For my contribution to this panel I had the pleasure of reviewing the third part of the ‘fourfold framework’ of Prof. Scholz’s edited volume, which explores the “The Impact of (Digital) Media Cultures on Feminist Biblical Exegesis.” Chapters in this part of the book provide a rich review of potential intersections between feminist biblical exegesis and a range of media (many of which have been typically underrepresented within the broader field of biblical reception), including video games, digital journalism, music, novels, and film. In an effort to try to draw together a range of reflections on these diverse chapters with varied purposes, positions, aims and achievements, I have restricted my comments to three themes: first, cultural studies and the feminist biblical scholar; second, Bible in culture and with culture, and third, some reflections for the future.

a) Cultural Studies and the Feminist Biblical Scholar

In the opening chapter to the volume “Reading the Hebrew Bible with Feminist Eyes,” Prof. Scholz outlines her thinking behind the inclusion of a section on “(digital) media cultures” in a collection dedicated to explorations of feminist approaches to the Hebrew Bible. This represents an important editorial move, I would say, given the still marginal place that reception studies hold within the field of biblical studies at large (though perhaps less so within feminist biblical studies…). By bringing writing on the Bible and culture into the book, Scholz follows through on the feminist decision to find ways “[to read] the Bible without merely rehashing text-fetishized ways of interpretation”[1] and to make space for interdisciplinary studies of the Bible and culture that sit equally side by side a plethora of other significant feminist interpretative methods represented across the volume.

Interestingly, Scholz situates this inclusion of “media cultures” – both digital and analogue – at the intersection between feminist and cultural studies, arguing that feminist and non-feminist biblical studies that have begun to engage with media and culture have followed in the footsteps of the likes of Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall – key members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham. This trajectory of the theoretical underpinning of biblical reception studies and its relationship to feminist biblical exegesis that Scholz outlines is not, I would say, representative of the dominant conceptual framing of reception criticism as a biblical studies enterprise. Much more popular, from my experience, are methodological justifications for the study of the Bible and its reception that take as their inspiration from the work of Hans Georg Gadamer, Robert Jauss, and Wolfgang Iser.

But in fact, Scholz’s argument here is an important reminder of the first steps taken by colleagues such as Cheryl Exum and Stephen D Moore in the 1990s to incorporate cultural studies into our field. Taking a particularly feminist approach to wanting to challenge the text-fetishization of our field by attending to issues of interpretation and impact has the potential to be a useful catalyst in reacquainting ourselves with cultural studies once more. After all, cultural studies’ aim of beginning to break down the barriers set up by classist notions of “high” and “low” cultures, barriers which have been important mechanisms for maintaining cultural control within patriarchal, heterosexist, racist, colonial systems, offers considerable potential for feminist approaches to biblical interpretation. Cultural studies opens the way for biblical scholarship to investigate the impact of the Bible outside of the academy, the gallery, the theatre, and the concert hall. Instead, it pushes biblical scholars to take seriously the impact the Bible has had and continues to have in peoples’ daily lives – and to consider how this has shaped performances and perceptions of gender and sexuality as they intersect with race, ethnicity, religion, disability, class and myriad other aspects of experience. Although only covered in passing in the first chapter of the book, Scholz’s observations about the value cultural studies has for feminist reception criticism certainly opens up a range of interesting links to intersectional hermeneutics and praxis that can lead the feminist biblical exegete to be alert to both interpretations and impacts of the Bible.

All of this serves as a call for feminist scholars to take seriously and to seek out the biblical culture produced by those who have been historically excluded from the academy - women, queer folks, people of color, working class people and people living in poverty, disabled folk, and those living under colonial rule. It also challenges us to take seriously the impact of the Bible in the culture of now. In the words of Beatrice J. W. Lawrence, whose excellent essay concludes this section of the book:

Scholars must review digital media to become able of making knowledgeable connections to the Bible. Teachers must also become comfortable with the claim that the study of popular culture is valid research. Watching television shows and movies, and studying music, art, and advertisement are all necessary steps to become experts on teaching the Bible. The lacunae of this kind of research creates additional challenges for teachers of reading popular media by reading biblical stories. Students are fully immersed in the social and online media landscapes, and so contemporary researchers ought to explore the cultural assumptions embedded in today’s media.[2] Lawrence makes this point with urgency in the context of teaching on the Bible, rape, and rape culture.

In terms of how this approach is represented in the volume, the reader is treated to articles that cover a mix of “high” and “low” digital and analogue cultural artifacts that echo, alter, and reimagine the biblical text. While readers of the volume are encouraged by, for example, Charles M. Rix, to consider how game theory might help us to encounter the complex gender dynamics in Joshua 2, they can also look to Helen Leneman’s survey of the power of (interestingly all male but one[3]) librettists and composers, as well as the performers of opera, oratorio, and song, to retell the stories of biblical women in Western classical music, or to Sara M. Koenig’s exploration of Bathsheba’s starring role in twentieth and twenty-first century romance novels. Each chapter in this section of the volume encourages readers to consider the ubiquity of biblical stories in modern and contemporary cultures, particularly within the West, and to attend to the ways in which the Bible continues to be implicated in not only the perpetuation of patriarchy but also in movements to resist and dismantle it.

In future studies that build out from work like this collection, more attention must be paid to whose readings and retellings are being platformed. While this volume, as a whole, makes considerable space for engaging with both global and intersectional issues within feminist biblical criticism, and it rightly champions work on a wider range of types of reception à la cultural studies, including digital material, the media under consideration in this section of the book tended to be produced in the West by white, and often, though not exclusively, male producers. Notable and important exceptions include the analysis by Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch’s chapter on film receptions on Dinah, which included an analysis of the Malian film Le Genèse, while engagement with the work of women culture producers is found in chapters by Vanessa L. Lovelace and Arthur W. Walker-Jones, and alongside male authors in Koenig’s chapter.

b) Bible in Culture, Bible with Culture.

There seem to be two key dynamics of reading with media in this section of the volume – looking at the Bible in culture, and reading the Bible with culture. From my review I would say that the former was the most frequently represented method amongst the chapters, with a number of essays focused mainly on addressing what we might call cultural afterlives of primarily female biblical characters. Whether we encounter glimmers of biblical women and men in contemporary digital media, as we do in Linda S. Schearing’s chapter that examines the fleeting and slightly obscure appearances of Adam and Eve in the video game Bioshock, or are introduced to the catalogue of consistent erasures and displacements of Noah’s female family members in the wide range of twentieth and twenty-first century Noahic cinema surveyed by Anton Karl Kozlovic, many of the essays in this part of the anthology concern themselves primarily with analyzing and critiquing re-tellings of biblical characters and stories, considering what these re-tellings might tell us about the people and cultures responsible for producing them, and in some cases considering the impact this might have on the consumers of these cultural artefacts and their perceptions of the Bible.

I was particularly impacted by the powerful insights into specific examples of how biblical woman are weaponized by sexist, antisemitic and racist agendas – and here I would point especially to Adele Reinhartz’s compelling illumination of three troublingly supercessionist Hollywood reframings of Bathsheba, the Queen of Sheba, and Ruth, in which she sheds light on the way each Hebrew Bible woman’s story is cinematically molded into the Christian Pericope Adulterae (John 8:1–11) by various Hollywood directors. Reinhartz demonstrates how this interpretative move ensures that each biblical story is presented in such a way that promotes supercessionist Christian patriarchal ideals “in an era when overt anti-Semitism was frowned upon”[4] by creating storylines that present women as weak and in need of saving by male heroes, David, Solomon and Boaz, all of whom exhibit “virtues… valued by Christianity whereas the traits of their enemies conform to long-standing anti-Jewish stereotypes.”[5]

Equally powerful and nuanced were the observations provided by Vanessa L. Lovelace in her fascinating analysis of the dynamics of the racialization of Hagar in novels written by white women writers in antebellum American South. As Lovelace writes, while “for U.S.-American blacks, the recognition that the Egyptian Hagar is ‘black’ lifted their status as descendants of enslaved Africans. For nineteenth-century white feminist novelists living in the U.S.-American south, Hagar represents a different form of enslavement and freedom.”[6] In each of the novels surveyed in this chapter, Lovelace demonstrates how the Hagar character is troublingly molded from racist stereotypes of Black women as “wild, dark, and rebellious,” and sent on a journey ultimately to find purpose and virtue in an idealized domestic life. While on the surface these texts aimed to elicit “sympathy for the rejected and rebellious young heroine…” whilst also imagining ultimately “her freedom from societal gender expectations,”[7] in fact, as Lovelace so compellingly demonstrates, they perpetuate a message of idealized submission that fails both black and white women in the nineteenth-century United States by telling them both that “they need to aspire to being revered for their piety, submission, and resourcefulness.”[8]

In fact, many of the essays that examine the bible in culture alert us to the potential dangers of imaginative re-readings of biblical texts, and the ways in which they can be used to perpetuate and even deepen oppressive and abusive readings of the Bible. Linda S. Schearing shows us how, within the gendered dynamics of the gaming world, Eve’s archetypical image as essential partner, but also ultimate sex object is reiterated tacitly within the videogame, BioShock. A game whose narrative, while giving its players some semblance of free choices, leads them to be “unconsciously reinforcing ancient stereotypes over and over again.”[9] Looking at Genesis 34 and its representation on screen, Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch finds Dinah’s filmic experiences in La Genèse, which reframes the story in the context of postcolonial Mali, remain, as they are in the biblical account of Genesis 34, displaced by the wars of men in the film. Even the miniseries the Red Tent, which ostensibly aims to retell Genesis as “a liberating story by transforming the biblical rape into a tragic romance,”[10] actually entails the “the erasure of violence perpetrated against women (Dinah and the Hivite women),”[11] which is certainly not a “liberating hermeneutical choice in a society that all too often denies the reality of sexual assault and its consequences.”[12] Similarly troubling dynamics of power are evident in Koenig’s work too - her review of Bathsheba’s multiple appearances in romance novels, across the eleven books she reviews, leads her to end the chapter by stating that “despite the creative, diverse, and imaginative gap filling about Bathsheba, all of the novels depict her in gender stereotypical ways”[13] – a depressing conclusion indeed.

This excavation of the myriad ways in which the Bible sustains patriarchal cultures long after its inception, is, of course essential work. These approaches which read out from the Bible and into popular culture urgently alert us to the ways biblical literature can be and has been weaponized in the hands of heterosexist patriarchal racist colonialist cultures, and call on us to be “resistant readers” of such cultures.

BUT! The collection also gestures towards other potentially generative methods that might be explored by feminist biblical critics wanting to collaborate with cultural studies. In particular, as well as looking out from the text into its subsequent interpretations, we can also look back from culture into biblical literature as a means of contributing to the growing number of future-oriented retellings of the Bible – the kind of interpretations that we have seen emerge and continue to emerge in the work of feminist, womanist, and mujerista theologians. Working with media and culture can bring new ways of seeing and new ways of reading biblical texts within a feminist framework – we can change the narrative!

While this kind of method appears in the work of Charles M. Rix, which encourages us to apply game theory to reading Rahab, and to Arthur W. Walker Jones’ cyborg reading of Jezebel, most interesting to me was Helen Leneman’s focus on the emotional and affective possibilities provided by reading the Bible with music – this desire to bring feeling to the text feels urgent and promising. In this chapter, Leneman observes that encountering biblical stories through music allows for stories “so often read but rarely felt” to be “felt,” highlighting the affective potential of reading with media and culture.[14]  For me, this is a distinctly feminist move, because it challenges the dominance of historically male-coded values such as rationality, detachment, objectivity, and consistency within academia and makes space for historically female-coded qualities such as emotion, connection, subjectivity and messiness to be brought into the work of biblical interpretation in a way that is not dismissed or devalued. This feels like something that need not be left to artists, musicians, writers of fiction, and designers of video games, but is actually an approach that feminist biblical exegetes can take too. They can take this approach not only by looking at emotive representations of biblical characters in culture but also in staging their own encounters between the Hebrew Bible and a much broader array of media and culture that goes beyond biblical afterlives, with the aim of making space for an affective response in their readers. This is something that I, amongst others, have interest to explore in a range of contexts including the Visual Commentary on Scripture.[15] Here artworks are used as reading partners for biblical texts, usually with the aim of generating new, fresh, and in my case, feminist readings of biblical texts. For example, in my entry on Eve’s punishment, I reflect on the way that reading Eve’s experience of maternal trauma in Genesis 3 and 4 alongside Damien Hirst’s image of female tragedy in hi Mother and Child Divided – two vitrines at a distance from one another containing the bisected bodies of cow and calf – amplifies the visibility of the first woman’s maternal suffering in a way that has not been particularly prominent in the history of interpretation of her narrative.[16] This is an approach that has also been modelled in Rhiannon Graybill’s latest work Texts after Terror : Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible, when she argues for a feminist approach to reading texts concerning violence against women “through literature,” following Gayatiri Spivak’s claim that “texts crack open when they are made to talk to other texts.”[17] Likewise, such reading biblical texts alongside cultural artifacts can help us crack down on androcentric, misogynistic, racist and homophobic reading cultures, by creating our own cultural vocabulary within which to encounter the Bible.

c) Reflections for the Future

Much has been done in this volume to champion the potential for feminist cultural criticism within biblical studies, and it has paved the way for further studies that can also incorporate things like social media. As a handbook that might be encountered by someone just starting out their career in feminist biblical exegesis, it certainly provides a range of inspiration.

These scholars of the future may well want to attend to one issue that was not entirely resolved for me at the end of the review process. What does it mean to do feminist cultural criticism with the Bible? Not every essay in this part of the collection was entirely clear about its specific feminist stance. And not every essay fully articulated why a particular approach to reading the Bible, either in or with culture, ultimately served feminist goals. In the hope of not reverting back to a mode of feminist scholarship in which focusing on female characters in the Bible is sufficient to deem a study “feminist,” it seems to me that if we are to adopt the new, creative, critical methods we encounter in this volume, we must also be able, willing, and compelled to articulate why they particularly further the feminist cause. It also seems to me that the work that has been offered in this volume points towards the fruitful possibility more of collaboration and co-creation within feminist biblical research. How can we develop this agenda further by working with other scholars from elsewhere in the academy and beyond? What would it look like for academics and artists, musicians, writers, games creators, social media influencers to more frequently collaborate together? How can we incorporate the voices of the folk who are creating Bible culture today into our practice, beyond only observing and analyzing their work?

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[1] Susanne Scholz, “Reading the Hebrew Bible with Feminist Eyes: Introduction,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), xxxvii–xxxviii.

[2] Beatrice J. W. Lawrence, “Teaching the Bible and Popular Media as Part of Contemporary Rape Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 438–39.

[3] The one female composer who is included, Celanie Carissan, is described by Leneman as “a largely unknown woman composer.” See Helen Leneman, “Exploring Biblical Women in Music,” in Susanne Scholz ed., The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 378.

[4] Adele Reinhartz, “Sexuality, Stoning, and Supersessionism in Biblical Epic Films of the Post– World War II Era,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 324.

[5] Reinhartz, “Sexuality, Stoning, and Supersessionism in Biblical Epic Films of the Post– World War II Era,” 324.

[6] Vanessa L. Lovelace, “Hagar in Nineteenth Century Southern Women’s Novels,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), p. 390.

[7] Lovelace, “Hagar in Nineteenth Century Southern Women’s Novels,” 403.

[8] Lovelace, “Hagar in Nineteenth Century Southern Women’s Novels,” 404.

[9] Linda S. Schearing, “The Bible, Women, and Video Games,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 278.

[10] Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, “Mediating Dinah’s Story in Film,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 364.

[11] Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, “Mediating Dinah’s Story in Film,” 364.

[12] Rhonda Burnette-Bletsch, “Mediating Dinah’s Story in Film,” 364.

[13] Sara M. Koenig, “Bathsheba in Contemporary Romance Novels,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 421.

[14] Helen Leneman, in “Exploring Biblical Women in Music,” in The Oxford Handbook of Feminist Approaches to the Hebrew Bible, ed. Susanne Scholz (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021) 377.

[15] https://thevcs.org/

[16] https://thevcs.org/eves-punishment  

[17] Gayatiri Spivak, cited in Rhiannon Graybill, Texts after Terror : Rape, Sexual Violence, and the Hebrew Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).