Whispering the Word

In the past 25 years there has been an explosion of work focusing on women in the OT. Significant work has been done in attending to critical issues raised by the patriarchal nature of the texts, but the question of how to hear these texts as the word of God is often left unaddressed. Many Christians who call themselves feminist wonder if they can simultaneously maintain their faith in feminist principles of gender equality AND their faith that God is speaking to them and the church through the Scriptures. Jacqueline Lapsley addresses this issue, as she reads and interprets a number of narratives in which women are prominent in order to reflect critically on issues of gender but with the ultimate goal of considering how these stories may reflect God's word for us. Lapsley proposes three strategies: (1) attending to women's words; (2) attending to the narrator's perspective; and (3) attending to textual worldview--which she applies to specific tex