Tell Us Their Stories and Change Our Lives

(Content warning: This post mentions sexual violence and rape.)

The Sunday, June 17, 2018, New York Times published an opinion piece by Lutheran pastor, Emily M. D. Scott, called “The Bible’s #MeToo Problem.” She used as her examples three very short (part of her point) stories from the Old Testament about violence against women. One I knew, but the other two I had never been told (no surprise there).

In a single sentence, the Bible presents the story of Dinah, daughter of Leah and Jacob, being raped by a tribal prince. The rest of the passage focuses on Dinah’s brothers’ revenge, which includes their selling her to that very same prince and using this as a pretext to attack his kingdom, killing all the men. As Scott points out, “One can only imagine what happened to the women.”

“Tamar violated by Amnon,” by N. Verkolje

Even worse (perhaps) is a story I knew and had always found appalling. Tamar, daughter of King David, is the victim of a rape plot by her own half-brother. When David hears of it, he is angry but forgives his son and “would not punish him, because he loved him”! There is a third story she mentions in Judges about what a Levite does, and has done, to his concubine but is too gruesome to repeat here. You can only imagine if it’s worse than the two above. Chillingly, Scott notes, in the study Bible she has used for years, the
comment is that the women’s reactions “go unrecorded.”

These stories also go unrecorded, unnoted, and unmentioned in our churches, and this is especially tragic when so many women and all genders and all minorities in the pews have themselves been abused, victimized, traumatized – and ignored. These are the people with whom these stories would not only resonate but perhaps lead them and all of us into in-depth conversations about what happened, what it felt like, and what the aftermath has led to in their – our – lives.

Why is this important? In scriptural texts almost certainly written by men and for the most part presented by men (if at all), Scott sees a terrible injustice and the need to address its root, not only in abuse – but in our own Catholic extension especially – restriction of leadership and power to men only:

Abuse takes place when one person fails to see the humanity of another, taking what he wants in order to experience control, disordered intimacy or power. It is the symptom of an illness that is fundamentally spiritual: a kind of narcissism that allows him to focus only on sating his need, blind to the pain of the victim. This same narcissism caused the editors of our sacred stories to limit the rape of Dinah to only nine words in a book of thousands.

We know that abusers or hoarders of power reject or ignore the humanity of their victims or underlings. They turn them into objects rather than people. To transform these views and the resulting actions, we need nothing less than to transform hearts and minds. In the case of women, which is the main focus here, we must put our stories in the forefront of consciousness by creating “a space for them to be heard, not only by women but also by men who are steeped in a culture that valorizes those (degrading) behaviors.” So often,
Scott reminds us, “hearts can open when someone tells a story”.

Let the silence, therefore, end. If we are going to hear stories from the scriptures, let us hear them all. Then, let us hear each other.