To celebrate Juneteenth a few years ago, I bought a book I’d had my eye on for a while: “Womanist Midrash, Volume 1: A Reintroduction to the Women of the Torah and the Throne,” by Dr. Wilda Gafney. It came highly recommended from a couple of scholars whose work I enjoy, and I was at a point in my life when I was looking at the Bible and realizing, “This is not working.”

It came at some point after seeing paintings and videos of scenes from the Bible and, embarrassingly late in life, realizing all of these people from ancient Southwest Asia should not be this white. And that all of the interpretations and teachings I got from the Bible came from white, mostly male, leaders. And that what I was being told was correct was increasingly at odds with what I was reading, what I was taking from the text and what I was finding through the practice of midrash.

The book is a game-changer. Dr. Gafney is a Black woman and a scholar of the Hebrew Bible who tears down and rebuilds the stories I’ve known my whole life from angles I’d never been taught and never considered. She gives life and voices to women—Black life and Black voices. The Bible explodes open through her visionary writing, which is meant, she says on page 2, for all of us—we are all welcome at her table:

“This text is written for those who read the Bible as a religious text, who look to it for teaching and preaching, inspiration and illumination; to offer religious readers an exegetical and hermeneutical resources that delves deeply into the canon(s) and draws on marginal and marginalized women as scriptural exemplars.”

First, some definitions

Womanism: Put simply, this is black feminism. Black American author Alice Walker introduced the term in “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens.” But womanism is more than black feminism. It embraces liberation theology, the idea that the gospel of Jesus Christ must have as its center the liberation of all people. It rejects the racism and centering of white women that often happens in American feminism and does not hold space for an either/or approach. Gafney calls it a “richer, deeper, liberative paradigm; a social, cultural, and political space and theological matrix with the experiences and multiple identities of black women at the center” (2, footnote).

Midrash: This is a spiritual practice that started millennia ago in Judaism; it aims to understand and interpret the Tanakh more fully by essentially filling in the blanks, of which there are many. In recent decades, feminist scholars in Christianity and Judaism have embraced midrash as a way to give stories and voices back to the women of the Hebrew Bible and Christian (New) Testament. I love this practice; I both read and write my own midrash, and through it I have experienced elation, grief, anger, love and understanding. I’ve read the same stories from different angles and considered what could have actually happened, what, if I strip away the words, interpretations, expectations and patriarchy, what our foremothers might be saying.

Why womanism matters

Broadly, the more voices and perspectives and interpretations we have from the Bible, the better. This is a collection of individual books or letters, written over several centuries, the earliest works passed down orally for generations before being written down. For most of history, they have been written, translated, interpreted, edited, revised by men with a specific purpose: to tell the story of the One True God who has always was and always will be, unchanging, all-powerful, male.

The reality of the Bible is way more complicated than that. In fact, the reality of the Bible is a bit of an oxymoron. There is no “correct” translation or “right” interpretation. We don’t know what was originally written down. We don’t know how far from the events in question the first stories were committed to paper. We don’t know how many times they were rewritten, revised, changed, both intentionally and not. But we know it was a lot, and we’ve all played the game of Telephone and seen what can happen to a simple message the further it gets from its source. We can’t rely on the One True Narrative because that does not and has never existed.

Narrowly, the Bible says what we each bring to it. And when for much of the last two millennia, the people allowed to read and interpret and preach from the Bible were bringing a lot of the same—they were white or of European descent, they were men, they were interested in keeping and maintaining power. They often wielded the words of the Bible to their own advantage. Did you know the words of Paul were used by preachers in the American South to justify slavery? And we all know how the words of Paul have been wielded against women. (Are those really the words of Paul? And is he actually saying that? Again, it’s complicated. But the church—both the Mormon church and the broad Christian church—has accepted them as the words of Paul and the leaders use them to their advantage. So.)

We need people with different experiences reading and interpreting the Bible—people who see and uplift the marginalized, who notice those whose stories go by without getting a name, who take different lessons from the stories we’ve all been taught since childhood has only one lesson. We need scholars who see characters in the Bible with different default skin colors. I am trying to do this, but after so long seeing white as the default, it is a struggle. It is important that I do it anyway.

And finally, it matters because there is not representation of women in color in Mormonism. There is not enough representation on The Exponent II. Nicole Sbitani wrote an excellent piece, “Making Mormon feminist spaces more inclusive,” that lays out ways that spaces like this are, both intentionally and unintentionally, unfriendly to women of color. We need to make sure—I need to make sure—that we, like the white male preachers of the last 2,000 years, are not upholding our experiences and interpretations and power as correct and God-given at the expense of others.

Gafney writes: “Womanists and feminists ask different questions of a text than do other readers and different questions from each other. And we also ask some of the same questions, and we arrive at similar and dissonant conclusions. Privileging the crossroads between our Afro-diasporic identity (embodiment and experience) and our gender (performance and identity), we ask questions about power, authority, voice, agency, hierarchy, inclusion, and exclusion. The readings enrich all readers from any perspective. The questions we ask enrich our own understanding and the understandings of those with whom we are in conversation” (7).

Hagar, an African mother who named God

Dr. Gafney gives the women of Genesis and the women of David’s kingdom a voice; you should read them all. Close your eyes when you finish her words and imagine these women in different settings, looking different than you may have imagined them or seen them in paintings before, but knowing they still belong in these stories—that they have grown and become more majestic as they encompass all of God’s children.

But there is one who bears special mention: Hagar. She is African. She is a slave. Her bodily autonomy is taken from her. She is abused. She is abandoned in the desert and retreats from her dying son, unwilling to watch his last breaths. She cries out in injustice. She also is the only person in the Bible given the honor of naming God (Gen. 16:13).

“The Hebrew text beginning with Genesis 16 makes it clear that Hagar has no say over her body being given to Abram or her child being given to Sarai. Hagar is on the underside of all of the power curves in operation at that time, as noted by Renita Weems, Delores Williams, and many, many others: she is female, foreign, enslaved. She has one source of power: she is fertile; but she lacks autonomy over her own fertility. Sarai is infertile, and the text suggests that, as a result, Hagar held Sarai ‘in low esteem.’ Hagar’s disposition towards Sarai is framed with the word q-l-l, ‘to curse’ or to ‘hold worthless,’ that is, ‘light,’ little,’ or ‘nothing.’ It may not be that Hagar views Sarai was nothing because Sarai is infertile and Hagar is fertile. Rather, it may be that Hagar regards Sarai as nothing and/or curses her because Sarai uses Hagar’s body for her own reproductive purposes. Why should a sex-slave, forced in gestating someone else’s child, think highly of her or bless her enslaver? Perhaps the text singles out Hagar’s feelings toward Sarai because Sarai is primarily responsible for Hagar’s sexual subjugation. Abram’s complicity is secondary. Sarai is free; she has some societal privilege as Abram’s woman and Hagar’s mistress. But she is still an infertile woman in a male-dominated world, both of which imperil her status; she seeks to attain/restore her status on and in Hagar’s body” (41).

Dr. Gafney notes that the verb describing the violence Sarai inflicts on Hagar in Gen. 16:6 is the same verb used in Exodus 1:1 to describe the violence Egypt inflicts on Israel. We’ve all seen “The Ten Commandments.” We have images in our minds about the severity, the cruelty, the inhumanity of that violence. Yet when it is inflicted on one marginalized African woman and her child, it is whitewashed.

This is not the story I grew up knowing, put as it was through the white Christian/Mormon telling of Sarai the faithful, patient, put-upon wife who was doing the best she could. And it’s possible that is largely true—she was faithful, she was struggling, she’d been promised something that did not appear to be coming. But that does not take away the other side of the story—Hagar’s story, who experienced this woman vastly differently. And who deserves to have a voice as much as Sarai did. Who deserves to be remembered as a mother of a great nation, a victim of abuse who survived and found her way home, a woman who stood face to face with God and spoke as an equal.

Find “Womanist Midrash” by Dr. Wilda Gafney on Bookshop.org. (I also discovered looking this up that Volume 2 has been published!) Both books are published by Westminster John Knox Press.