Mind the Gap: An Introduction to Biblical Philology, Gender, and the Two Mothers

Biblical philology conventionally assumes the objectivity of the interpreter in recovering a single, stable meaning of its object of interpretation (the biblical text). This aim is imperiled by unexamined assumptions of this interpretive framework. The long tradition of male-dominated philology and theologically oriented scholarship obscures (gendered) dimensions in the study of language and its patterns in biblical texts. The following essay foregrounds the four main studies with a brief, focused sociology of knowledge in the field: how are certain types of metaphors deemed important objects of study for biblical philology while others remain unstudied? I propose a bias towards metaphors recognizable to the interpreters, while others are unrecognized as a result of the interpreters' social positioning.