Women in the Biblioblogs

I'd like to share a few biblioblogs which post on women of the Bible. Claude Mariottini often has excellent posts on women of the Hebrew Bible. I think you would enjoy this one on Deborah and Queen Hatshepsut's Perfume.

James Getz of Ketuvim has a post on Women Nazirites. Dave Warnock mentions that Angela Shier-Jones thinks we need more women engaging in theology.

Her.meneutics is a new blog for women at Christianity Today. HT Evangelical Village. Cynthia Nielsen completes a four part series on Paul and Slavery. She concludes,

Each new generation of Christian thinkers and activists must confront the particular moral and ethical issues of their day, which requires wisdom, seeking truth wherever it can be found (whether in divine revelation or elsewhere), and instruction from the Holy Spirit working through his people in the context of the church, “not by appeal to a previous blueprint by Jesus [or the New Testament writers] for the church.”[7] Such an approach requires wisdom, which is, of course, never easy but always worth the struggle.

To the question, should Christians today actively seek to eradicate slavery-the practice of reifying human beings and reducing them to the status of property-I answer with a resounding “yes.” For the Christian today, I see no moral imperatives in Scripture compelling support for the institution of slavery. Just as Paul called the Christian communities of his day to live out its kingdom values, we too must live and act in such a way that challenges the injustices of society. Our historical and cultural situation is of course different from that of Paul and the early church. Nonetheless, the Church would do well to reflect on Paul’s subversive strategies, to recall Scotus’s condemnation of slavery, and to work towards developing a position in the spirit of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Pope John Paul II, in which the enslavement of human beings is once and for all condemned as an “intrinsically evil” (intrinsece malum) act.[8] The faith and eschatological-ly grounded hope of our African American brothers and sisters serve as an exemplar for all Christians of striving for justice and standing for the dignity of all human beings. Will we follow with an appropriate response of (active) love?

Edith Humphrey, a Canadian theologian, has written And I turned to See the Voice. Linda MacCammon has published Liberating the Bible: A guide for the Curious and Perplexed.

Dorothy Peters, of Trinity Western University, has a blog. Here is an excerpt from a recent entry, The Delivering God: Midwife or Labouring Mother,

We might be excused for having overlooked God-as-Mother language in the Bible. Translators frequently make the more “sensible” interpretative choices from the range of possibilities available to them. A most remarkable example of this is found in the Song of Moses in Deuteronomy 32, written right before Moses’ death and taught by Moses to the Israelites. Here, the children of Israel are imagined collectively as a “child” with God as their parent.

In the Song of Moses, the more gender-specific “He suckled him” or “He nursed him” (32:13b) is translated in the NIV as the more generic “He nourished him,” which is something either a father or mother could do. This interpretative translation is certainly a logical one. “He suckled him” strikes the modern ears strangely since males are not physically equipped to nurse babies! Yet all other forms of this Hebrew verb in the Old Testament are expressed and translated appropriately as the nursing of human or animal young. In the Song of Moses, too, the picture is clearly of God who nurses his children from the bounty of his creation.