Biblical Commentary as Invitation and Dialogue

Forum on Lynn R. Huber, with Gail R. O’Day. Revelation. Wisdom Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023.

Lynn Huber’s monumental Revelation commentary is a vitally important volume in the celebrated and award-winning Wisdom Commentary Series. If I had to limit myself to seven adjectives to describe this book, they would be fresh, unexpected, creative, honest, compassionate, hopeful, and invitational.

The contributors to this forum were asked not simply to discuss this commentary, but to broaden the conversation to discuss feminist biblical commentary. My comments both review defining characteristics of feminist biblical commentary to date and highlight ways this commentary both exemplifies those characteristics and develops them in new and distinctive ways.

The Wisdom Commentary series must be acknowledged as the first English-language series of its kind, namely an explicitly feminist series that offers extended, typically book-length, treatment of every book of the Bible. As feminist commentary, it follows on the pathbreaking work of such single-volume commentaries as Women’s Bible Commentary (1st, 2nd, and 3rd ed., 1992, 1998, 2012 respectively), Feminist Biblical Interpretation (2007 German; 2012 English), and The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (2007), as well as The Queer Bible Commentary (2006). The book-length treatment provided by the Wisdom Commentary allows its volumes to take their place alongside long-hallowed reference commentaries. But cracking open these pages is something altogether different.

The commentary genre has historically privileged the commentator as authoritative interpreter. Yet as each commentary takes its place within an existing history of interpretation, commentary also has the character of dialogue. This dialogic and conversational character was recognized in the 2015 book The Genre of Biblical Commentary. One contributor there described the task of commentary as akin to “directing a symphony of voices” (Watts 46). Another characterized commentary as a conversation to which readers might “listen in” (Yarchin 11). These metaphors aptly represent the dialogic character of traditional commentary. They also shed light on the construction of authority and boundaries within the genre.

Feminist commentary poses alternatives to hierarchical and bounded models of interpretative authority. In the preface to her own feminist commentary on Jer 26–52 in the International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament Series, Carolyn J. Sharp offers as counterpoint to the “traditional authority of the commentary writer” (Sharp, Jeremiah 26–52, 13), or what Irmtraud Fischer has called “the ‘one-man show’” exemplified by traditional commentaries (Fischer, “On Writing,” 23), the “feminist valorizing of collaboration and the decentering of power” (Sharp, Jeremiah 26–52, 13).

Like other volumes in the Wisdom Commentary Series, Huber’s commentary exemplifies such collaboration and decentering by incorporating diverse voices, both that of Dr. Huber’s mentor and collaborator Gail R. O’Day and those of eight “Contributing Voices,” that is, scholars, primarily women, whose insights and interpretations appear at critical junctures throughout the volume. In describing this collaborative model, Barbara E. Reid, General Editor of the Wisdom Commentary Series, invokes the same metaphor of symphony (Reid xxiv) that was cited above in the discussion of the traditional commentary genre. But rather than positioning commentator as conductor, the metaphor here intentionally positions the commentator as one voice among many. This model both “reflect[s] that there is no single definitive feminist interpretation of a text” and “show[s] the importance of subject position in the process of interpretation” (Reid xxiv). In terms of format, within the Wisdom Commentary Series, those voices are offset in textboxes that mark each contribution as distinct and readily visible. Yet, with less intentionality, such a format might easily result not in dialogue but in a multiplicity of bounded monologues. In Huber’s commentary, while the format preserves the integrity of each contributing voice, those contributions do not simply stand apart. Instead, Huber engages in substantive dialogue with the contributing voices. In so doing, she models for readers a commitment to collaboration, inclusion, and dialogue.

Huber articulates an important further reason for this commitment. Feminist interpretation and theology values experience as a source of knowledge and even revelation. Huber explicitly draws on her own experience, e.g., in envisioning the lamb on stage at a rock concert (Huber 205, commenting on Rev 14:2–4), reflecting on boundaries of exclusion portrayed in Revelation’s vision of new Jerusalem (Huber 333, commenting on Rev 21:8), or comparing that same vision to the 2015 Alamance Pride celebration (Huber 339–40, commenting on Rev 21:22–27). Yet Huber also acknowledges the limits of any one person’s experience and perspective. Noting the ways privilege can insulate its bearers, Huber writes, “I must be unaware of other places in the text where hearers and readers feel exclusion and erasure. This, for me, is a call to engage the interpretations of those who come from a wide variety of experiences” (Huber 288).

Moreover, rather than seeking to emphasize her own authority as interpreter, and rather than positioning the reader as listening in, Dr. Huber repeatedly validates and elevates the authority of her reader and the salience of the reader’s perspectives, experiences, and expertise for interpretation of and engagement with the text. In Huber’s words, “we hear the call to ‘come’ [in Rev 22:17] as an invitation to engage, interpret, and navigate this text . . . The hope behind this commentary is that readers will similarly hear this invitation in and through these pages and that you will join us as we navigate these waters in new ways together” (Huber 349).

Two further features of feminist commentary are exemplified in Huber’s Revelation commentary. One is resisting essentialism, whether with regard to gender and sexuality or other aspects of human identity (Sharp, “Mapping Jeremiah,” 39; cf. Fischer 241). Throughout the commentary, Huber interweaves feminist and queer interpretation, highlighting gender fluidity in Revelation’s portrayal of “the risen Christ” (Huber 23), the queerness of the lamb (Huber 77), and the ways the book both challenges and destabilizes traditional ideals of masculinity and family (Huber 213–16) even as it sometimes reinforces them (Huber 221).

In addition to combatting essentialism, feminist commentary has frequently articulated a commitment to interpretation that advances justice and human flourishing (e.g., Sharp, “Mapping Jeremiah, 39; cf. Fischer 239). In dialogue with O’Day, Huber articulates an understanding of “exegesis as worship” that seeks the flourishing of all, especially “those whom the text has harmed” (Huber 349). Huber takes an activist stance in relation to unjust and exclusionary systems and structures. She and her collaborators offer the audience vital resources to do the same.

Works Cited

Eskenazi, Tamara Cohn and Andrea L. Weiss. The Torah: A Women’s Commentary. New York: URJ Press, 2007.

Finlay, Timothy D. and William Yarchin. The Genre of Biblical Commentary: Essays in Honor of John E. Hartley on the Occasion of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015.

Fischer, Irmtraud. “On Writing a Feminist-Postcolonial Commentary: A Critical Evaluation.” Translated by Christl M. Maier and Carolyn J. Sharp. Pages 234–51 in Prophecy and Power: Jeremiah in Feminist and Postcolonial Perspective. Edited by Christl M. Maier and Carolyn J. Sharp. London: T&T Clark, 2013.

Guest, Deryn, Robert E. Goss, Mona West, and Thomas Bohache, eds. The Queer Bible Commentary. London: SCM, 2006.

Huber, Lynn R. with Gail R. O’Day. Revelation. Wisdom Commentary. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023.

Newsom, Carol A. and Sharon H. Ringe, eds. Women’s Bible Commentary. 2nd edition. Louisville, KY: WJK, 1998. [1st ed. 1992]

Newsom, Carol A., Sharon H. Ringe, and Jacqueline E. Lapsley, eds. Women’s Bible Commentary. 3rd edition. Louisville, KY: WJL, 2012.

Reid, Barbara E. “Editor’s Introduction to Wisdom Commentary: ‘She Is a Breath of the Power of God’ (Wis 7:25).” Pages xxiii–xlii in Revelation. Wisdom Commentary. By Lynn R. Huber with Gail R. O’Day. Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2023.

Schotroff, Luise and Marie-Theres Wacker, eds. Feminist Biblical Interpretation: A Compendium of Critical Commentary on the Books of the Bible and Related Literature. Translated by Lisa E. Dahill et al. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012. Translation of Kompendium Feministische Bibelauslegung. 2nd corrected edition. Gütersloh: Chr. Kaiser Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1999.

Sharp, Carolyn J. “Mapping Jeremiah as/in a Feminist Landscape: Negotiating Ancient and Contemporary Terrains.” Pages 38–56 in Prophecy and Power: Jeremiah in Feminist and Postcolonial Perspective. Edited by Christl M. Maier and Carolyn J. Sharp. London: T&T Clark, 2013.

Sharp, Carolyn J. Jeremiah 26–52. International Exegetical Commentary on the Old Testament. Kohlhammer Verlag, 2021.

Watts, James W. “Writing Commentary as Ritual and as Discovery.” Pages 40–53 in The Genre of Biblical Commentary: Essays in Honor of John E. Hartley on the Occasion of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Edited by Timothy D. Finlay and William Yarchin. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015.

West, Mona and Robert E. Shore-Goss. The Queer Bible Commentary. 2nd edition. London: SCM Press, 2022.

Yarchin, William. “Introduction.” Pages 1–25 in The Genre of Biblical Commentary: Essays in Honor of John E. Hartley on the Occasion of his Seventy-Fifth Birthday. Edited by Timothy D. Finlay and William Yarchin. Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2015.

Anathea Portier-Young is Associate Professor of Old Testament at Duke University Divinity School. Her work focuses on embodiment, biblical prophetic literature, Jewish apocalyptic literature, early Jewish novellas, themes of violence and non-violence, and scripture and social justice. She is the author of The Prophetic Body: Embodiment and Mediation in Biblical Prophetic Literature (Oxford University Press, 2024) and the award-winning Apocalypse against Empire: Theologies of Resistance in Early Judaism (Eerdmans, 2011).