Phyllis Trible died in a hospital in Manhattan Oct. 17 at the age of 92, as confirmed by Union Theological Seminary, with whom the renowned scholar had a longstanding relationship. She leaves behind a sister, Barbara Pickrel, and two niblings, Debra J. Pickrel and Douglas Pickrel. For many biblical scholars, what she leaves behind is a legacy that cannot be understated.
Trible earned her doctorate in Old Testament in 1963, focusing on the book of Jonah, at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University’s joint program, part of what Cullen Murphy called the “first generation” of women in biblical studies.
Alexiana Fry
Many of her most well-known and loved works were published more than a decade later, starting with her article in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation,” writing on the significant challenge to “translate biblical faith without sexism.”
Trible, although growing up Southern Baptist, was a faithful Presbyterian; she did not apologize for her faith or her feminism and made a home in between the two. This does not mean she ignored passages that included horrific acts of violence against women or justified the misogyny that can be easily found in the biblical text; driven by love, which “need not mean to approve, sanction or embrace in toto,” she sought to reclaim and restore texts that often were rendered more sexist due to (male) scholars’ chauvinism.
“She did not apologize for her faith or her feminism and made a home in between the two.”
These sentiments were most vivid in her books God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality, published in 1978, and — intended as a companion to the first — Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives, published in 1984, which are more or less regarded as canon for those engaging in feminist biblical criticism. Both are informed by literary-critical methods but with a clear-eyed focus on addressing feminist concerns.
Yet, as Trible herself notes, the two “differ in emphasis and spirit” and through referencing Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) 3:4, she categorizes the first work as embodying “a time to laugh and dance” and the latter as a posturing of “a time to weep and mourn.”
She was right. The first book demonstrated the gender fluidity of the deity as well as undid the sexist interpretations of many biblical terms that influenced the interpretation of gendered bodies. The book is celebratory and revelatory in tone, as if shouting from the rooftops as a woman and for women: “Look! We have always been here!”
The second book, built upon this recognition, memorialized women in the biblical texts who had been victimized, maligned and overlooked by scholarship and in religious institutions: Hagar, Tamar, the secondary wife in Judges 19, and the daughter of Jephthah.
Gale Yee, the first woman of color and Asian American president of the Society of Biblical Literature, writes in the 40th anniversary edition of Texts of Terror, that the seeds of feminism “completely flowered into feminist advocacy” after reading the book.
Robyn Whitaker, associate professor of New Testament at Pilgrim Theological College in Australia, wrote: “Trible arguably started a revolution in biblical scholarship in the 1970s when she applied a feminist lens to a patriarchal biblical text because she was determined not to give up on it. She recovered feminine imagery for God and amplified overlooked female characters. She exposed the blatant sexism of much previous interpretation and never lost her concern that such interpretation was doing damage to actual women.”
“She articulated clearly the significant gap in the field as it pertained to the inclusion of women.”
Although she herself would become president of the SBL, the central guild for biblical scholars, in 1994, she articulated clearly the significant gap in the field as it pertained to the inclusion of women in her introduction to a special issue on Women’s Studies in Biblical Studies for the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament in 1982.
Nineteen eighty was the centennial anniversary of SBL, and the meeting was intended to be a special celebration. Trible remarked that this, however, was no centennial for women or women’s studies, as “in the SBL, as in society at large, women have little, if anything, to celebrate. But we do have much to consider.”
While there has been significant progress since her critiques, we still have much to consider.
Whitaker adds: “Like many feminist scholars who’ve fought damn hard for a place at the table, Trible was a bit brusque, a bit awkward, rather feisty, and utterly brilliant.” Others who have known her concur and have shared their own stories of her quirks and sharp wit.
Trible taught at Wake Forest University from 1963 to 1971 and Andover Newton Theological School from 1971 to 1979 before returning to Union Seminary, where she was appointed Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature in 1980. She left Union in 1998 to become associate dean and professor of biblical studies at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, where she served until 2001, when she was appointed University Professor at Wake Forest, a role she held until she retired in 2012.
I did not get the opportunity to meet Trible, but I do know my story is likely very similar to others, regardless of their personal relationship with her. I personally encountered Trible’s work at the beginning of my Ph.D. journey in 2019. Although I had attended a Christian university, where I received a minor in Bible, and also completed my master of divinity degree, I was not aware that what Trible already had done was something I was allowed to do.
Unlike Trible, feminism was not natural to me — I had to “convert” to feminism. But like Trible, I loved the Bible; like Trible, even 50-plus years later, I was in classrooms where I was either alone or one of the few women present. So when I read Texts of Terror, I wept, not only because of the content, but because I felt as though I had been given permission.
Trible was a trailblazer, and from that path, many other avenues of biblical scholarship have been made possible. To many of us in the field, she has been and will always be known as a mother.
Alexiana Fry is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Copenhagen studying “Divergent Views of Diaspora in Ancient Judaism.” Find her scholarship at www.alexianafry.com.