Narrative Lectionary Key Verse for Today
“He sent word to Moses, ‘I, your father-in-law Jethro, am coming to you, with your wife and her two sons.’ Moses went out to meet his father-in-law; he bowed down and kissed him; each asked after the other’s welfare, and they went into the tent.”
NL Daily Devotion for Monday, June 20, 2022
by R. M. Fergus, Clergy Stuff
What’s wrong with this picture? The name of the passage is “Moses Reunites with His Wife.” But the text is about how Moses reunites with his father-in-law. Is his wife even there? His sons? Does he hug them when he sees them? Do they matter at all?
The whole thing just smacks of patriarchy. What matters is the adult men. The wife and children are property—they have no autonomy and no value other than in how they can benefit Moses. It makes me mad. It’s just another example of how deeply inextricable most of scripture is from misogyny. Sometimes it’s enough to make this Christian woman want to toss the whole lot.
But of course I don’t. As a woman, I’m already conditioned to work twice as hard as a man to be recognized half as much. So I’m not put off by the idea that I have to work diligently to find my place and women’s voices in a text I regard as the Word of God. I can imagine Moses’ wife, rather than passively accepting her lot, finding the other wives and mothers in the Israelite camp and being received into community with joy. I can see her and the other women doing the hard work of making their nomadic life in the desert not just tolerable but fulfilling. While Moses is off being the big shot for God’s cloud-and-fire presence, his wife is deeply immersed in communion with God’s loving, mothering, and nurturing presence, Who is just as powerful a force in the lives of the Israelites (if not more so) than the scary God on the mountain.
Just sayin’.
Where do I find the voices of the marginalized between the lines?
