Artist’s brush on biblical history
JULIE SZEGO
LATELY I’ve been reading my five-year-old daughter Sara a Bible chapter every evening.¬† I was silly, though, to have ordered the version published by the American Bible Society.
The naive art fails to inspire and I didn’t realise that it also veers beyond the Old Testament, which means a) there’ll be some tricky discussions about how the first half of this book is kind of true, but the second half kind of isn’t, or b) after we’re done with the first half, I’ll be forced to engineer a fatal spillage of Milo over the text.
But there are more than enough challenges already. How does a secularist, who believes her child should know and appreciate the greatest stories ever told, mediate all these unsound motifs and creepy archetypes? Such as the vengeful, calculating God who wipes out entire communities — babies and all -— in Noah, Lot, Jonah, and on it goes.
Or the feuding brothers, always cast as binaries of the savage and the civilised, tales of bloodlust and deception set against the scheming, unabashed favouritism of parents; Cain and Abel, Esau and Jacob, Joseph and his siblings, and on it goes.
How do you deal with all this without the benefit of years of biblical scholarship or a degree in theology?
As if all this wasn’t hard enough, there’s the even harder subject of biblical women.
The American Bible avoids any reference to the popular interpretation of Eve being fashioned from Adam’s rib, explaining merely how “God made a woman to be Adam’s partner and wife.” But there’s no getting around the fact that Adam got here first and the hierarchy implicit in this.
Eve is drawn with snake-like eyes, while Adam appears hapless but patently less sinful.
Again, our sanitised Bible leaves out the particulars of Eve’s punishment for tasting the forbidden fruit -— pain in childbirth and subordination to man -— “your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you”.
At first, I was relieved at the omission in the interests of political correctness, but now I wonder.
Wouldn’t the inclusion of this challenging material help me start a useful discussion?
I could ask Sara: “Do you think this is fair, do you think the bit about men ruling women is true?” and try to puncture the text’s authority. I could suggest, “Maybe some men are scared of women because the women seem smarter than them,” and so open the text to new readings.
Or I could get her dabbling in a bit of philosophy: “You can’t have life without pain, so maybe it makes sense for women to feel pain in giving life.” Leaving out the hard bits is no answer, I conclude.
Anyway, I took her to the opening of Women in the Bible: Tricksters, Victors and (M)others, an exhibition at Melbourne’s Jewish Museum of Australia, with these questions fresh in my mind.
Sara raided the pretzels and roamed the place shrieking with her friend. In the meantime, I read about Eve’s thirst for knowledge and how this can be seen as an admirable trait — a questioning, a desire to understand and get closer to divinity.
It made me think about all the other curious-but-maligned women of the Bible, such as Lot’s wife, determined to bear witness to the destruction of Sodom.
I delighted in Barbara Hanrahan’s Eve and the Snake, in which the world’s first woman appears as a cheeky pink figure romping naked in Eden like a cartoon character.
This Eve is an action woman; Adam is absent and, by implication, passive.
I was mesmerised by the pieces exploring Sarah and Hagar, the latter of course being Abraham’s slave who bore him a son, Ishmael, only to then be cast out once Sarah miraculously delivered Isaac.
The story contains so many vital threads, unravelling them is almost impossible: the resentment at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict (at a stretch!), the colonial history of West versus East, surrogacy, class, race and patriarchy. One work casts the two women as antagonists, unable to recognise one another’s humanity even as their foetuses loll side by side in emu shells.
Another celebrates their joint contribution to religious heritage and meditates, through the harmonious placement of objects, on the possibilities of peace.
And I came away with just enough talking points to get me through a chapter or two.
Julie Szego is a writer with The Age.
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