Kathleen O’Connor’s commentary, Lamentations and the Tears of the World is beautifully written. The exegesis is at the service of hearing the text and overhearing its message to a broken world. She doesn’t mimic Brueggemann’s style, but she writes with that same gift of opening the text by allowing text, theology, political realities and human yearning to share in the hermeneutic of our experience.
Joan Chittister is a Benedictine whose writing on the Rule of Benedict I have read for years. Her commentary on Ruth is a deep reflection on twelve defining moments in the experience of women – loss, change, friendship and so on. It is a series of essays, each one so soaked in Ruth that they are Ruth flavoured! And that’s another way of reading a text. Chittister is a consummate essayist, who turns the theme she is writing about like wood in the lathe, and shapes it to bring out the contours of the grain.
The New Interpreter’s Bible has several commentaries by women – Renita Weems is one of them and it is an education to read her commentary on the Song of Songs alongside Robert Jenson’s one in the Interpretation series. Weems is an African American Woman, who writes as a professor of Hebrew Bible at Vanderbilt, out of her experience of growing up in Tennessee, and as one deeply ambivalent about the treatment of women and the use of female imagery in the hebrew Bible. For that reason her commentary is unabashedly about God’s gift of human love, which is to be celebrated as of the essence of the human. Her book Battered Love is an exploration of women and violence in the Hebrew prophets, and it is the lack of violence, and the celebration of mutuality in the Song, that gives her commentary a radical freshness.
Jenson is an elder statesman in the parliament of Systematic theologians – one of the most creative and demanding writers in the field, who admits to stepping outside his academic bailliwick in writing this commentary. He takes it as a story of the human love for God, and offers an interpetation of love that is theological, and of God that takes full cognizance of divine affectivity. Reading the two together I didn’t want to decide who was "right" – I found both had listened intently to the text, to their own theological and human experience, and had written out of who they are.
All of which leads up to the question I want to ask. Who are the other prominent female voices in biblical commentary writing? Margaret Thrall’s Second Corinthians, 2 volumes in the academic benchmark series International Critical Commentary; Morna Hooker on Mark, and Philippians. But who else? Have you read, or do you know of, biblical commentary written by women? I’d like to post on this later – I have a feeling some of the most creative biblical interpretation is to be found here.
