Tribes of Yahweh Gottwald, Epilogue, excerpt “If the firm core of Israel’s ‘covenantal’ faith is in fact an egalitarian paradigm, it is precisely one of my aims to acknowledge the rich multiplicity of religious imagery generated by an astonishing range of cultural and sociopolitical experiences entailed in the upthrust of this egalitarian people into ancient Near Eastern history. In this vein, it is clear that literary tools of various sorts will greatly enrich our perception of the remarkable expressiveness of Israel’s central egalitarian paradigm. Employing rhetorical criticism and metaphor (with its two levels of ‘vehicle’ and ‘tenor’), Phyllis Trible has recently argued that Israel’s ‘God male and female’ sums up and gives impetus to many surprising expressions of feminine as well as masculine freedom and initiative, which simplistic ‘faith against culture’ and ‘patriarchal hierarchic’ models have entirely missed or deliberately suppressed. I consider her study one way of carrying out a strategy of feminism (meaning for her not a narrow focus upon women, but rather a critique of culture in light of misogyny) in biblical studies which I both invite and urge. By her rhetorical method, Trible conjures a biblical literary world congruent with a central egalitarian paradigm, so that the body of her work provokes urgent social situational questions: What forms of egalitarian social organization, in what times and spaces, in ancient Israel were the matrices of these expressions of feminine creativity? And what forms of hierarchic social organization in biblical times and later were responsible for subordinating and obscuring these expressions of feminine creativity?”
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