Moses, Feminism, and The Male Subject

When women began reading the Bible as feminists, they focused on the ‘great women’ of the Bible, uncovered marginalized voices, critiqued patriarchal ideologies, sometimes rejected the text, and sometimes rehabilitated it. This mirrored the political and social movement of feminism. Even though feminists are committed to gender equality, the beginnings of the movement focused on what gender equality would mean for women. As society really begins to take the promise of feminism seriously for men, feminist reading strategies also shift and feminist readers turn to other texts, not just those that are about women. This chapter explores the expansion of feminist interpretation of scripture to include texts that do not obviously lend themselves to feminist analysis by focusing on feminist readings of Moses. Moving beyond questions of how Moses relates to women, feminist readings of Moses look at constructions of masculinity and also attend to the body, language, and relationship.