Wilda C. Gafney > Quotes

“Womanism is committed to the wholeness and flourishing of the entire community.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Feminine language occurs in the text repeatedly of God; this means that feminists and womanists advocating for inclusive and explicitly feminine God-language are not changing but restoring the text and could be considered biblical literalists.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“For me as a black feminist and womanist descended from enslaved Africans in the Americas, biblical slavery is a particularly pernicious and personal issue. Slavery in the Bible represents more than the ubiquity of slavery in the ancient world; it represents the theological bulwark on which the Atlantic slave trade rested.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“In Jewish sacred literature, midrash is the primary rabbinic term for exegesis.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“I have determined from my work pastoring, preaching, and presiding in (Christian) congregations and teaching in college, university, seminary, and divinity school classrooms that people tend to hear neutral or inclusive language through a masculine cultural filter, so that they hear “the Spirit” as “He,” just as they hear “God” as “He,” no matter what I write or say, unless I specify “She.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Though the Divine is articulated with feminine and masculine gender in the Scriptures, in translation and tradition God became virtually exclusively male. The gendering of God’s Spirit as feminine calls for the feminine pronoun, yet generations of sexist translations have gotten around this by religiously avoiding the pronoun altogether. So in each case the text will say, “The Spirit [verb]. . . .” No unacceptably feminine pronoun is needed. But she is still there.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“womanist interpretation makes room at the table of discourse for the perspectives of the least privileged among the community and the honored guest of any background:”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Our sacred texts do not proclaim or even envision a world without slavery and the subordination of women, but they lay a foundation for us to transcend them and their limitations—the limitations of those who claimed to hear God enshrining human bondage of all sorts: “Remember that you were slaves in Egypt.” “Do to others what you would have them do to you.” “What is hateful to you, do not do to another.” “In the Messiah there is no longer slave or free, male or female.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Moses’ use of his power and authority to disenfranchise women in his community identifies him as one of the male religious leaders in virtually every religious tradition of which I have ever heard whose response to women’s demands for equality—even a small amount of parity—is, “Over my dead body.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Acknowledging another supernatural entity was not seen as a problem, because the Torah is henotheistic (hierarchy among gods) rather than monotheistic (denying the existence of all but one god)—hence the divine jealousy over worship of other gods.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The biblical Sarah is a complex character who exercises privilege and experiences peril. In her complexity she can be iconic for contemporary religious readers who may not find themselves on a single side of a contrived privilege-peril binary scale. Women of color who are imperiled in the United States and the wider Western world because of race and ethnicity can also exercise privilege if they are Christian and/or cisgender and/or heterosexual. Women who exercise white privilege can be imperiled through Muslim identity or sexual minority status. Male privilege—even white male privilege—can be eclipsed in part by sexual orientation or broader gender nonconformity.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Though calling someone out of (or outside of) their name is a serious violation in many black cultural contexts, the Divine Name is a name that cannot be named and can be substituted for only with inadequate language, calling for manifold options.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“No matter how misogynistic, how heavily redacted, how death-dealing, how troubled, troubling, or troublesome the text, womanists who teach and preach in the black church do not throw the whole androcentric text with its patriarchal and kyriarchal lowlights out of our stained-glass windows because of its Iron Age theology. We wrestle with it because it has been received as Scripture. Our wrestling should not be taken to mean that we affirm texts that do not affirm us.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The experiences of widows like Zeruah are rarely considered in diatribes against single motherhood. Nor are the circumstances of women who adopt, foster, or become the guardians of children in their families or wider community accounted for when folk bemoan the state of single mothers or households headed by women in the black community.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The sexual use of enslaved women and girls that pervades the canon also begs the following questions: How are these texts Scripture? How are they true? How are they illuminating? How are they authoritative? What enduring Word is there in these words?

To those questions I can answer only that the truth of these passages of Scripture is the truth of the world in which they originated. The biblical world was one in which women’s autonomy over their own bodies, sexuality, and reproduction was nearly inconceivable.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The concept of a person’s physiological booty as spoils of war booty has passed almost unnoticed into the lexicon of American English and African American cultural rhetoric, in which booty has been reduced from a whole person to a person’s anal and genital orifices, often accessed from the back. ... Given the ongoing colonization and exploitation of African diasporic and African American sexuality, especially female sexuality, the veneration of young women who proclaim the deliciousness of their own booty is utterly fascinating.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The sanctified imagination is the fertile creative space where the preacher-interpreter enters the text, particularly the spaces in the text, and fills them out with missing details: names, back stories, detailed descriptions of the scene and characters, and so on.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“So “Do not covet your neighbor’s amah-womb-slave” means “Do not covet sex with your neighbor’s sex-slave.” Indeed it is hard to imagine one man coveting another’s slave-girl without coveting her sexual exploitation. Likewise the command not to covet your (male) neighbor’s male slave should be heard with regard to the likelihood of sexual abuse of male slaves.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Bilhah represents the woman who has had more than one abusive relationship, the woman who has been raped by more than one perpetrator, the woman who has been betrayed by women and men, the woman who has never known anyone to value her for more than what they think about her body, in part or the whole. And Bilhah represents the woman who survives her abuse.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The union of Abigail and David is no more romantic than those of battered women who do and say anything to calm their abusers in the hope of preventing today’s beating.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The disenfranchisement of women from inheriting land was particular to Israel in the ancient world. Just as Israel was relatively isolated in largely restricting women from public and professional religious roles, they were also virtually alone in legislating women’s exclusion from property law. Women throughout the ancient Near East, from Egypt to Mesopotamia broadly, and specifically in places like Sumer, Ugarit, and Elam, owned and inherited property for more than a thousand years before the codification of Israelite law. The codes of Hammurabi and Israel’s Hittite neighbors also legally enfranchised the property rights of women.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Exercise of the sanctified imagination is also a form of what biblical scholars call reader-response criticism.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“My experience in classrooms and congregations demonstrates that while some reader/hearers read and hear God as gender-neutral or gender-inclusive, many read and hear “God” as male, as the polar opposite of “goddess” (which in their construction does not merit the capital G of “God”).”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“There is no happy ending for Leah; she is not fulfilled as a person or as a woman in motherhood. She is not the last woman to go to her grave longing for the love of a man who does not love her but is willing to sleep with her. Pious women readers/hearers may not choose to be Leah, but I suspect that Leah’s story canonized her lovelessness as well as her fruitfulness because it rang true to human experience. Leah offers a cautionary tale to women looking for fulfillment in someone else’s love: you cannot make someone love you.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The Bible does not address itself to minor children. When commands to “children” are issued, they are issued to adult children.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Translation is the only means non-Hebrew readers have to access the Scriptures of Israel in their own tongues. Yet the act of translation and principles that govern an individual translation are frequently invisible to many readers, save for expressed preferences for one translation of the Bible over another. Even then, the preference is often based on nonscholarly criteria: what the text sounds like, how familiar it is, how it corresponds to cherished previously held beliefs about what the text ought to say, or even a belief that only one translation of the Bible is authoritative.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“Womanism emerged as black women’s intellectual and interpretive response to racism and classism in feminism and its articulation and in response to sexism in black liberationist thought. Womanism includes the radical egalitarianism of feminism, the emancipatory ethic and reverence for black physical and cultural aesthetics of the black liberation movement, and the transformational trajectories of both movements; it is operative in religious and nonreligious literary disciplines.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“In the Gentile world, Bible translators have been overwhelmingly white, as is our guild. This means that until very recently, the Bibles that hold authority in my religious and academic worlds were produced by scholars who do not look like me, do not share my culture, and are part of a culture that has been openly hostile to the scholastic capacity, literary achievements, and even moral agency of my people.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The world that Leviticus envisions, like the Scriptures themselves, is heteronormative. The authors and editors of the biblical corpus produce these texts to support their nation-building and expansion agenda. They require bodies for labor, for (re)settlement and (re)building, for food production, for defense, and for nurturing the hopes of their own imperial dreams. Leviticus, and the broader canon, therefore valorize and prioritize heterosexual unions and reproduction.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne

“The biblical text is fundamentally androcentric and regularly (though not exclusively) patriarchal. Yet there are texts in which God or the narrator addresses women directly, texts in which women and their children and other vulnerable people are the primary concern of God and the text (not to mention texts in which feminine language and imagery is used for God). Women in the Scriptures function in various capacities: monarch, prophet, judge, shepherd, entrepreneur, musician, slave, and slaveholder.

The complexity of the biblical texts is part of what draws me to them and commends them to me. I wrestle with the texts, more bruised than blessed while God-wrestling the Torah as a surrogate for the One who revealed her and the ones who claim(ed) clear and certain apprehension of that revelation in the name of the One.”
― Wilda C. Gafney, Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne