Putting Women Back In The Story with Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney

We’re honored to have religious scholar, preacher, teacher, and activist, Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney on the pod this week. Rev. Dr. Gafney is a biblical scholar whose work focuses on translation of the scriptures for congregations and lay readers, womanist and feminist biblical interpretation and women who prophesied in ancient Israel and the ancient Afro-Asiatic world and their reception in rabbinic literature. She is the author and translator and wrote “Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to Women of the Torah and of the Throne” and its sequel, “Womanist Midrash: A Reintroduction to Women of Joshua Judges, Samuel and Kings.” She co-edited “The Peoples’ Bible” and “The Peoples’ Companion to the Bible.” Dr. Gafney is an Episcopal priest canonically resident in the Diocese of Pennsylvania and licensed in the Diocese of Texas and a former Army chaplain and congregational pastor in the AME Zion Church. Her lectures and sermons are widely sought after in academic and Jewish and Christian congregational spaces in the US and in the UK. In this conversation, Dr. Gaffney discusses the Womanist Midrash project, exploring the intersection of womanism and biblical interpretation. She emphasizes the importance of context in understanding scripture, the role of translation, and the significance of centering marginalized voices in religious narratives. Dr. Gaffney also introduces the Women’s Lectionary project, which aims to highlight women’s stories in the biblical text, and addresses the challenges of biblical illiteracy in contemporary faith communities.

 

Takeaways

• Midrash fills the spaces between the letters and gaps in the story.
• Womanism is invested in the wellbeing of the entire community.
• Biblical interpretation is not just about facts but about the stories that shape identity.
• Translation is inherently interpretative and should be approached with awareness.
• The Queen of Sheba’s story reveals the richness of shared religious traditions.
• Understanding context is crucial for interpreting biblical texts.
• The Women’s Lectionary project aims to center women’s voices in scripture.
• Marginalized voices enrich the understanding of biblical narratives.
• Biblical illiteracy can be addressed through guided reading programs.
• Engaging with scripture can be both devotional and academic.

 

Chapters

(00:00) Introduction to Womanist Midrash

(03:03) The Intersection of Womanism and Midrash

(06:04) The Role of Translation in Biblical Interpretation

(09:06) Exploring Biblical Stories: The Queen of Sheba

(11:54) Understanding Context in Biblical Narratives

(14:56) The Women’s Lectionary Project

(17:56) The Impact of Centering Marginalized Voices

(20:59) Navigating Biblical Illiteracy

(23:56) Conclusion and Resources

 

Resources:

• Learn more about Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney at https://www.wilgafney.com/
• Womanist Midrash Volume 2 by Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney
• Join our online community at  Sanctuary Collective Community

 

If you want to support the Patreon and help keep the podcast up and running, you can learn more and pledge your support at patreon.com/queertheology

This transcript was generated by AI and may contain errors or omissions.

(9s):
Welcome to the Queer Theology Podcast. I’m Brian G Murphy. And I’m father Shannon, T l Kearns. We’re the co-founders of Queer Theology dot com and your hosts from Genesis, revelation. The Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people, and we want to show you how Tune in each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness, and how they can enrich one another. We’re glad you’re here. Okay. Full fanboy disclosure alert. Shannon And I have been wanting to get today’s guest on the podcast for many, many years, and today is finally the day. I’m so excited to share this conversation with you with Dr. Will Gaffney. We had a really powerful conversation about sacred stories and sacred communities and the intersections between those two.

(56s):
How to see ourselves in those stories and in the traditions, and to really look at the importance of going, looking for people that have always been there, but that perhaps the dominant powers straight, cis, white, male, European, have tried to silence or play down, or I ignore. They’re so, so, so, so, so many insights from this conversation. I think you’ll hear me say summary here, that we could keep on going for a, you know, a few more hours. There’s just so much to dig into. So after the episode, pop on over to our Instagram and leave a comment on this post for what was your most meaningful insight from today’s conversation, because I know there are just so many.

(1m 36s):
It is a jam packed conversation. Today we’re joined by the Reverend Dr. Will Gaffney, who is a biblical scholar whose work focuses on translation of the scriptures for congregations and lay readers, womanist and feminist biblical interpretation, and women who prophesied in ancient Israel and the ancient Afro Asiatic world and their reception in rabbinic literature. She’s the right Reverend Sam b Halsey, professor of Hebrew Bible at the Bright Divinity School in Fort Worth, Texas. She’s the author of a Woman’s Lectionary for the whole church years A, B, and C, and a novel year W, which is a standalone volume and translator of its biblical selections.

(2m 17s):
She’s also the author of a Womanist Midrash, A Reintroduction to Women of the Torah and of the Throne, and its sequel Womanist Midrash, A Reintroduction to Women of Joshua Judges, Samuel and Kings. She co-edited the People’s Bible and the People’s Companion to the Bible. Dr. Gafney is an Episcopal priest, canonically resident in the Diocese of Pennsylvania and licensed in the Diocese of Texas, and a former Army chaplain and congregational pastor in the AME Zion Church, a former member of the Dorsha Dera Reconstructionist Minion of Germantown Jewish Center in Philadelphia. She has co-taught courses with and for constructionist Rabbi Seminary pa.

(2m 60s):
Her lectures and sermons are widely sought after in academic and Jewish and Christian congregational spaces in the US and in the UK. She’s a public facing religious scholar, preacher, teacher activist, and an amateur watercolorist. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Dr. Gaffney, Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast. We’re so excited to talk about your work and introduce hopefully more people to it. So thanks for being here. My pleasure. I’d love to start by asking if you can just tell us a little bit about the Womanist Midrash Project. You know, how did that project come about? And maybe for folks in our audience who might not know what Mid Rush is, if you can give a brief description or definition of that.

(3m 41s):
Alright. Mid is a Jewish classical practice of biblical interpretation that continues into the present and it has delineated rules for rabbinic literature, and in the contemporary context, it has become much more wide open. One way to think about biblical interpretation in this context is to imagine a page of Torah if you’ve seen one or even a page of your own scriptures, and think about the letters and the spaces between them.

(4m 24s):
Midrash fills the spaces between the letters and gaps in the story, making stories more complete, rich and full. I did study rabbinic literature in my PhD program with Jewish faculty members, And I spent a decade as a member of a synagogue while I was teaching in Philadelphia, and I’m now a member of one here. And I say that to make it clear that this is not an opportunistic, but that I am not appropriating a Jewish practice, but rather in some contemporary modes of thought in Jewish scholarship and Jewish biblical interpretation, sermon writing, that anytime anyone expounds on the Hebrew scripture, they are doing midrash.

(5m 24s):
So that, that’s a brief overview of the origins and contemporary use of midrash. Womanism is black feminism, a feminism that is richer, deeper, thicker, and more complex, while classic white women’s feminism really centered on breaking through power structures, getting a place at the table, black women’s feminism womanism is much more comprehensive. It is invested in the wellbeing of the entire community and it centers black women’s thoughts and experiences because if a policy is not good for black women than it is not good for anyone, womanism will look at the complex array of identities, often focusing on two or three in a particular project while attentive to the intersectional harm that comes from the way the dominant culture wields its force against those identities.

(6m 41s):
That, by the way, is the proper definition of intersectional, the harms that accrue as a result of the different identities not having multiple identities. Yeah, yeah. So then, then you embarked on this bringing these two ideas and fears of, of knowledge together in the Womanist Midrash project. And I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about, you know, how that came to be and and what your hope is for that project. Really, they came together in me as a biblical interpreter because of my roots in the black church.

(7m 24s):
I was very familiar with the preaching practice known as the sanctified imagination. And when I began to study biblical interpretation as a scholar, I intuited that the sanctified imagination was an indigenous form of mid rash, if you will, that it was the way black folk interpreted scripture, particularly black preachers who were brought up in the black church, and they had a lot of similarities in their storytelling aspect. So it was natural for me to fuse my academic work with my religious life.

(8m 8s):
That’s a very common practice among black folk in the religious academy. We are more often than not, practitioners of a faith tradition, and even those who are now outside of a faith tradition tend to remain on good terms with it, and it informs their own work. So the way that I attend to biblical translation, which became something that I found that I loved and would become a hallmark of my own scholarship, focused on getting everybody on the page in the story with my first book, women Prophets, daughters of Miriam Women Prophets in Ancient Israel.

(8m 56s):
Because when we say the word prophets or the corresponding Hebrew word ne, it’s a collective. And so many of the biblical expressions have been translated in virtually 1960s English as mankind. Some old Bibles, you’ll see the Sons of Israel. Well, they didn’t leave the daughters behind. So I began translating in a way that made it clear. So for those expressions that were called masculine, plural, I, I renamed them as common plural because they were grammatically, the rules of grammar are you have to have at least two people, and only one of them has to be male.

(9m 42s):
But just as an English grammar, I could say to a bunch of women, you guys, let’s go biblical Hebrew does that, and Naomi uses masculine form for Ruth and Opa when there are no males among them. So I would translate something like the Children of Israel, which you would see in a lot of Bibles or the Israelites, but I found those to be unsatisfying, And I started writing The Women, children and men of Israel. So then I would need to explain in my writing why my translations of the scriptures look different from other people’s.

(10m 22s):
And that combination of translation and explanation, deep linguistic based exegesis, and then telling a story about the character, those became the key components of Womanist Midrash. Hmm. Yeah, this is a little bit of like a, it may be in the weeds, I’m Jewish, and it, it just like what you’re doing like reminds me of how I think like in Christianity there’s sort of like this focus on sort of like getting the translation like exactly right. And is arguing over translations. And if you read any sidor, there’s like the Hebrew and the English, and they’re like basically the same thing, but like sometimes they’re not exactly the same thing.

(11m 5s):
Sometimes they’re like wildly different. Like I think that, and, But we all, there’s for millennia we’ve called these translations because there’s a recognition that all translation inherently is interpretation. And so I just like love that what you’re doing, like you were saying, like adds more nuance and color and depth to the, to the text. But part of the baked in antisemitism of the Western Enlightment Biblical Guild is that they were scholars and scientists and not moved by religion, and that they could determine what the precise translation was, unlike the people before them who laid claim to the text.

(11m 49s):
And so there’s a lot of this, we know what we’re doing with your text and we’re right baked in. And my early academic career was sort of under the umbrella that translation should be without interpretation, which is yeah. You know, impossible and nonsensical. So it was brushing up against that. That’s also easier to understand in Judaism because you are very much aware that the text, and indeed half the liturgy depending on what kind of Jewish community you belong to is in another language.

(12m 28s):
It’s been a joke, but it’s also true that there are Christians who have not known that the scriptures they read have been translated from other languages. Yeah. You know, people who not only just say that, you know, the King James is, is perfect and itself revealed from heaven, but you know, think that Jesus spoke English and yeah, for that matter was a white person and all this, this kind of thing. So one of the lectures I give now regularly is called the Invisibility of Translation, where I introduce people to translation and how it affects the text that they read.

(13m 9s):
And it’s always an eye-opening experience and shock and some other things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah, I would, I would love to listen to that lecture. I feel like that would be so good for so many people. Well, it, there’s probably, there’s probably a version of it on will gaffney.com. Okay. I tend to post my things after the event. Great, great. I’m curious, as you were doing this, this Midrash project, what maybe some of your favorite stories were to dive into or the ones that maybe revealed something new that you hadn’t noticed before?

(13m 52s):
Oh my goodness, so much. In so many, especially now that there are two volumes. So I’ll, I’ll say something about the second volume. I decided to do The Queen of Sheba, and she can only be done properly with, she appears a little bit in the Quran, but it’s the hadit where her, the big part of her story is. But even bigger than that, in the Ethiopian sacred tradition, there’s basically an entire sacred work that tells the story of her encounter with Solomon and their child and all of these things.

(14m 39s):
So I put all of that together, that Keppra Nagas from Ethiopia, the Haddi from Islam, the Hebrew Bible, and a little bit of New Testament, she’s named a couple of times in the gospels. And so that was a different project because I was working with a whole lot of source material. And some of it is quite humorous. The, there is a tradition in the Haddi that the world’s first depilatory hair removing cream was invented for her because Solomon was dismayed by the amount of hair on her legs, which became visible when someone did something sneaky and had her walk over a surface that was smooth, reflective water, and they saw up her dress a little bit.

(15m 35s):
So, you know, those kind of things are humorous, but it calls us to recognize that this is a shared religious tradition, and our scriptural version of the story is only one ancient version. And people at the point when all of this literature was extant at the same time, very likely entertained the multiple sources together. The way we entertain multiple gospels that can’t even get their story straight about the resurrection, which is kind of the thing, right? Yeah. How many angels, Mary, Peter, John, who was running, who was there, who she was there clinging onto him by himself, at what point did she leave?

(16m 22s):
Did Peter run then where did the other angel go? I mean, it’s like a car wreck where you’re trying to get the same story out of the witnesses, but people will tell you with sincerity in their eyes that there are no contradictions in scripture. Yeah. We’re always like, it starts with Genesis one and two. Like they, they have different orders of creation. Like, come on, come on. I remember studying theology in undergraduate and learning about, oh, like the Jesus seminar where they were sort of like trying to just like get at like what was the real Jesus, right. And what was later on.

(17m 3s):
And I think that feels connected to this sort of like, project of white academia. And I, And I, but I, I know that for many people in our audience, they’re like, well, what actually happened in the Bible? Or which version of the story is correct? And can you just like talk a little bit about like what happened when you held all these different versions of these stories together? Not with the goal of like, well, which, which version was right, but sort of like what happens in the synergy amongst all the different tellings. And, and you, you also kind of hinted that this happens with amongst the gospels also. Like how do you, like, how, what do you make of these different versions of the stories and what sort of bubbles up from there?

(17m 44s):
Well, there’s a saying that I use in class, A text without a context is a pretext. Ooh. In order to understand the text, you have to understand the context. Just as a person who hadn’t been exposed to the speech or the character would not know what we meant by four score and 20 years ago, right? You’re in part of the American context, either by your education or by living and being raised in it, so you know what to do with those words. But if you are not a part of ancient Afro culture, you’re not a part of ancient Israelite culture and religion, which is not Judaism.

(18m 31s):
Judaism derives from it. But there are different religions, different cultural practices to some degree, different languages. The differences between modern Hebrew and biblical Hebrew, our legion, a whole present tense was invented for modern Hebrew. Biblical Hebrew doesn’t have one. So in knowing that context, one of the things that you’ll know, and this does apply to the gospels, this applies to antiquity. They were not a fact-based era of, of being, people told the things that were important to them in a narrative to compel and convince you.

(19m 22s):
They were not interested in what would be a hallmark of the post-enlightenment, just the facts. So you see differences across gospels, between gospels and epistles. Paul just mixed stuff up. My favorite one was what? That Sarah bowed and called Abraham Lord. Well, that’s not in there. He took a story of a verse in Deuteronomy about the commandments. And because this commandment was referred to as this word, he goes, oh, that’s Jesus.

(20m 9s):
And when it’s clearly clear, it’s very clear that it’s at the end of Moses giving not just the commandments, but retelling all of Israel’s story in a way that doesn’t line up with the previous books of the Torah, by the way. Yep. And Moses is saying, keep all of this, this whole thing, this word, this word of God, that whole thing is not Jesus. There’s a relationship between them, but not the same. So the way that people who are earnestly and faithfully and sincerely telling the most amazing story and experience they’ve ever heard, and the ancestral stories that are important to pass down to the children is not even intended to be read as factual as we say today.

(21m 5s):
Certainly not literally. So people make straw houses out of the, the bricks of scripture by trying to read them in ways that they were not intended to be read missing. Thank you. Stephen Colbert, the truthiness, I use that word with my students. What is the truthiness of the Exodus story? If there is no archeological evidence and there isn’t that 2 million people stomp through the desert going that way. The truthiness is that this is a foundational narrative that shapes Israelite identity and subsequently provides a basis for faith, for African slaves in the us and subsequently becomes a paradigm for coming out of the closet for gay folk.

(22m 1s):
And subsequently becomes, it holds all these truths in it. The archeological piece is irrelevant. Ooh. Yeah. Amen to that. I think there’s also some arrogance to like, to think that we now get outta objective truth, and we don’t do that anymore. Like you turn on Fox News versus CNN versus NBC, right? Like we’re, even today news is propaganda history books are written by the victor. Like it’s just like we’re, we’re, we’re still doing that. We just maybe kind of like dress it up in the guise of objectivity, right?

(22m 43s):
Sure. But this notion of literal scripture and truth comes down from what we call plantation religion, that it’s important to have an irrefutable source and an irrefutable hierarchy. And so those kind of readings were used Not just to, to invade, invent the American’s slovo, but also to set up these colonizing empires that presaged it. So these were strategic readings that would confer Godlike power on monarchs.

(23m 30s):
Nevermind they weren’t in the Israelite Judean monarchy family history. But now all of a sudden, all the crown heads of Europe are divinely anointed heads of the church, et cetera, et cetera. Well, except back to the point where you had popes, but you get this divine authority that becomes unquestionable and particularly for the, the Western church and the Western powers gets fused with scripture. There’s a thing in, in British history, well, you know, the national song is O Jerusalem.

(24m 13s):
There aren’t, they aren’t anywhere near Jerusalem, right? Yeah. And there’s a thing that the European wave of painting biblical characters as Caucasian wasn’t just, every culture gets to see God and the holy people in their image. But there is a period that the faces of the monarchs were used for the faces of the saints and the biblical characters to make a, a claim on divinity themselves. And then that became a very powerful witness to people who were not literate. That’s what stained glass did.

(24m 54s):
It told us the story of the scriptures that people could see when they couldn’t read themselves. And so there’s this fusing of monarchial identity and biblical authority. This is all just making me think like we talk a lot as part of our project of that storytelling is the way to change people’s hearts and minds that, you know, people can debate facts, but they can’t debate your story. And it also brings in this thing of like, it’s so important that we pay attention to the stories that we’re telling about ourselves as both as individuals and as a people.

(25m 35s):
Because those stories really impact our ethics and how we live our lives. And you know, we’re seeing that kind of writ large in the United States right now. So, so thank you for, for bringing out this, this piece of stories. I think it’s so, so important. Can, can you tell us, you also have this, this women’s lectionary project, which is both the, the cycle of lectionary texts, but then also a, a standalone year. And we started this podcast to do a queer reading of the Lectionary every Sunday. And we did that for a couple times through, and then decided we were gonna take a break from the lectionary for a while.

(26m 15s):
Yeah. But I’m wondering if you could talk a little bit about why that project and maybe what you felt was missing in kind of the quote unquote traditional lectionary that, that you wanted to create something different for folks Women. That’s the answer. Yeah. Well, you, you can restart with the lectionary because after we finish this year, your A will be up and you can start with a women’s lectionary. Yeah, yeah. I was preparing to preach, I don’t know what the RCL texts were, but they were wholly inadequate.

(27m 5s):
And I went on Facebook and Twitter and whined about them And I tweeted something like, what would it look like if someone built electionary around women’s stories? I have the exact wording somewhere. I have the tweet archived as an image. ’cause God knows what’s gonna happen with that site. Yeah. And everybody got in my mentions and responses, you do it, Dr. Gaffney, you do it. I was writing a grant for an extended sabbatical, and it was not going well because I found myself writing what I think they might want to hear to just give me the money so I can get this sabbatical, which is, you know, not a passion project that’s a failing and flailing desperation project.

(28m 3s):
So I just started scribbling it out and then I couldn’t stop writing. And that, and the timing was perfect, that that happened in 17. They did their considerations and made the awards in 18, And I had 2019 the entire 12 months to do the consultations, travel, get away to write, do all of that before I was locked in my house for three years. Yeah, yeah. The blessing is I didn’t lose that sabbatical year to covid. I had it. So that was 2019.

(28m 43s):
And in 2021 I published both the standalone and year a ’cause that’s all I was doing, you know, teaching class online of course. And then this is, so it was, and then B in the summer of 23 and see in the summer of 24. And what the lectionary does is it raises the whole thing to the ground as much as possible. I am an Episcopal priest And I wanted it to be particularly useful for those with the similar structure. So I didn’t wanna do a New Testament, an Old Testament, because that would limit it to who could use it.

(29m 28s):
So I had to have a first reading from the Hebrew Bible, a psalm or Canticle and epistle. Oh, I’m talking with my fingers And I can’t see them. This was, this was my trial during Covid because I talk with my hands And I learned to talk with my hands all the way up here. Yeah, yeah. All the way up here. Okay, three, Three, top up my face. So we’re up to the epistle and of course the gospel. And then, because I’m a Hebrew biblical scholar who specializes in translation, translation notes, so the preacher could, or the person reading devotional could immediately see why did that verse look like that? Oh wait, she says it right here.

(30m 9s):
Okay. You know, and then there are preaching prompts from people who’ve read a whole cycle and said, I never thought about these texts together. I’m still reeling over that translation. I don’t even know where to begin. I got you. The lectionary was characterized by being Hebrew Bible driven as much as possible. The asterisk with that are that we’re reading a for a Christian calendar sequence. And I really try to negotiate and hold a tension of how Hebrew Bible is used by the Christian Church.

(30m 52s):
And I wanted to demonstrate that it’s not a magic eight ball predicting Jesus. Right. So yeah, for example, I started with advent and instead of saying, what’s a Hebrew Bible text that works for advent, I thought about the story that we tell an advent and the annunciation is a huge part of it. Don’t get me started on why we tell the annunciation in December and not in March takes nine months to make a baby. But the Marian Annunciation in the New Testament is not a new thing.

(31m 33s):
This is something God did regularly in the Hebrew Bible. And so that notion that let me teach people Bible, let me see if, if I can take a chunk out of biblical illiteracy in the church, especially with the way they use the Hebrew Bible that can be super secessionist and co-opting and all of these things. So the four weeks of Advent had three Hebrew Bible annunciations, and then Mary’s annunciation building that pattern. So I wanted to translate in a way that people could hear everyone on the page. So the crowd surrounded Jesus, the crowd of women, children, and men.

(32m 17s):
And so then you find out that women are in all of these places. ’cause what’s a crowd? Everybody outdoors. So it has to have all kinds of people. Those translations, Joshua Annihilate, annihilated the Canaanites, women, children, and men reads very differently when you’re just saying, you know, Canaanites parasites hit tides, hitite, you know, all the ites. Then you start to come to account of the layers of genocidal violence in the text. So I picked hard pairings sometimes on Good Friday we read the Death of J’s daughter at the hands of her father, and we read the crucifixion story and we think about what it means to claim the death of a child as a religious necessity.

(33m 22s):
How horribly that can go wrong, how horribly that’s gone wrong in Christianity. So that’s the, the broad structure one, there are two other unique pieces with it. And that is I decided to use the female pronoun in the Psalms for people who have never heard God presented as themselves or as other than themselves. And because of the way that the title Lord functions as a slave holding title, I look to Jewish tradition, which does not say the divine name, it’s not knowable, it’s not pronounceable, but instead said Lord, not as God’s name, but as the thing you say, because you can’t say God’s name that got lost somewhere.

(34m 16s):
And that there are other things you can say like Hashem and Ham. Mako. And I developed a whole list of divine titles, some drawn from my experience from the black church, like the arc of safety, others drawn from the work of a Rabbi Rosenberg, things like wellspring of life. I made them explicitly feminine places, womb of creation. So all of those components characterize the lectionary, the women’s lectionary, a women’s lectionary for the whole church.

(34m 58s):
Yeah. So powerful. We, we had coherent Ro Shapiro on a few months ago and, and they also have a list of names for God. And I took a, an online course with them, and when I was reading through theirs, I was like, oh, just like thinking about all of the different ways to think about God, like womb of creation. Oh my God, that like really hit me. It’s just like so much richer than like, Lord God, you know, even like be universe. Right. Which sometimes in progressive spaces would be like creator. Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So it, it’ll be interesting to see if where we’ve come up with some of the same names.

(35m 38s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about what changes for a congregation, for a people when voices that voices are centered that maybe they’re not used to having centered, you know, we talk a a lot about how queer and trans theology and readings of scripture aren’t just good for queer and trans folks. They’re good for cis and straight folks as well. I’m wondering if you can just reflect on that a little bit. Well, that was one of the basic underlying principles of the lectionary, that there are something like 111 named women in the Hebrew Bible and only 52 weeks a year.

(36m 29s):
So there was no reason for the RCL to be as male focused as it was. And so the of the texts I was putting together in these different ways were all texts with women, or that addressed women, or as close as I could get them. So they were, these congregations were then hearing the gospel through stories of women, many of whom they never knew existed. They’re hearing the First Testament told through other people. And under the principle that we as women and other folk who were not identified at the time were supposed to have gotten the gospel right by only listening to stories of men.

(37m 14s):
Well then surely it worked the other way around. And I did that with gender in the lectionary. But it’s also the case that as my theology professor Kelly Brown Douglas said that where you sit in the arena of life either gives you view to what’s happening on the center stage, or your view is obscured by a pillar. And if you think you already know what this text means and what it can mean and what it should mean, then you’re closing off layers of illumination.

(37m 56s):
I mean, it is part of what we see on television with all of the specials telling this person’s story, whether it’s a crime story or a human interest story, because that person and that producer want the viewing public to learn something, see something, hear something, and people come away from those programs saying, you know, I never knew it was like that. I had no idea this culture was like that. I didn’t know that this religion did that. That same discovery, when you share another person’s story, is true when the story is a biblical interpretation.

(38m 39s):
I was thinking about this question made me think about why I started going to synagogue in the first place. I had an encounter with seminarians of different religious traditions that was curated for seminarians. And, And I was very taken with the chanting of the Torah, the chanting of Psalms, which is what we heard then. And later I heard the chanting of the Torah, but the discussion in the synagogue that I would become a member of the discussion of the texts, the people were drawing from a whole different set of knowledge and authoritative books and authors and doing some of the best text grappling I had ever heard.

(39m 26s):
It was a well-educated congregation. It was seminary professors and seminarians, but still lay people well, good chunk of rabbis, but still people had who had not studied these texts academically. And the conversation was so much richer. But I wouldn’t have had that if I believe that Christians, whether my black church upbringing or the dominant white church I find myself in, now that we know what the Hebrew Bible says. Yeah.

(40m 6s):
I’m, I’m thinking about what you just shared now, and like the past few things, there’s been this like through line, right, of at, at some point you mentioned trying to sort of like weave in a corrective to people’s biblical illiteracy. And the enunciation was like one of many enunciations that happens in, in throughout Hebrew scriptures. And I’m thinking about, we hear both from pastors and also from lay folks, similar themes from pastors. We hear like, well, I can’t like teach the Bible while I’m preaching like that. Ha. Like, it’s just too much work to do all of this biblical education, like from the pulpit, I just have to preach a good message. And maybe they’ll come to Bible study later and then from lay folks will hear like, the, this all sounds like well and good, but like I just wanna like read the Bible and have it feel comforting to me.

(40m 50s):
I don’t wanna like do all of this homework to read the Bible. And I’m, I guess I’m like wondering, like, do you have any words of wisdom for like either like why that’s important to do this sort of work or how to get started if it feels like daunting or overwhelming? Like how, like how do you begin to peel back your own sort of like biblical illiteracy either in your congregation or within yourself? So I would say use the church fathers as a model. You know, they had a fourfold way of reading scripture. They read scripture differently depending on what they were doing with it.

(41m 32s):
So reading scripture devotional is fine. And I would encourage people to do that. And I would say what you, what you find or discover for yourself is meaningful read prayerfully guided by the Holy Spirit, but understand that that meaning is not then what the text means for other people. What it has meant, what it means when you understand the language and the culture so that there are multiple levels. But I would certainly not say, well, you know, you can’t read the Bible unless you know, know all this context that I’m talking about.

(42m 17s):
But you need to understand what kind of reading that is that you’re doing. And the same with most Bible studies in church. We’re doing a church-based Bible study in this, and this is gonna be different from the way that you would study the Bible in university or in seminary and make the point that all of those are valid and like a layer cake. They add a lot when you read them together, which is why the church fathers would sometimes do all the readings at the same time. But we’ve lost that bit of our tradition to the people, to the literalists who say, and even the non literalists, the pastors who want the, the religious churchy meaning to be the only meaning.

(43m 15s):
Yeah. And in terms of you don’t have to have time to teach when you preach. I strongly disagree. Yeah, I think so. Do we? So I I do, I do both. I do both. And I’m not the only one who does both. But pastors are negotiating popularity contests in the pulpit and a whole host of other things you can and the constraints on their time and that that’s real. So pastors don’t always have time to do the kind of study on a text.

(43m 58s):
Yeah. That’s necessary. Yeah. That’s that’s different from I can’t do it in this one sermon. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I, I I’m thinking of folks that like want to want to read the Bible expansively or are queer or are women or folks of color and they open up the Bible and because they haven’t studied in seminary or because they haven’t had a pastor do this sort of work for them, they open it up and they see, they read a passage and they think like, oh, here it says that like, because they just absorbed from the mainstream conservative Christian media, white media, like evangelical media. Like, oh, well here it says God as a man, or I’ve heard this passage say that sex is bad, or I can’t trust my desires.

(44m 42s):
And there’s not sort of like, maybe they don’t even want to believe that, but like, that’s just all they’ve ever heard. And I mean, obviously I’m gonna start telling people to, you know, go through The Women electionary as one starting point. But like, do you have a, like a, like what’s the, like the good word for people who when they open up the Bible, it like feels scary or they see condemnation or, or an angry God or an empire God in it. So those things are there, those things are real. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And it’s very much like going into a foreign country without a map. And that doesn’t always turn out well. You know, people begin these reading projects and they get to, sometimes it’s usually Leviticus Yeah.

(45m 30s):
That they, they fall apart. I had a Jewish men’s study group tell me that they made it all the way through. They go, they said, we go through the Torah, you know, during the year. So we decided, we decided, okay, we, we are doing all of this. I had a men’s bible study group in the synagogue say that because they go through the Torah during the three-year cycle, they wanted to read more. And so they started with Joshua because that was next after the Torah. They were so horrified by the violence and the calls for violence from God that they stopped.

(46m 14s):
And I had a talk with them about reading Joshua as a veteran, telling his stories. I was an army chaplain and we talked about the way that soldiers experience battle in the middle of it after it. And all the ways their stories differ from the official histories and how they are often the hero in their stories as a way of understanding the type of literature. Joshua, is to give them one way of looking at it. But it’s very difficult to just read without a guide.

(46m 55s):
Sometimes people have a very good experience of it, in part because of their prayer life or whatever is within them as an individual. But it is frightening and disappointing to other people and can be easy to be heard in prescriptive rather than descriptive terms. So what I would say is use one of the reading programs that does like a chapter of Hebrew Bible, a Psalm, and a chapter of New Testament a day. So you’re not just slogging through Leviticus For four weeks.

(47m 41s):
You’re encountering this difficult text along with a psalm that makes you, can make you feel better or more familiar territory. And something from the New Testament. I find that works fairly well. I love that suggestion. Thanks. I, I feel like we could keep talking forever, but I, I wanna be honoring of your time and so if, if folks wanna know more about you and and your work, where is the best place for them to connect with that? Will gaffney.com. Excellent. We’ll put that in the show notes. Thank you so, so much for the time that you’ve given us today. This is, this is gonna be really meaningful to a lot of folks, so we really appreciate it.

(48m 23s):
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