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Probing scripture
Christian Century, Jan 3, 2001 by Carol Newsom
Not all feminist interpretation has been concerned with historical reconstruction, however. A significant strand of feminism has used literary methods, exploring the ways in which biblical texts construct and represent an image of women that may function in the service of particular ideologies. In many cases this literary approach has involved reading against the grain of the text. For instance, a figure whom the text treats as a subsidiary character may become for feminist analysis the central character of the text (e.g., Jepthah's daughter in Judges, chapter 11, or the Levite's concubine in Judges, chapter 19). And African-American women, to take another example, have complicated the Anglo-European interpretation of the Abraham/Sarah narratives by focusing on the character of Hagar, the ethnic outsider, the slave, the surrogate wife. Similarly, Latina, African and Asian women have taken up the challenge of understanding the ways in which the practices of reading and interpreting the Bible serve to constrain or to emancipate women in their particular social and cultural contexts.
FINALLY, CANONICAL criticism, which often describes itself as a theological mode of interpretation, may also be considered as a form of cultural hermeneutics, since it also puts into the foreground the community context within which the text was created and from which it is to be read. Though the forms of canonical criticism developed by its two major proponents, Brevard Childs and James Sanders, differ, one can identify common elements. Specifically, canonical criticism is concerned with how scripture's final form was created within a believing community and how the meanings created by that final form continue to guide the reading practices of the community. The canonical shaping of the Jewish Bible, for instance--which places the writings in the final position and concludes with the call of 2 Chronicles for the exiles to go up to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple--tells a different story from that produced by the shaping of the Christian Old Testament, which places the prophets last and concludes with Malachi's reference to the return of the prophet Elijah to announce the coming day of the Lord.
In one sense canonical criticism is an extension of historical criticism's interest in the development of traditions. But in contrast to historical criticism's tendency to investigate the earliest stages of development, canonical criticism explicitly privileges the latest stage, the canon in its final form. This concern with reading the text of scripture in its final form gives canonical criticism some similarity to the literary approaches of the "New Criticism." Thus, where historical criticism, reading the Book of Isaiah, tries to distinguish which materials come from the eighth-century prophet, the sixth-century prophet and the fifth-century/prophet, literary and canonical critics focus on how the final form of the book has created the context within which all of its materials are now to be read, as a movement from judgment to salvation.
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