Reddit reviews Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction To The Women Of The Torah And The Throne

When we’re talking about the historical Paul, I want to avoid the pitfall of presentism, evaluating the rightness of his and his contemporaries’ attitudes based on the accumulation of 2000 years of Christian moral discernment.

Although I do want to push back slightly on the assumption — I may be wrongly reading — in the second half of your comment. The hermeneutic that many conservatives — and even progressives — use nowadays is a pretty literalistic historical-grammatical approach. It’s not the approach to Scripture that Jesus or Paul or the church fathers used. Jewish traditions of midrash and allegorical readings were popular through even the medieval period. Our sorta “plain view” reading of Scripture is largely a product of the Enlightenment and subsequent positivism.

I’m actually alright with hermeneutical options that question the surface interpretations of Scripture. Take Wil Gafney’s Womanist Midrash as one example, where several Biblical stories are reconceived through the lens of the oppressed characters.

A book that helps me wrestle with this is Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne by the Rev. Dr. Wilda Gafney, an Episcopal priest and biblical scholar. She both digs into some of the context of the stories as well as grapples with it from a modern perspective. And the book was super accessible as well as informative.