Feminist Liberation Theology

Most of the rhetoric in the women’s movement rejects the Abrahamic Religions. Phyllis Trible notes in her essay Eve and Adam: Genesis 2-3 Reread that feminist are hostile towards the Bible because they believe the Bible to be hostile towards them. But as Trible explains in her essay, this is not the case. In fact, she argues that the Bible can be reread in a new scope to be seen as a tool of equality. Phyllis Trible earned her B. A. at Meredith College and then went on to get her Ph.D with an emphasis in Old Testament at Union Seminary/Columbia University in 1963. She worked at several universities before returning to Union as the fourth women ever to attain professorship there. In 1980 she became the first woman to become Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature. Trible has also had the honor of serving as president of the Society of Biblical Literature. She is a world leader in feminist interpretations of Biblical texts. She is well known for two feminist theology books: Texts of Terror and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, though she has published numerous highly regarded books, papers, and articles. She is a respected professor and a highly esteemed lecturer. Genesis 2-3 is ubiquitously used as divine evidence for women’s subordination and a proof by certain feminist organizations of the evils of religion. Phyllis Trible argues that it is none of these. She states that when feminist read Genesis as an example of man’s domination over woman they are reading it through the patriarchal lens they claim to reject. In her essay she gives many examples of content, context, and structure that assert men and women as being portrayed as equal. For example, the word used to refer to the human in Genesis 2 is ‘adham, which is a gender-neutral term. When God forbids the eating of the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, we refers to ‘adham but means for it to apply to both of them. So at the beginning of Genesis 2 gender and sexuality does