My Sister,My Enemy: Using Intersectional Readings of Hagar,Sarah,Leah,and Rachel to Heal Distorted Relationships in Contemporary Reproductive Justice Activism

Introduction

Feminism is sometimes seen to be at odds with religion, especially in the polarized United States where I am originally from. However, I learned early on that feminism, whether “out in the world” or within the church, is prophetic. It is a movement that “examin[es] the status quo, pronounc[es] judgment, and call[s] for repentance” (Trible, 1984: 3). It was that understanding that brought me back to scripture after many years in the secular humanist feminist movement. In my ministry today, it is that parallel between feminism and prophetic religion that I try to nurture, especially during such a reactive time in my home country, one that encourages people to take refuge in either stark secularism or regressive religion. I approach my task by helping people connect to their prophetic nature and the stories I use most often among fellow activists are those of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham, and Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah. These are stories that, when contemplated with an open mind and heart, speak to women about their reproductive lives, about racism, and classicism. But the most powerful question they pose for me and the one that I teach and speak about the most to activist audiences is the question of women’s relationships with each other within a patriarchal culture. How does living under patriarchy affect our relationships with our sisters? How does it condition us to seek power over, and thus safety from, each other? What does the story of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham have to say about the hostility that can develop between women when encouraged by patriarchal norms? What do Rachel and Leah have to tell us about our propensity to throw other women under the bus as a form of safety? What does scripture really have to say about the sin of hierarchy, the idea that if I am to rise, you must fall? And finally, what does all of this mean for third- and fourth-wave feminists as we attempt to build intersectional coalitions and level hierarchies?

Scriptural interpretation that means to be prophetic for women working for equality and/or liberation must speak to their reality. In this day and age, it must be intersectional or, as the saying goes, it will be bullshit. It must address the ways that racism, heterosexism, classicism, and gender roles converge to be oppressive. To fail to address this point with third- and fourth-wave feminist activists is to fail to understand the conditions of their lives and the context of their work.

In a post-enlightenment world, many people are only interested in whether biblical stories are “true” or not, by which they mean, did the events actually occur in history? Gone is a sense that the texts might be true without ever having happened. Often, my own job as a minister is to present scripture as a relevant source of spiritual understanding for women working on the front lines for liberation, showing them that the old stories might not have actually occurred as written but that they hold wisdom about human nature that is accessible to anyone “with eyes to see.” I seek to demonstrate that scriptural interpretation is necessary for every generation and that its practice is not limited to literalists or to academics.

With my usual audience in mind, that of the activists to whom I minister, I will approach Genesis 16-21 and 30:1-24 using primarily an intersectional cultural criticism to discover what these stories can tell us about women’s relationships as they exist within a patriarchal context and, finally, how we can apply such insights to our work as feminist activists concerned with intersectionality, particularly within the reproductive justice movement.

Genesis as a Liberatory Text: Reading against the Grain

Despite its antiquity, the story of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham has particular relevance for modern women, especially those who would be conscious of the ways in which patriarchal values can distort our relationships with other women and thus inhibit coalition building. It’s no accident that one of the hottest shows on TV at the time of writing is the Handmaid’s Tale which is, in part, a futuristic retelling of this same story (as well as that of Rachel, Leah, and their maids). In it, Serena, the Commander’s wife, is keen not only to bear children through her handmaid Offred, a sure sign of favor and status, but also to keep her husband’s love in the midst of this triangle. Throughout the show, the viewer can sense that reproductive rights/justice are not the only plot focus. We are also meant to understand the ways in which women like Serena are drawn into participating in their own subjugation, often as the price of safety or status. This age-old story still reverberates.

In many cases, women are positively reinforced as a means to enticing them to cooperation. Praising motherhood, then and now, as the highest calling, for instance, has often proven to be an effective strategy for containing female power and ambition (Exum, 1996: 93, 96). This not only limits an individual woman’s power but also distracts her from joining in collective action. Collective action is also made more difficult in a culture in which women are taught to compete with each other and commit sabotage for the coveted attention and approval of the males who hold power. It is precisely that last point that I want to explore in the Genesis stories of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham, and Rachel, Leah, and their maids. Though these stories can be read in many different ways depending on the reader and the context, I want to highlight how an understanding of the female relationship dynamics in these stories can illuminate our present-day attempts to band together to fight oppression. My belief is that the stories, while perhaps not always heartening, give us a chance to reflect on the messiness of relationship and power, and what we sometimes do to keep both.

Power and Hierarchy

Now Sarai, Abram’s wife, bore him no children. She had an Egyptian maid whose name was Hagar; and Sarah said to Abram, “Behold now, the Lord has prevented me from bearing children; go in to my maid; it may be that I shall obtain children by her.” And Abram hearkened to the voice of Sarai. (Genesis 16:1-2)

We are already being given many clues about both relationships and power structures in these two short verses. We are told that Sarah has not borne Abraham any children, something that is important to women’s status and something that one would assume would lower her value in her husband’s eyes. And yet, Abraham seems unbothered by this childlessness which is incredibly unusual. He also “hearkened to the voice of Sarah” suggesting that not only was he easily persuadable but it also suggests that he views Sarah and her judgments with considerable respect. In effect, he obeys her. This all hints that their marriage is more than a simple transaction and that Sarah wields considerable power over him, at least in household matters. We know further that Sarah is a rich woman with a maid. Hagar, whose name sounds like a Hebrew word for outsider (Frymer-Kensky, 2002: 226), is a slave and therefore subject to Sarah, her mistress. These verses show us that Sarah had perhaps more power in the household than anyone else. Hagar, being a slave and a foreigner, is at the bottom of this household hierarchy.

Sarah’s suggestion to Abraham is telling in that it seems quite natural to her to give her maid to her husband as a surrogate. In fact, the ancient Mesopotamian legal code, the Code of Hammurabi, stated that a woman could offer her husband her slave as a means of avoiding the contention involved in his taking a second wife. The wife still held enormous power in the transaction in that she could demote the surrogate wife back to the status of a slave at any time (Frymer-Kensky, 2002: 227–228). For Sarah, offering Hagar to her husband was an acceptable compromise in that she would enhance her status by having children while also maintaining her power over Hagar. Though Hagar will be accepted as either a wife or a concubine, Sarah can demote her at any moment and, in any case, stands to gain even greater glory through using Hagar as a means to get children, because even though Sarah is rich and enjoys the confidences of her husband, “the narrative emphasis is on [women’s] biological role in overcoming infertility and producing offspring to establish ancestral lineage” (Meyers, 2012, Loc 488). Any children Hagar had would be considered Sarah’s, just as if Sarah had borne them herself.

These particular verses also show Sarah as a self-determined woman. She tells Abraham, “The Lord has prevented me from having children,” and yet she does not see this as her ultimate fate. Rather, she takes the initiative in finding a work-around in offering Hagar to Abraham, not as a companion wife, a person, but as a surrogate, as a tool (Trible, 1984: 11) to enhance her own status. It is true that Hagar is often later referred to as Abraham’s other wife, and it is true that there is much we don’t yet understand about marriage in ancient Israel, but, generally speaking, the difference between a wife and a concubine was the bride price (Reiss and Zucker, 2014). Hagar came free. By the standards of her time and culture, Sarah felt entirely free to offer up her slave as a surrogate, even in the face of God’s supposed will for her. This boldness in going against what appears to be God’s will for her is not punished but, in fact, is rewarded. As I will explain later, women are punished or rewarded based on whether their power grab was for themselves or whether it was to serve the interests of patriarchy and, more specifically, the creation of Israel.

One of the most interesting things about the bible is the way in which it can subvert power in one book, only to celebrate established power and hierarchy in the next. The same is true for views about women. While I agree with Carol Smith that looking for an overarching pronouncement on either power or the status of women in the bible is futile (Smith, 2001), I do maintain that power, in almost every case when it involves women, is related to her reproductive ability to grow the house of Israel. In such cases, what is really being celebrated is not women, but the victorious nation. Such an idea is not foreign to us even today. In my own home country, politicians regularly opine on the “browning of America” and movements such as Quiverfull (which counts the Duggers as adherents) function as a sort of shoring up of America’s perceived white roots, attempting to outbreed people of color. Quiverfull women, though under the headship of their husbands, are celebrated as heroes of the future republic each time they give birth. Israel is only different in the sense in that adoption in many cases seems to erase former nationality. Hagar’s son, though genetically half-Egyptian, will be Sarah’s son, fully Israelite. But the principle remains the same—homogenization and erasure.

These verses as well as the Rachel and Leah story in Genesis 30 speaks to another contentious issue of our own time—that of surrogacy and how it intersects with race and class. In Genesis 30, both Leah and Rachel are married to Jacob. Jacob loves Rachel more than Leah but it is Leah who bears him children at first. In her distress, Rachel gives her maid Bilhah as a surrogate in the same way Sarah gave Hagar. Bilhah, a slave with no power of consent or refusal, then bears a son. Of course, the son is really Rachel’s. Bilhah has absolutely no right to him. Not to be outdone once she has ceased to bear children herself, Leah then gives her own maid, Zilpah to Jacob, who then also bears a son. One by one, the sisters seek to gain power over each other, using their slave women as ammunition. The slave women, the women who birth these children, are as nothing. Leah and Rachel are seeking power within the confines of the principle of hierarchy. One must fall as the other rises.

Surrogacy plays an interesting part in the bible when it comes to issues of power. Sarah, a seemingly strong-minded woman, has seized the initiative in deciding for surrogacy which can be interpreted as self-determination in the face of powerlessness. However, some modern interpreters disagree. In both stories in Genesis, God is seen as having the ultimate power to open and close wombs. Indeed, all of the barren women in the Hebrew scriptures pray to God for mercy, asking God to grant them children (sons). One conservative Roman Catholic scholar in particular sees Sarah’s assertiveness in acting for herself as a sin as bad as Eve’s. In acting on her own, Sarah has subverted the power of God (Cristiano, 2011) and this interpretation informs the Roman Catholic Church’s opposition to surrogacy, birth control, and abortion today. Many feminists today who are also opposed to surrogacy object not that it is a subversion of God’s will, but that, like in the stories of Genesis presented here, surrogacy involves an inherent imbalance of power that is often class-based. Just like Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah, the modern surrogate mother is not anything more than a tool used by middle- and upper-class women to get children. The ownership of the contents of the uteruses of these economically poor women is displayed when adoptive mothers dictate what the surrogates can eat, what physical functions they perform, and even whether they can dye their hair (Pollitt, 1987). For at least 9 months of their lives, their bodies exist solely to serve rich women.

What is, of course, obvious when attempting a liberatory reading of these verses, is that both Sarah and Hagar and Rachel, Leah, Bilhah and Zilpah are living under the same patriarchal system. In fact, both Sarah and Hagar have both at one (and in Sarah’s case 2) point(s) in their lives been given away and have lived in sexual servitude. Earlier in Genesis, Sarah is abandoned by Abraham into Pharaoh’s harem in the same way that Hagar is forced into sexual servitude to Abraham. But the similarities between the two women do not create a sense of solidarity. Amy-Jill Levine says of this strange confluence, “. . . Sarah practices the same domination over Hagar that the men have practiced over Sarah. Indeed, her command to Abraham to ‘go into her’ mirrors his own command to ‘Say you are my sister so that it goes well with me’” (Levine, 2001: 21). The extra-Biblical literature contains a further reversal of roles. Genesis Rabbha describes Hagar as being Pharaoh’s daughter, a literal princess in the same way as Sarah’s name can be translated to mean “princess,” who is given to Sarah as an apology of sorts (Freedman and Simon, 1961). In this way, Sarah and Hagar’s stories are intimately connected, regardless of the power structures that keep them apart.

Competition and Distraction

Abraham sleeps with Hagar and right away she conceives. As a result, she begins to look down on Sarah as a wife who cannot do her duty. Hagar may be a slave, but by getting pregnant, she also shows that she is more than a tool, that she is a woman (Weems, 1991). In this way, the balance of power begins to go slightly awry. As Hagar gains status through becoming a pregnant co-wife, she begins to despise her mistress. After all, if there is to be a hierarchy (and hierarchy is necessary to patriarchy), her rise means that someone else needs to be lowered. Sarah is incensed by this treatment and, in all likelihood, her lack of foresight. She has unwittingly handed power over to Hagar in allowing her a role in the building up of Israel, the most important role for women in early Israelite society.

In the case of Leah and Rachel, the sense of jealousy and competition was fostered long before, when Jacob was tricked into marrying Leah. Jacob’s disdain for Leah and obvious preference for Rachel was a source of pain to Leah. But she was dutiful and presented Jacob with sons. Rachel, however, though loved, could not conceive. She may have had Jacob’s love but she did not have status or respect in the way that only motherhood could confer. And thus began the rivalry that resulted in both sisters pawning their maids as tools to Jacob to impregnate. Later, Leah, like Sarah, unwittingly invites her own downfall when she trades some mandrakes (thought to be efficacious for infertility) for a rare night with Jacob. While Leah proceeds to conceive again, so does Rachel eventually get pregnant. Finally, the playing field is leveled. Or is it? Where one interpreter sees the situation as a resolution of the conflict (Hawk, 2011), I argue that the conflict continues even after death. When the sisters die, Leah, as the faithful one who gave Jacob many sons, is rewarded with burial in the family tomb, while Rachel dies and is buried under a pillar on the way to Ephrath. Once again, it seems that hierarchy prevails even when the players are reversed.

Male Abdication

What is interesting about the conflict between Leah and Rachel and between Hagar and Sarah is that they shed light on a tool used by modern patriarchy to ensure competition, and thus division, among women, effectively hampering female collective power. Men frequently abdicate responsibility for their role in conflicts between women which in turn gives rise to the idea that women oppress and demean each other because it is in their nature and not because they are trying to survive and even thrive in an androcentric culture. Abraham is able to wash his hands of the situation by pushing all the emotional labor onto Sarah. Jacob, I suspect, had no qualms about the rivalry between his wives as he seems to have made it known that he did not love his first wife. Moreover, Jacob appears to be resentful of Leah because of the trick played on him by her father Laban. Either way, women are blamed for conflicts that stem from androcentric rules, laws, and norms.

Abraham’s response to the upset in his household is to tell Sarah that, “your maid is in your power; do to her as you please.” The Code of Hammurabi, referenced earlier, noted that a slave raised to the status of wife was to no longer act as a slave. Abraham’s statement, however, indicates that he is giving Sarah permission to demote Hagar and return her to slavery. One could argue that whether Hagar held the title of wife, concubine, or slave, it was all slavery in that her position did not allow her to consent or to refuse. In this way, Abraham and Sarah reassert the old class- and race-based hierarchy that is necessary for patriarchal harmony.

Sarah begins to reassert her dominance in the newly restored hierarchy by abusing Hagar. It is very likely that Sarah’s hatred and loathing are as much a result of her anger at her need for Hagar to stay and bear a child as for Hagar’s insolence. But “this ‘womb-with-legs’ is a person with her own viewpoint” (Frymer-Kensky, 2002: 228), and Hagar, having had a taste of status and perhaps a restored sense of humanity, decides to take her chances and flee into the wilderness. Her flight is an act of profound self-determination in that she has no idea what will happen to her, whether she’ll die or find freedom. All she knows is that her self-respect won’t allow her to stay another night. This flight has echoes of the escape of the enslaved African people in the United States. Like Hagar, many African slaves were used as breeders by their masters and despised by their jealous mistresses. And, like Hagar, later on, many slaves were sent back to their masters with no thought for the desires or needs of the enslaved.

It is during this wilderness flight that God speaks directly to a woman for the first time (Hawk, 2011; Trible, 1984), telling her that God will multiply her “seed” (a term usually reserved for males) (Hawk, 2011) and will build up a great nation through her son. In this, and many other ways, Hagar’s life and purpose resemble Abraham’s. Carol Smith offers that God, by giving Hagar a son and “descendants . . . that cannot be numbered for multitude,” subverts the abuse of power by making her powerful (Smith, 2001). While I would agree that Hagar is clearly being singled out for greatness in a similar way to Abraham, this greatness still follows the established pattern of giving women power and significance only when it suits male purposes, in this case narrating the story of the birth of Israel and the tribes of Ishmael.

Hagar is then ordered back to Sarah. Many interpreters have wondered why God would command an abused slave woman to go back to her cruel mistress. Yohanna Katanacho says, “this is not an endorsement of Sarah’s oppression but an encouragement to transform a situation by changing expectations and strategy” (Katanacho, 2010). Hagar is being called to meet abuse with love. I think such an interpretation, while well-meant, is ultimately dangerous to women, in particular, black American women with slavery in their family history. We sometimes encourage this narrative today in domestic abuse situations. Friends, family, and even abusive men themselves will often position the abused as a potential savior so long as they persevere, giving the abused a small sense of purpose and pseudo-power in return for compliance. Though it is harsh, I am much more inclined to side with Phyllis Trible who says that God is appearing to side with the abuser in sending Hagar back to Sarah (Trible, 1984: 16)

No more is said about abuse from Sarah and she herself is soon blessed by God with a son, Isaac. Whatever accord may have been reached between the time of Hagar’s return and Isaac’s weaning is broken when Sarah realizes that Ishmael is a possible contender for Isaac’s inheritance. This sense that others are stealing a favored child’s inheritance echoes down to us today in the form of resistance to affirmative action school admission policies and even something as trivial as free school lunch programs. The idea seems to be that when something is given to a less fortunate child, something else is being taken away from a more “deserving” child. This classist sentiment drives yet another wedge between women who would otherwise connect as mothers.

As a result of Sarah’s unease, she demands that Abraham cast Hagar and Ishmael out into the wilderness to survive on their own. Though Abraham is distressed at the idea, God tells him to obey Sarah and, “again the voice of Sarah, the matriarch, and the voice of God are one” (Newsome et al., 2012: 35). Abraham again submits to Sarah’s authority and does as he is asked, sending his family out into the wilderness of Beer-sheba with the promise that Ishmael will raise up a nation. In this way, the hierarchy rights itself again with Sarah and Isaac on top and Hagar and Ishmael on the bottom, thrown out with only a promise of future greatness.

Interestingly, Sarah and Hagar never actually dialogue with each other. Both are kept apart as Abraham acts as the go-between, a reminder that ensuring complicity with androcentric norms sometimes means not allowing women to get close enough to each other to compare notes.

The Sins of Patriarchy

When the Hebrew bible speaks explicitly about sin, it is usually in the context of sinning against God. This might mean failing to live up to a covenant or engaging in specified immoral acts. But even these pronouncements can be interpreted differently by different people. The Hebrew bible, for all its seeming specificity, is anything but straightforward and universally interpreted. Apart from issues of translation, we must deal with the question about whether pronouncements about women and other groups are descriptive (do they reflect how these groups actually behaved, what they thought?) or prescriptive (are they rules being set down to govern behavior that must be taken at face value? Are they a response to behavior?) And to complicate matters further, we must take into account the attitudes, experiences, and contexts that readers bring with them to the text. Therefore, when we seek answers in biblical writings to questions about women, their place, their motivations, we cannot simply take the text, or even what one interpreter says about it, as definitive. The bible is like any other piece of literature that must be interrogated carefully and fearlessly if we are to make sense of it for our own time.

This is especially the case when reading the bible to understand the influence of patriarchal culture on women’s lives then and now. Pronouncements about scripture have always been tinged with the contexts and attitudes of its interpreters. Though there exists a kind of fundamentalism that insists on biblical inerrancy, it is impossible to assume a perfect objectivity or that meaning is located unambiguously in the text. Rather, I think that a third- and fourth-wave reading of scripture insists that meaning is formed when the reader interacts with the text (Exum, 1996: 90). This implies that scripture that is used to oppress women today may not have had that intent originally, even scripture written from within a patriarchal society. When it comes to using scripture as a means of oppression, the fault is as much the interpreter’s as it is the text’s (Smith, 2001). However that may be, what it comes down to is that we can never be sure of ancient attitudes or what was “really” meant by a given verse. Nor should we necessarily care unless our intent is to investigate early attitudes themselves. When it comes to searching scripture as a means of uncovering a liberatory or recoverable reading, all we can do is interpret the words for a new generation, keeping in mind our own contexts, biases, and locations.

In looking at the above stories in Genesis from the location of a twenty-first-century woman fighting for liberation, what stands out for me are what I call the sins of patriarchy, more specifically, the ways in which both women and men are diminished and led to sin in order to establish or maintain hierarchy or “power over.” It would be naïve of me to assume that the bible questions hierarchy at all and my reading does not search for evidence that the biblical authors were critiquing it. In fact, the bible itself does not question hierarchy but instead questions how hierarchical power is used (Smith, 2001). There are moments in both stories in which hierarchies shift and the players are rearranged, but, in every case, the story ends with hierarchy still operational. Hierarchy is a given in patriarchy and it is anachronistic to assume that the writers were even aware of this, much less seeking to explicitly enforce it. Nonetheless, from my own location, as a woman concerned with power structures, my own interpretations of these stories must be concerned with hierarchies.

Not all interpreters agree with me that the stories begin and end with hierarchy firmly in place. L. Daniel Hawk, for instance, also reads both stories as a critique of hierarchy in which it is ultimately subverted. He believes that, in particular, the story of Leah and Rachel is one in which God, using God’s power to open and close wombs, seeks to bring equity to relationships. “In the Lord’s eyes, people matter more than human hierarchies,” he says, and that God’s intent in the story is to bring justice to the unloved (Hawk, 2011). However, I maintain that rather than leveling hierarchies, God, in the story, simply shifts who is on top at any given moment, maintaining the pyramidal structure with Bilhah and Zilpah always on the bottom and Rachel and Leah taking turns on the top. At no point does the pyramid collapse. So, while Hawk may argue that there is a certain kind of leveling in that neither Rachel nor Leah can be sure of their position within the pyramid at any given time, the pyramid itself still stands on the backs of their maids. My own interpretation of this story is that it shows how oppressed women of the ruling class will in turn visit oppression on their otherwise potential allies in order to maintain power and safety. That is just one sin of patriarchy that women can commit against each other while attempting to navigate a patriarchal culture.

Hawk says, “Read as paradigms, the stories of Hagar and Leah challenge us to align our vision of human worth with God’s over against a warped vision that assigns value according to the divisive systems and operations that configure a fallen world” (Hawk, 2011). I can agree only so far. I believe that such an interpretation only makes sense when the text is read against the grain. Where Hawk seems to see an open condemnation of human systems within the text itself, I believe the condemnation of systems only occurs when the reader interrogates the justice of God’s actions in pitting sister against sister. Where I can agree with Hawk is when he says that the Sarah and Hagar story shows that gender, class, ethnicity, and so on make no difference to God who can work God’s plan through anyone (Hawk, 2011). We most certainly saw this when God spoke directly to Hagar. But I believe, again, that this is a rescued reading, an interpretation that can only be arrived at when the text is read against the grain, as a cautionary tale and not, as Hawk would have it, a tale that ends with equality.

Power and hierarchy are convoluted and complicated. Often the players shift but leave the structure itself intact. This is because no one in ancient Israel was questioning the structure, even if they questioned what was happening inside of it. Hierarchy is absolutely vital in ensuring patriarchy. Hierarchy was also the accepted means to power, one in which women were often relegated an inferior position. When women wanted power or agency, however well-intended, it was only within this structure that it could be obtained. Therefore, in order for an individual woman to rise, another person had to fall. In the story of Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham, the convoluted power relationships were many—Abraham had the power and privilege of abdication of responsibility; God had the power of opening and closing wombs; Sarah had the power to command, oppress, and abuse Hagar; Hagar had emotional power over Sarah. The scramble to the top of the hierarchy is an attempt to curtail this anarchy and confusion and secure one’s position, however brief. Women, like other ancient Israelites, accepted this scramble as natural and, as a result, often oppressed their otherwise potential allies.

A final sin of patriarchy I want to address is how androcentric interests often circumscribe women’s agency under the guise of power. As noted earlier, power, when it is ascribed to women, tends to be power that is focused on family building. This creates a culture of competition among women while keeping them distracted from other ambitions. Cheryl Exum describes this beautifully when she, taking on the voice of ancient patriarchy, says, “. . . stay in your place in the domestic sphere; you can achieve important things there. The public arena belongs to men; you do not need to look beyond motherhood for fulfillment” (Exum, 1996). This sentiment allows women to believe that they are powerful while also fostering divisive competition—everything from expelling your slave woman and her son to modern-day mother shaming. This allowance of power to women in the domestic sphere is ultimately a disguised reward for complicity and a means to keeping women from banding together. After all, it is not bad that women want power, it just needs to be for the right reasons. In ancient Israel, women who obtained and used power for the good of Israel were heroes. Women, like Eve, who used self-determination to reach for enlightenment, are today still vilified. It is this fear of women’s power, used not in the service of androcentric ideals, that fuels the need to keep us feuding and not cooperating.

Liberating Ourselves, Liberating Each Other—How Do We Live Now?

A third-wave reading of the Sarah, Hagar, and Abraham and the Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah stories give us insight into racism, classicism, sexism, heterosexism, hierarchy, and power. That these themes can be interpreted from scripture thousands of years old attests to their relevancy. We see their echoes in popular culture, in shows such as “19 Kids and Counting” and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The stories of Sarah, Hagar, Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Zilpah continue to reverberate, even among unknowing consumers of media.

There is a difference though between consuming stories and savoring them, between watching them and thinking about them. If we take the time to reflect on the ways in which androcentric norms divide us, we are halfway to understanding our options. My mission in my ministry is to connect women fighting oppression with these timeless stories as a source of reflection, understanding, and nourishment. But having examined these stories, the question remains—how do we live now? What do we do with these insights? How do we translate what we learn into practice?

“One key feature of the story of Sarah and Hagar is the way in which the wellbeing of both these female characters are threatened by forces that prevent them from flourishing, that is to reach their full potential” (Claassens, 2013). Patriarchal values and customs, such as hierarchy, among others, kept Sarah and Hagar from even contemplating that their situations were similar. Despite class and racial differences, the two women had a common history of oppression and sexual servitude. In Renita Weems’ words, “In fact, the only things which separated the two women were a couple of cattle and some sheepskins (which in today’s language translates to a paycheck and a diploma)” (Weems, 1991). Weems is right on the mark in identifying what often separates women who live in sexist and classist cultures today. A great sin of the second-wave feminist movement was its inability to understand that the middle- and upper-class white experience was not the universal female experience and that we often climbed onto the backs of minority women in order to reach the top of the hierarchy ourselves. When we wanted to have careers, we hired poor women of color to scrub our floors or watch our children, paying them as little as possible so we could save for a cruise. And today, in a country in which an admitted sexual predator received a majority of the white female vote and has proceeded to gut reproductive healthcare for the poorest of women (usually women of color), I can absolutely see Weems point that black women constantly fear that when white women are given the opportunity, they will throw their black sisters under the bus (Weems, 1991). Weems’ own womanist interpretation of the Hagar and Sarah story is prophetic. It is a call to intersectional healing, listening, and seeing that should result in excising our (white women’s) complicity with oppressive structures. In religiously-based feminist communities, reading scripture from an intersectional perspective leads to understanding our own complicity. Once understood, the distraction techniques of popular politics no longer work to keep us apart and the real work of coalition building can take place.

Another result of a third- or fourth-wave reading of the stories is that they force us to confront the question—who is the oppressor? We are given easy answers in our culture and sometimes our own scriptural interpretations allow us to easily designate a single individual as “the oppressor.” But we must be careful in how we approach this question because it can quickly lead us right back to hierarchies. In readings in which Hagar was “the other woman,” “the foreigner,” or in which Rachel was seen as haughty, beautiful, and favored, we can sometimes unwittingly place these women at the bottom of the pyramid, thinking that we must do so if their wronged counterpart is to be raised. Alternatively, a third- and fourth-wave reading might cause us to identify so much with Hagar that we, who are so used to dualisms, might be inclined to name Sarah as an irredeemable oppressor. However, a reading that takes into account the many ways in which patriarchal practices can distort our relationships and thwart our attempts at reconciliation will hopefully lead us to the conclusion that questions of a neat dualistic model of oppression are too simplistic and, in fact, cause us to generate hierarchies of our own. Such a cycle serves not to liberate us but to continue to oppress using our newly reorganized pyramid as justification. Our task now, as feminist activists, is not to perpetuate cycles of oppression but to build coalitions with an intersectional consciousness. This does not mean that all activists who interpret these stories will come to the same conclusions that I have. We must still be willing to question who the oppressors are but we must do so with a consciousness that we are all at different times oppressors as well as victims. Sarah, Hagar, Rachel, and Leah are all both victim and oppressor because they live within a complex power structure that both ignores their desires and rewards their complicity. They are all both victim and oppressor in the way that women are when friending and feuding in a patriarchal society. As Levine says, “Both [Sarah and Hagar] are resourceful; both are blessed. Neither is a purely positive role model; neither is a purely negative example,” (Levine, 2001: 20). Understanding our role as both allows us to begin to find that common ground needed to forge alliances. More importantly, understanding how we are both victim and oppressor grants us the power to let down our guard and be more vulnerable with other women—an important step in building trust across race, class, and sexual orientation. That vulnerability also gives us the opportunity to lean on each other as we begin the process of healing.

I believe that it is absolutely vital that we, as spiritually minded activists, engage in third- and fourth-wave interpretations of scripture that inform our work in the secular world. These stories from Genesis don’t have to be taken literally or seen as irredeemably sexist and unrecoverable. Like, feminism itself, the stories can be both complex and prophetic and they can continue to nourish and educate us for the hard fight ahead.