An Invitation to Hear the Voiceless
A Feature Review of
Womanist Midrash Volume II: Reintroducing the Women of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings
Wilda Gafney
Paperback: WJK Press, 2024
Buy Now: [ BookShop ] [ Amazon ] [ Kindle ]
Reviewed by Sherrie Lowly
To enter the life of a person marginalized, voiceless, and labeled as meaningless– to walk in solidarity with her/them in order to reintroduce them to others as meaningful– requires a strong commitment of empathy and love. I am always learning more about this commitment in relationship with my adult daughter who lives with severe and profound disabilities. She, and others like her, live so often invisible and meaningless to a society where to be seen and heard is increasingly awarded only to those with power, money, and success. My husband and I, taking up our vocations of art-making, meaning-making, and story-writing, are committed out of love for our daughter to invite a wider public into her world, introducing her and giving her a voice and a meaningful presence.
I recognize just such a commitment and calling in this second volume of Womanist Midrash by Dr. Wilda Gafney, Reintroducing the Women of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings. Dr. Gafney demonstrates an authentic, highly ethical response to the call of knowing the poor and marginalized. She translates the lives of the voiceless women and girls hidden in these biblical texts, reintroducing them with great empathy. It is a work of liberation to read and behold.
There will certainly be critique of Dr. Gafney’s methods of biblical translation and interpretation from those who stand by the traditional Western scholarly methods. These methods of translation pretend to erase all traces of the translator’s cultural identity and values to get to some culture-neutral, “correctly” translated text. Dr. Gafney chooses not to use the traditional methods. She names instead, “the shoes that fit her feet.” (an African American folk saying indicating that all needs will be met in heaven, i.e., no more cast-off, ill-fitting footwear) Her well-fitting shoes are womanist (radical and revolutionary movement in Black women’s scholarship since the early 1980s), Rabbinic Midrashic, mystical, imaginative, queer, liberationist, and feminist. She translates the texts with a commitment to walk with the silenced and marginalized women and girls, giving them agency, voice and meaning. She goes on to walk with them beyond the texts, inviting us into her “sanctified imagination” (a type of African-American indigenous midrash) to create poems, laments, psalms, and songs that speak the women’s names—when they have been rendered nameless—and honors their memory.
ADVERTISEMENT:
For example: Naaman’s slave girl who tells her captor of a prophet who can heal his leprosy in 2 Kings 5:1-4. Dr. Gafney—in conversation with Phyllis Wheatley and Maya Angelou—using her sacred imagining, writes a poem from the soul of this ancient little one who she names Zipporah:
I wish that I were free,
Free as all the birds I see
Everywhere around me.
I too am a bird.
But my wings were broken.
I will never forget who broke them.
I may never fly free and flee this place.
But I will never forget that I am a bird, born to soar.
For persons of faith who have taken up the work of reading and studying the Hebrew Bible; for those of us trying to make meaning of these texts; for clergy persons who use the texts as foundational for preaching and pastoral counseling; and, for persons such as myself, struggling to give representation to someone who has no voice, Womanist Midrash is a necessary contribution and a trusted guide to the work. I envision some who may want to use Volumes I and II of Womanist Midrash for small-group study. The facilitator of such a group—responding to members who may find Dr. Gafney’s sometimes academic writing difficult to read—may need to use translation methods of their own to help give understanding for the average reader.
Some of the women and girls Dr. Gafney reintroduces are familiar: Rahab, Deborah, Hannah, and the Queen of Sheba. Others are new, given no name in the texts, forgotten, shamed, and silenced, including special sections on widows and sex-workers. Reintroduced by our host, given a name and a presence, we behold all of their beauty, truth, and authority. We partake of the richness of their stories. It is as if we are invited to Dr. Gafney’s supper party to celebrate her labors, asked to bring our own personalities and sanctified imagination to the table and join with these women and girls of the ancient texts to talk, eat, drink, laugh, cry, give praise and sing of our faith and witness of love and power.
At this time in our history, we need Dr. Gafney’s work to hear the voices of the women and children of the Hebrew Scriptures and, outside the biblical texts, to others hidden and marginalized by our society. It is a work for our time to lift up a fuller witness of Yahweh in worship, in culture, in the body politic, and in a growing nationalist Christianity that seeks to silence the voices of women and girls, people of color, the poor, the immigrant, persons living with disabilities, and the LGBTQ+ community. I, for one, am deeply grateful to Dr. Gafney for revealing such a way of love for this much needed work. I hope that others will read and join together to hear the call.
Sherrie Lowly
Sherrie Lowly (pronouns she/they) is an authority on the intersection of faith and disability. With a passion for social justice, she teaches, preaches, and writes about discovering the mystery of God in the margins of society and church. The birth of her daughter Temma Day Lowly in 1985, overturned Lowly’s life, her faith and vocational direction. After working for 25 years as pastor in rural, urban, and suburban churches, Lowly is now retired and spends her time exploring and writing her own and her daughter’s voice in memoir and spiritual non-fiction. Find her online at: https://slowlysite.wordpress.com
 Reading for the Common Good From ERB Editor Christopher Smith "This book will inspire, motivate and challenge anyone who cares a whit about the written word, the world of ideas, the shape of our communities and the life of the church." -Karen Swallow Prior Enter your email below to sign up for our weekly newsletter & download your FREE copy of this ebook! |
Understanding Christian Nationalism [A Reading Guide] |
 Most Anticipated Books of the Fall for Christian Readers!
|
 Hilarious One-Star Customer Reviews of Bibles |
