When Richard McBee talks about Abraham and Sarah's marriage, he calls it "a deeply problematic human relationship," which leads him to ask, "Do we look at biblical figures as paradigms of behavior?"
McBee is not a therapist who thinks he is living in biblical times, nor is he an anti-theist seeking to undermine the bible. McBee, a painter, identifies as both a feminist and an Orthodox Jew, and as such, he is very concerned about how Abraham treated -- or rather mistreated -- his wife.
McBee is the first to admit that his biblical analysis is not original -- not by several centuries. "I don't believe for a moment that my 'problems' with the biblical text are unique," he says. When he painted Sarah in a box being smuggled through Egyptian customs, he was quoting from a midrash that states that Abraham hid Sarah in a box to protect her.
McBee's innovation is wondering how Sarah felt to be locked up inside of a chest, as well as shifting the conversation from a literary understanding to a visual one. "That's a shift that I think I wouldn't necessarily expect someone to do unless they are a visual artist," he says.
A series of 16 paintings of McBee's on this subject was recently on exhibit in Sarah's Trials at the Jewish Community Center of Manhattan.
McBee says he received "an extraordinary amount" of feedback about the show, some of which came from people who were disturbed.
One work that particularly disturbed some people (and which made me laugh when I first saw it in McBee's studio a few years ago) is "Isaac Comforted" (pictured).
"After Abraham buried me," McBee writes in the caption to the work, which is expressed in the voice of his protagonist, Sarah, "he sent to his family in Haran for a child-bride for Isaac."
In case you missed that point, the young girl in yellow holding Isaac's hand is his wife, Rebecca. Before yielding to the temptation to report McBee to To Catch a Predator, consider that the interpretation comes from the medieval commentator Rashi in his interpretation of Genesis 25: 20.
According to Rashi:
"He waited for her until she would be fit for marital relations -- 3 years -- and then married her," says Rashi, quoting from the Midrash Genesis Rabbah 57:1.
To the best of my knowledge, despite this midrash, McBee is the first artist to depict a 3-year-old Rebecca with a 40-year-old Isaac. He also decided to included the seated Abraham, mourning the death of his wife Sarah. In what he describes as a "totally atextual" move, McBee's Abraham turns back and looks at his son and his new bride.
"This pushes him to say, 'I have to see what my life is going to be about,'" McBee says of Abraham's revelation, "And he goes and marries this funny woman named Keturah, i.e. Hagar."
In the next painting, McBee depicts Abraham walking down some stairs to meet his own younger bride, Keturah, whom the midrash identifies with his previous wife-servant Hagar, mother of Ishmael. Nowhere does it say in the text that Abraham thought for a moment about Sarah when he married Keturah, but McBee paints the cemetery with Sarah's tomb in the background.
It should be clear at this point that the Sarah series is all about women -- and all about sex.
Another innovation of McBee's in the series comes in the first painting in the series (perhaps the prelude), where McBee reinterprets another midrash, this time about Abraham smashing all the idols in his father Terah's idol store. The young monotheistic Abraham, the Midrash says, decimated all the idols except one, and put a club in the hand of the sculpture that was still standing. When Terah demanded an explanation, Abraham said the idol, not he, was the culprit. Terah could hardly counter and say that idols couldn't possibly do such a thing without compromising the integrity of his products.
McBee's first painting shows Terah's idol shop stocked with sculptures of nude Venuses, as well as far eastern nude female figures and some Gothic Madonnas-with-children. In the second painting, McBee depicts Abraham smashing one of the Venuses.
This move of showing Abraham's struggle against idols representing the nude female form as foreshadowing and explaining Abraham's later marital problems is totally original on McBee's part.
It also explains the next two paintings in the series, where Abraham -- dressed as a Hasid-- sees no problem putting his wife in a box, and where an angel intervenes to protect Sarah from Pharaoh. According to the midrash, Sarah instructed the angel to whip, and it whipped Pharaoh.
Not only has McBee sexualized the angel (who wears a mini-skirt), but he shows Sarah recoiling as the angel faces the tuxedo-clad king.
"That wasn't something that I said 'Aha, I want her to recoil.' In trying to make her as a figure, she ended up pulling back a little bit, and only in retrospect did I say, 'Aha, it's not so easy,'" says McBee, explaining that Sarah might not have been able to so seamlessly assume a position of power.
"She's a woman given a very powerful tool to use at her own will, but I'm saying in fact it's more subtle than that," he says. "She's not that woman with her hands on her hips in total control. Maybe that kind of control provides its own problems."
In the interests of full disclosure, I co-write a weekly column on Jewish arts with Richard McBee at The Jewish Press, where we have worked together for more than five years. This article first appeared on my Houston Chronicle blog.
Follow Menachem Wecker on Twitter: www.twitter.com/mwecker
John W. Whitehead: The Right Not To Be Offended: The Supreme Court And Religion
"Woe to The Women, The Bible Tells Me So" by Annie Laurie Gaylor
Another good book on the above topic is "The Red Tent" by Anita Diamant
I'm glad that some people are starting to reflect on what these stories mean, but there's still a struggle for modernity going on in most religions. While it's good to see that people like McBee are starting to think about old stories in modern ways, it's an attitude that's changing very slowly among highly conservative or orthodox believers, who are often among the people who most need to change their ways.
The sky is blue too.
The civilization that worshiped the Goddess for thousands of years, bringing with them in the earliest times knowledge of agriculture, medicine, architecture, metallurgy, wheeled vehicles, ceramics, textiles and written language were gradually stamped out because the northern invaders wanted to control the paternity of children, and land that the priestesses of the Goddess temples controlled. The legends were re-written to disgrace the sacred sexual customs of Goddess worship, and because of that, all females were regarded as sinful and blamed for the downfall of man.
These will get you started. I highly recommend Gimbutas and Neumann for scholarly, yet understandable writing. Campbell is vital for comparative analysis. The Serpent and the Cross is great for understanding the Church's assault on the Old Faith. After reading literature from the region you should re-read the OT for some reflection. So many women in the OT were hurt or killed as casually as you might kill livestock. What did Lot's wife ever do to deserve her fate? She was female. Note how the OT attacks sentiment or empathy. This happens with an unbalanced male God. Once the Jews took His wife away YHWH was never the same.
"When God was a Women" by Merlin Stone and 'The Living Goddesses' by archeologist Marija Gimbutas.
Merlin Stone's book is partially based off of Marija Gimbutas's work.
The two prevailing themes in Old Testament, and Genesis specifically, were attacks previous cultures. Because, basically, that is how humans taught, with the use of myths. Myth, in a classical sense, means a story with an underlying truth. The cultures being attacked were the cultures that worshipped the Mother Goddess and Nature. We have to remember that we transitioned from being hunter gatherers, which were Animists - to pastoral nomads, which had combinations of worshipping the Mother Goddess and Nature. Women had a higher roles in society at the time because of their special "power".
See, women could bare children and most likely created agriculture. Which, IMO, was the tree of knowledge that instigated being kicked out of the Garden of Eden. Going from being hunter gatherers to agriculturists increased the workday by 300% so men were pissed;) As well, Men were kept in the dark about procreation. So, the combination of man's understanding of their role in procreation, which was hidden by women until that time - as well as being burdened with work with the advent of agriculture, caused the first gender war in the from of a new religion that subjugated women.
Who worshiped these goddesses?
The Middle Easterners?
What about the Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Mongolian, Khmer, Aztec, Incan, etc. civilization that did not have an Adam and Eve story?
No offense, the Middle Easterners (if I accept your premise that they were the goddess worshipers) might have been the earliest civilizations but all those technological breakthroughs were done independently by other civilizations and we owe our civilization to more than Christianity.
Ibn al-Haytham, of the 11th century has also been described as the "first scientist" for his development of the scientific method amongst philosophers of science. Of course, this and other contributions from the Arab world were down played and hidden amongst Christian scholars up until about the early 20th century. "Official" Christian history has Francis Bacon as the developer of the scientific method even though he learned it in Muslim Spain.
See:
George Sarton in the "Introduction to the History of Science,"
John William Draper in the "Intellectual Development of Europe"
Robert Briffault in the "Making of Humanity"
Abraham uses Sarah as a sexual object to attain political power and wealth. Good thing none of this actually happened.
Agree. Good thing none of this acutally happened.
Someone help me here.
I have read about the depiction of Mary Magdalena in the Gnostic gospel of Philip, and how Peter took a different view.
JC, it seems was quite the revolutionary - and nearly everything he taught has since been co-opted for largely banal reason.
If any of the stories are true, we don't know much about how he treated women. The stories about how he treated his mother don't paint a very nice picture.
He never refuted any of the misogynistic laws in the old testament.
And, if him and his god are supposed to be the same guy (trinity) then yes, he's got a pretty bad record ... he was horribly misogynistic in the old testament stories ... so, unless he *changed* (which a perfect god can't do) ... I don't think he would win any awards from any self respecting women.