I remember meeting Phyllis Trible for the first time in August of 1990. I had just arrived as an international master’s student at Union Theological Seminary, where she was the Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature—a position she held from 1980 to 1998. I had to get her signature to register for my fall classes, as online registration did not yet exist. I was climbing up the final steps of the increasingly narrow spiral staircase when I saw Phyllis waiting outside her office. Slim and slender, she wore her usual khaki pants with a belt and a tucked-in shirt. Her black hair framed piercing blue eyes that welcomed me into her office as we greeted each other. I immediately thought, She is a real feminist! No skirt or big jewelry, just no-fuss business attire and a contained but friendly smile. I registered for her course on literary criticism and the Bible, understanding that I would have to work very hard there. A year later, I was her doctoral student.
Phyllis’s mentorship and later her friendship have been a cherished gift over the decades, and along with many others I mourn her recent death at age 92. Fortunately, I spent a delightful Sunday brunch with her barely three weeks before she died. She ordered avocado toast and for dessert a slice of delicious chocolate cake. I will always remember fondly her vibrant company during our last meal together.
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Phyllis was born in Richmond, Virginia, on October 25, 1932, a little more than a decade after women became eligible to vote in the United States. At the time, there were no feminist Bible scholars. Mary Ely Lyman (1887–1975) became the first female lecturer at Union in 1929, but she did not teach feminist exegesis. Phyllis grew up in a Southern Baptist church, and later she told the story of a female missionary who she met while attending Bible camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. One morning, the missionary asked the group of young girls, “Little girls, everything God created got better and better. What was the last thing God created?”
The group chirped up in unison: “man.”
“No, woman!” the teacher countered. This early exchange was a transformative moment for young Phyllis.
Many years later, she took this memory as one of the clues to reinterpreting Genesis 2–3 in response to Mary Daly, the mother of feminist Christian (and post-Christian) theologies. Teaching at Boston College, Daly lectured in town and elsewhere. Around 1971, Phyllis, who at the time was a professor at Andover Newton Theological Seminary, attended one of Daly’s lectures. Daly claimed that feminists should toss out the Bible, freeing themselves from all hostile patriarchal traditions and institutions. She illustrated the pervasiveness of biblical sexism with the story of Eve causing the fall. She stated that feminism and the Bible were enemies. Phyllis listened intently. Back at home, she thought, I have been a feminist since birth, and I love the Bible.
Then she went to work demonstrating that Genesis 2–3 can be read in ways that are compatible with feminism. In a March 1973 Andover Newton Quarterly article on the subject, she asserted that the biblical text needs to be “reread to understand and to appropriate.” The same month, she published an article called “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation” in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. There, she acknowledged that readers, asking different questions, “may discover a different understanding” of the Bible. Without saying so explicitly, Phyllis was recognizing the significance of a reader’s social location for the hermeneutical process—at a time when few Bible scholars did. She exegeted against the belief that Genesis 2–3 affirms “male dominance and female subordination,” thus countering “the traditional exegesis of male supremacy.” The result was a reading of the Eve and Adam story in which “the last may be first,” in direct opposition to the long defended view of Eve as “a second, subordinate, inferior sex.”
In other words, Phyllis’s feminist hermeneutics was deeply intertwined with the second feminist movement of the early 1970s. Already in 1973, she openly noted this connection: “Visiting the Garden of Eden in the days of the Women’s Movement, we need no longer accept the traditional exegesis of Genesis 2-3.” Her social location in the early 1970s was thus instrumental to her exegesis. Since the feminist movement was buzzing and bursting at the seams, Trible’s work energized many, often younger, scholars in biblical studies—along with countless Christian preachers who found her interpretations both accessible and preachable.
After graduating from Meredith College in 1954, Phyllis did graduate studies at Union Theological Seminary in 1956 and was awarded a PhD in the joint Union/Columbia University program with a thesis on the book of Jonah in 1963. She studied with James Muilenburg (1896–1974), who dazzled many students, including another famous Union graduate of Phyllis’s generation, Walter Brueggemann (1933–2025). As was customary at the time, Phyllis did not publish her doctoral thesis (although many decades later she included her reading of Jonah in a book on rhetorical criticism). Her living room was filled with many small and large toy whales, whales of glass and clay, and photos of whales, always reminding her of a favorite Sunday school story from her childhood and of the theological meaning it offers: There is hope even when we are in the belly of a beast.
Phyllis never shared much about her family of origin, her upbringing, or life in the segregated South in the 1930s and 1940s. Everybody knew she loved living in New York and exploring the city’s many niches and corners. She also lived in Jerusalem for a year and spent a sabbatical leave in Kyoto, where she acquired a love for Japanese teas and customs. She never married or had children. However, she was never alone, as patriarchal storytelling wants people to believe unmarried women are. Her partner of many decades died only five years ago, in October 2020. And many of her students consider her our exegetical mother, the one who gave us the intellectual space to become the feminist teachers, scholars, and exegetes we are today.
Her numerous honorary doctoral degrees demonstrate how known and admired she was—not primarily for her exegesis of Jonah but rather for her close feminist readings of both pivotal and neglected biblical prose and poetry. In her first book God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978), she mesmerized the exegetical and ecclesial world with her rhetorical exegesis, most famously on the Eve and Adam story in Genesis 2–3 (“A Love Story Gone Awry”).” The book also includes chapters on the book of Ruth, the love poetry in the Song of Songs, and the Hebrew root rhm (mercy, compassion) as it relates to the noun rehem (womb). Phyllis’s faith-oriented exegesis shines through in the book’s foreword, in which she explains that she employs a feminist hermeneutics “to recover old treasures and discover new ones in the household of faith.” Her conviction that feminists ought to translate their faith traditions without sexism has been appreciated around the world, as exegetes, theologians, ethicists, historians, preachers, and practitioners of various faith traditions have employed Trible’s notion of depatriarchalizing the Bible.
Her second book, Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (1984), is her most often cited work. Limited to the biblical stories of four female characters—Hagar, the royal Tamar, an unnamed woman in Judges 21, and Jephthah’s daughter—Phyllis’s feminist reading came down to earth like a thunderbolt. Her statement of what’s at stake in these narratives found widespread approval: “Ancient tales of terror speak all too frighteningly of the present.” Religious or not, readers were electrified by Phyllis’s literary readings.
At first, commentators gave more attention to the substance of her work than to her methodology. As Brueggemann wrote in his foreword to the book, her readings get “the interpreter out of the way so that the unhindered text and the listening community can directly face each other.” Readers also often overlooked, at least initially, the implications of Trible’s stance that storytelling is “a trinitarian act that unites writer, text, and reader.” Those theoretical debates on method would come later. What moved feminist and non-feminist readers alike was Phyllis’s exegetical insistence that biblical texts are more than antiquarian relics of a bygone world. Her highly selective, even minimalistic literary interpretations demonstrated that the Hebrew Bible could be studied with feminist concerns in mind.
The intellectual boldness, exegetical courage, and theological independence that it took to write both books are emblematic of Phyllis’s personality. When she retired from Union in 1998 and helped build Wake Forest University’s School of Divinity, for a few years also serving as an academic dean, her colleagues would often tease her: You don’t want to be a dean, do you?
No, in her heart of hearts Phyllis wanted to be a poet. She mentioned this to me once as we walked down Greenwich Avenue after a lovely meal at Anglers and Writers on Hudson Street. (I almost fainted on the spot, knowing that she was going to be a reader of my doctoral thesis.) But was she not a poet of exegesis? Consider how she compares the first woman to the first man, in sharp contrast to the endless patriarchal blame of Eve for eating the fruit. Phyllis supposes:
Why does the serpent speak to the woman and not the man? Let a female speculate. If the serpent is more “subtle” than its fellow creatures, the woman is more appealing than her husband. Throughout the myth she is the more intelligent one, the more aggressive one, and the one with greater sensibilities. . . . She understands the hermeneutical task. In quoting God she interprets the prohibition (“neither shall you touch it”). The woman is both the theologian and translator. She contemplates the tree, taking into account its possibilities. . . . Thus the woman is fully aware when she acts, her vision encompassing the gamut of life. She takes the fruit and eats. The initiative and the decision are hers alone. There is no consultation with her husband. . . . She acts independently. By contrast the man is a silent, passive, and bland participant. . . . The man does not theologize; he does not contemplate; he does not envision the full possibilities of the occasion. His one act is belly-oriented, and it is an act of acquiescence, not of initiative.
What a reversal of patriarchal storytelling!
Reinterpreting the power dynamics of “female and male” (the title of one of Trible’s courses at Union in the 1980s) was central to her work. Trible wanted to reverse sexism, misogyny, and patriarchy in biblical interpretation, holding on to her two loves: the Bible and feminism. In her mind, the task was faith-oriented. Since she taught mostly future ministers and Christian leaders, her teaching aimed to help them hold on to the Bible, their faith, and justice work. Her poise and quest for excellence intimidated many of her students. Nevertheless, the students in her introductory Old Testament courses would give her a standing ovation on the last day of the semester. When I was her TA, I witnessed it several times.
Many of us in biblical studies are grateful for the bold spirit with which Phyllis published at a time when feminist Old Testament books were not yet being produced. Her work has encouraged a tsunami of feminist scholarship in biblical studies, work which collectively has moved into hermeneutical, methodological, and intersectional directions that Phyllis could not have imagined when she developed her feminist-literary approach in the 1970s. She was simply trying to reconcile her deepest concern—feminism—with her theological understanding of the Bible. This work, she believed, was her calling. When I asked her in a 2009 interview what made her become a feminist, she grinned and answered, “I had no conversion experience. None at all. I was never not a feminist.”
Born a feminist, Phyllis lived into her calling with tenacity, integrity, and an enduring love for the Bible. May she rest in peace.
