (originally published as "Heather Ann Clements"): “Old Testament Women in Public Leadership: Deborah” (Unit 2, Session 2) in Wynkoop Center for Women in Ministry Bible Commentary (Kansas City MO: Nazarene Theological Seminary, 2007): 1-9.
The Accounts of Deborah (Judges 4—5) in Recent Research
Currents in Biblical Research, 2009
Within the book of Judges, the figure of Deborah receives exceptional treatment in that her actions are presented first in a narrative, comprising chapter four, then in a poem, chapter five. Read together or separately, these chapters elicit scholarly interpretations aplenty. This article surveys recent research on the accounts of Deborah since 1990 by dividing the discussion into three sections: the two accounts as a single unit, Judges 4 alone, and Judges 5 alone. The first section discusses the function of these chapters within the book and their relationship with each other. The second section further subdivides according to the narrative elements of character or event, while the third section's divisions are based on common scholarly concerns like genre, dating, and structure.
Both Judges 4 and Judges 5 focus on Deborah as an exemplary judge who accompanies Israel in battle, and on God's mighty approbation of Deborah and Barak. God, by divine fiat and through Deborah, Barak, and Jael, conquers and kills Sisera, subjugates Jabin, and provides forty years of peace and prosperity to Israel. Judges 5 compares Deborah's and Jael's knowledge, initiative, and fortitude beside the ignorance, passivity, and anxiety of Sisera's mother and her ladies. Judges 4-5 compares the military leader Barak's respect of, cooperation with, and shared victory with the judge and prophet Deborah, with the military leader Sisera's dishonoring of, death, and defeat at the hands of Jael, wife of Sisera's ally Heber. Though the text also hints at a comparison between Barak and his foil Sisera, Barak is not the focus of the ancient record, but rather Deborah, then Jael, then Sisera's mother. These three women stand in contrast to each other, challenging our views today of what biblical womanhood might be in comparison to cultural expectations for the performance of femininity.