Jewish religious and cultural history and biblical authority have made the Bible one of the most important means by which woman's place in society has been defined down through the centuries. Not only is the Bible itself a partial historical document of the Jews, the way it has been received and analyzed has its own intriguing historical chronology. It is nearly impossible to accurately posit a specific date to any books or verses in the Hebrew Bible.1 The Dead Sea Scrolls, most probably written by a minor sect, the Essenes, are the oldest extant pieces of scripture. Prior to their discovery at Qumran near the Dead Sea in the 1940's, our oldest Hebrew scriptures are only one thousand years old. Yet invoking the Biblical text has been done to justify women's subordination and devaluation to men. As the deity for the Hebrews came to be a "He", this led to the exclusion of women from power in the family, the state, and public worship. .
Women scholars of the Hebrew scriptures did not materialize until the late twentieth century. The famous women's suffrage leader, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and others attempted in the nineteenth century to get women commentators to explore and explain a woman's perspective on the Bible. However, it was not until 1964 that Margaret Brackenbury Crook, a professor of Biblical Literature, published a study on the status of women in Judaism and Christianity entitled Women and Religion. When the women's movement followed the civil rights movement in the 1960's, an increasing number of women were able to attend seminaries. Now feminists' study of the Bible is one of the most important areas in contemporary biblical research. There is not a single woman's perspective on the Bible, but a rich variety of insights shaped by women's culture, class, ethnicity, and religious community. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible is the latest attempt to make the Bible gender neutral, but gender relating to God was not addressed.
