Reading for Orpah: Rethinking the Bible’s Marginal Characters (Part Two)

The Bible and Ethics is an emotional class for me to teach, and it is often an emotional class for my students to take. 

In most other classes that I teach, I try to put brackets around our conversations, like bumpers for novice bowlers. I encourage students to stay in the text of the Bible or in the world of its composition: “Okay, but where to you find that idea in the passage you just read?” I’ll ask repeatedly. Or: “That sounds like a pretty modern idea. Can you find evidence in the text that our ancient authors would have understood that concept?”

But in my class The Bible and Ethics the conversation zigs and zags between ancient worlds and more modern ones. We’ll spend an entire class session on how seventeenth-century American Puritans applied the biblical story of Amalek^[1] to their own experiences. Or how the 1995 Disney film Pocahontas might shed light on the Bible’s account of Rahab.^[2] The Bible and Ethics class is about what biblical laws and stories meant in their ancient contexts. But it’s also about what these passages do: both the actions they have inspired in others as well as the – sometimes predictable, sometimes surprising – attitudes they generate within us. 

In that respect, this class often gets personal, even emotional. We shudder together at Cotton Mather’s 1689 sermon^[3]that urges his listeners to beat Native Americans “small as the Dust,” just like the Israelites annihilated the Amalekites. Students prickle at Lori Rowlett’s suggestion that Rahab can be read as a colonizer’s dream girl,^[4] all too eager to capitulate to invaders. “I talked to my mom about this story” – one student told me after class – “and we both agreed that Rahab is brave. Besides, what other choice did she have?” She flushed a little. I did too, weighing whether to simply affirm this student’s complaint or to rearticulate the Rahab-as-colonial-fantasy argument. In the end, I tried to do both.

In Part 1 of this series,^[5] I explained the invitation I issue in this class for students to read biblical texts through the eyes of marginal characters. I define marginal characters as individuals that experience violence or are otherwise silenced; or those who are represented as “other” by virtue of their perceived ethnic difference, for example. 

During the course of the semester, we read examples^[6] of scholars – ancient and modern; religiously devout and not – who have done this kind of work. I then give students the opportunity to try their hand at this kind of biblical rewriting. The idea, again, is to expand our consideration of who is human and who deserves our attention. I tell my students that, at its heart, this is an exercise all about paying attention: both to the surprising details the text itself may yield about this overlooked character and also to what you experience in the act of rewriting this account. Paying attention both to the Bible and to your own of experience retelling its story, I tell them, will offer you crucial information.

Here are the directions I give students for this assignment: 

1. Select a story we have discussed in our class. Within that story, choose a character that sits on the margins of this story, by dint of the violence inflicted upon them or because of their perceived outsider status.
2. Each rewriting should be between 400-500 words and should consciously inhabit the perspective or direct its narrative gaze on a marginalized character. (This doesn’t mean you have to adopt that character’s first-person perspective although you may choose to do that).
3. Each rewriting should be a contextually-conscious and detailed reworking of the biblical text it is based on. That means that it needs to be footnoted, clearly deploying our secondary reading (reading 3-4 references). It should also directly reference the biblical story (4-5 references). Both sets of footnotes should explain how the specific details of the assigned reading have informed your creative reimagining. 
4. At the end of the document you must include a brief (300 word) reflection that responds to the following questions: (1) Why did you choose this character? (2) What emotions or features of this character’s experience were you attempting to convey? (3) What made this assignment challenging? (4) What was your major take-away from this assignment? If it changed the way you interpret the passage you selected, explain that. If it did not, explain that too.

This assignment tends to bring up big and varied feelings in students. Students often express frustration with the absence of biblical content to go on and the demands this assignment makes on their creativity. Some struggle to present their chosen characters as intelligible. Others have told me that imagining the lives and losses of these figures have made them feel a spectrum of defensiveness, anger, liberation, and sadness. This assignment often reveals something to the student about how they have learned to read the Bible. It showcases the power of both the biblical story and their received lens for interpreting it. At its best, this assignment also gives them sense of how it might feel to read otherwise.  

Notes & Bibliography