Divine Feminine

Virginia Ramey Mollenkott is mistaken in her general conclusion to The Divine Feminine, recently reprinted by Wipf & Stock. She writes, “it is perfectly natural for the Bible to contain a vast predominance of masculine God-language, springing as it does out of a deeply patriarchal culture. . . . Nothing would seem more natural to them than to honor God by exclusively masculine references. And nothing would seem more unnatural to them than to introduce the female and the feminine into their descriptions of the divine” (110).

This is theologically objectionable, insofar as it ignores some texts of Scripture and, in general, takes Scripture not as authoritative but as an expression of the surrounding culture. But forget for a moment that I’m a fundamentalist. Mollenkott’s argument makes no sense on historical grounds. After all, many of the surrounding “patriarchal” societies of the ancient world worshiped goddesses as well as gods, and thus were quite at home with introducing “the female and the feminine into their descriptions of the divine.” If anything, what stands out in the Bible is the absence of feminine deities. If a masculine God is a sign of patriarchalism, the Bible is hyper-patriarchal. Which is odd, since biblical religion has been the single most potent force for the liberation of women in the history of humanity. And that means we may be mistaken in making straight-line connections between masculinity in religion and patriarchalism in society.

That Mollenkott ends with a contradiction is unfortunate, because her little book is a fine, often stunning, exploration of the feminine imagery that is, as she shows, quite common in Scripture. She explores the obvious passages, like Psalm 123, Hosea 13:8 (Yahweh pounces like a “bear robbed of her cubs”!), Isaiah 42:14 (perhaps Yahweh is the laboring woman), Jesus’s reference to Himself as a hen wishing to bring the chicks under his wings. There is occasionally an odd bit of sexism in her interpretations. Hosea 11:3–4 must be referring to Yahweh as mother when it speaks of Him taking Israel in His arms and leading them with love, since it describes Yahweh showing “patient, yearning tenderness of material love” (27). Maybe, though, Yahweh is setting an example for men to hold their sons by the hand.

But she also notices feminine overtones in unexpected places. Psalm 22:9–10’s “you drew me out of the womb” puts Yahweh in the position of midwife (33; no male gynecologists in ancient Israel). Terms describing the glory are feminine, suggesting that the “Shekinah” has feminine overtones (the Shekinah corresponds to the woman who is the glory of the man). Like a medieval mystic, she suggests that the Song of Songs is about God’s love for the Other who is one with Himself (she, of course, uses the barbaric “Godself”). Mollenkott connects Jesus’s statement about a woman entering her “hour” of travail with the “house” that Jesus Himself enters on the cross (John 16:21; 17:1). On the cross, Jesus suffers the birth-pangs of the new creation.

Two passages were especially striking. She raises the question of whether Paul’s “in Him we live, move, and have our being” suggests a “cosmic womb.” Sounds like a stretch, but she points out that it is only in the womb that “we exist within another person” (16). She points to the fact that the Hebrew word for compassion is racham, linked to the word for “womb,” and suggests that Paul is claiming that “all human beings exist not only within the womb, but within the yearning womb-love, of God the Mother” (16). The “mother” is misleading here; Paul, after all, attributes this cosmic wombliness, if wombliness it is, to “Him” in whom we live. If there’s a cosmic womb, it’s the compassion of God our Father. (The paradoxically mixed imagery is more strictly biblical than Mollenkott’s feminist revision.)

A second passage: It’s common to point out that calling a woman a “helper” (ezer) is not demeaning, since Yahweh Himself is called a helper. Mollenkott reverses that logic: “the Bible applies the word ezer to only two specifically named entities: God and Eve.” From that she concludes that “woman is in some unique sense the channel of God’s ezer to the world; and conversely, God also is the ezer of humankind” (75). Woman is the channel of help specifically in her specifically female capacity to give birth: She helps by bringing Yahweh’s redeemer into the world. And the second part of Mollenkott’s comment is equally arresting: The Husband of Israel assumes the position of helper in order to deliver His people—a humiliation that comes to a climax but doesn’t begin with the incarnation.