Rummaging in Cabinets

Reflections on the Lectionary for October 6th

In the suite where I work, there is a large cabinet full of office supplies. Once, over fifteen years ago, each cluster of offices in my building had an administrative assistant whose desk sat in a small lobby. That person would make photocopies, manage appointments, order dry erase markers, and keep file cabinets full of syllabi and manuscripts in progress for all the faculty in that suite. But at some point those administrative assistants were let go. Nobody really works with paper anymore (it’s all electronic), and everybody keeps their own calendar. The desks where the administrative assistants used to sit were eventually moved out, and all the leftover office supplies were put into the cabinet, where they still sit today.

The cabinet is fascinating. It’s like a time capsule from a bygone era. There are stacks of stationary with defunct logos, hole punches and staplers, label makers, and typewriter ribbon ink. VHS tapes sit next to floppy disks and hard disks that no computer manufactured today could read. There are scores of audio tapes, too, of old lectures and music collections, sitting next to letter openers and interoffice envelopes and erasers and calculators and thumbtacks. Every so often I find myself needing something—a pair of scissors or some scrap paper—and I rummage through the cabinet until I find what I am looking for. But most of the time the cabinet sits, closed up, keeping its treasures from another time. There’s a distance between what that cabinet holds and what I need to do my job in 2024. Sometimes the cabinet holds something necessary and important, like a highlighter that miraculously still works, but most of the time it doesn’t. And occasionally, the cabinet contains something close enough to what I need, and I can find something in there that will work well enough until I get my hands on what I actually need.

The same essential distance holds for the Bible. The Bible is something like a cabinet, full of things from a bygone era. Sometimes those treasures from the past turn out to be very useful. But a lot of what’s in there is outdated, meant for another time. Sometimes we can makeshift our way to using something that’s in the Bible, adapting it for the 21^st century, but other times the Bible is just too archaic for the purposes we have in the present. While we might want to insist that the whole Bible is full of timeless truth and relevancy to the current moment, I think it’s ok to acknowledge that it’s a cabinet full of treasures—all of it stuff that at some point we decided was worth keeping, but not all of it useful at every moment and in every circumstance.

The lectionary for October 5^th is a great example of that. The readings for this week have a theme that runs through them—the nature and function of relationships and marriage—which is both timeless in some ways and also extremely specific to time and place. Three different texts in the readings for this Sunday—Job1:1 and 2:1-10, Genesis 2:18-24, and Mark 10:2-16—deal with this question of relationships in some way. The lectionary has collected them together like this—I assume—to shine a spotlight on the question of relationships, to collect the Bible’s resources together. But it’s kind of like looking for a USB-C charging cable in a cabinet full of technology from the 1990s. The texts in the lectionary this week are relevant to our experiences today, in the sense that they were composed with some of the same kinds of questions we might have today. But the texts in the lectionary this week might not be wholly useful and relevant in the present, any more than a floppy disk would be, at least not without an awful lot of work.

Take, for example, Genesis 2:18-24. This is the scene in the second creation story where God has recognized that the man (the only human being so far created) might be lonely, and that he might need a friend—a “helper as his partner,” as the NRSV says. Of course, in 2024 there are aspects of this situation that will feel familiar to many people. Many of us crave relationship, and many people are lonely. Companionship is now, as much as it has ever been, an important need for people. But there are also lots of things about this passage that don’t fit us or our world very well. Most of us recognize, for example, that women were not made explicitly to be men’s helpers; we believe that women are full human beings in their own right, and their purpose is not contingent on anyone else (to state what I hope is obvious). Many of us recognize that many men don’t desire a “helper as his partner,” and that even if they did, they might not desire a woman in that role. Likewise, many women have purposes and desires besides serving men or being in relationship with men. This passage envisions the existence of women as a solution to the problem of the existence of men, and most of us just don’t believe that.

This whole passage, by the way, is kind of like rummaging through a cabinet of misfit solutions. Notice how, once God realizes that the man might be lonely, God starts offering unhelpful responses. “Out of the ground the LORD God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air and brought them to the man to see what he would call them…but for the man there was not found a helper as his partner.” It’s kind of hilarious to imagine Adam sitting there, lonely, and the LORD God just trots up with a pigeon. “How about this?” No, that’s not right. So the LORD God goes back to the drawing board and comes back with a llama. “What about now?” It's maybe a charming story about God’s desire to find just the right companion for the man, but the passage does not paint a portrait of a deity who’s very good at knowing what the man actually needs. Basically, in this telling of creation, all the animals and birds that exist in the world were failed attempts to find a companion for Adam. Finally, God makes the woman out of the rib, and all is well. Or is it?

“Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh.” Happily ever after! But as we all know, it doesn’t always work out like that. Genesis is describing one set of relationships, one set of desires—heterosexual monogamous partnership—and not everyone fits that mold. Not everyone becomes “one flesh” with someone at all, much less forever, much less with someone of the gender they are socially expected to be “one flesh” with. Genesis, which was written down in thoroughly patriarchal Iron Age and Bronze Age contexts, reflects a completely different mindset about gender and relationships than the one(s) we have. Maybe there are some useful things in there, but there’s also a lot of stuff in there that we don’t need at all anymore.

The passage from Job, meanwhile, is not really about relationships—it’s about suffering, and theodicy—but notice Job’s unnamed wife’s role in this story. It certainly doesn’t seem like a “one flesh,” happily ever after kind of situation. “Curse God and die,” she suggests to Job unhelpfully, and Job’s response is to call her a “foolish woman” who speaks “as any foolish woman would speak.” This doesn’t seem like the “helper as a partner” envisioned in Genesis.

But I want to draw our attention to something that this passage from Job shares in common with the passage from Genesis, and also with the passage from Mark that we will look at below. All three passages assume the same audience, same concerns, and same ethical orientation for the Bible. All three passages assume that they are being read by the same kind of people: men. All three passages are invested primarily in the interests and concerns of men. In Job, it’s Job who suffers and who is the subject of God’s (and the accuser’s) attention, and his unnamed wife is simply a foil. In Genesis, it’s the man who has been created and who is lonely, and the woman who is created to be his helper. In both books, the Bible is proceeding as if it were going to be read by men who hold men’s concerns. That might have been true, in the ancient levantine context, but it’s not true now. Now, these stories are a cabinet of misfit tools that we might try to make use of, but which are really unsuited for the kinds of concerns many of us might bring to the text. If a woman picks up Genesis (which women do with great regularity), is there any way in which this text reflects her interests, concerns, or desires, beyond being a helper for a man? Does this text even imagine a woman as a reader? Or is anticipating being read only by men?

The best example of this in this week’s lectionary comes from the gospel passage, Mark 10:2-16. The whole passage rests on a question asked of Jesus: “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” Notice who the subject is here, and notice where the agency lies. The man is the subject of the question, the wife is the object (she is getting divorced, or not, but she’s not doing the divorcing), and only the man gets to decide. The question was asked from the perspective of men’s agency, and Jesus’ response continues to presume men’s agency in relationships. He continues to speak about men divorcing wives, until verse 12 where he also allows that a woman who “divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” The possibility that a woman might initiate divorce (which existed under Roman civil law in this period, but remained prohibited under religious law) is an afterthought.

So this is a cabinet full of some outdated things. Today many societies and persons affirm the rights of everyone to choose their own relationship status (though this is far from universal in either theory or practice). We take it for granted that people ought to be able to choose who they are in relationship with, and that folks might desire many different kinds of relationships.

So if the Bible is a cabinet full of outdated things, how should we think about it? It’s a tricky question. On the one hand, the Bible still holds a lot of authority as a text that’s given a lot of deference and influence over our lives. Whether we agree with its patriarchal and androcentric views or not, the Bible’s views still hold a lot of power in our world. Should we ignore the Bible, recognizing it as outdated and moving on to other sources of wisdom about our relationships and about gender? Or should we try to redeem the Bible—to look for the ways its ideas can be updated and adapted to a new time and place? There are good arguments on both sides.

My own perspective lands somewhere in the middle. Certainly, we should give no power to the parts of the Bible that are misogynistic and patriarchal. We should recognize when something from the cabinet is well and truly archaic—when it simply cannot serve us well any longer. But I think we should also recognize the immense cultural gravity of the Bible, and therefore mine the text for things that can be useful to us, even if we are using them somewhat against their intended purposes. For example, we can look to figures like Rahab, Deborah, Jael, Priscilla, Phoebe, and Junia, and notice that their lives do not really conform very well to the ideal of a woman as “a helper as his partner” for men. We can see that these women seize a great deal more agency than is imagined in the question and response found in Mark 10. We can point out how, no matter what the biblical texts were envisioning for their presumed-male readers, women in the biblical traditions were full human beings with agency, desires, and power of their own. We can find some things in that old cabinet that are useful for doing justice in our own time.

The Bible will never be a 21^st century text, no matter how much we might wish it could be. But our interpretation of the Bible, our understandings and ethics and ways of living derived from it, can reflect the values we hold to be true today. We can use the Bible for justice, for doing good work in the present, even if there are some outdated things in it. Just like that cabinet in my office suite, full of cables that don’t connect to anything anymore and dot-matrix printer paper that will never be fed through a working printer, some of what we find won’t be useful. But some of it will be.