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VINDICATING THE VIXENS
Sandra Glahn dicusseses her book, Vindicating the Vixens, Revisiting
Sexualized, Vilified and Marginalized Women in the Bible
EOF: Hello, and good afternoon to Dr. Sandra Glahn. The author of Vindicating the
Vixens: Revisiting Sexualized, Vilified and Marginalized Women of the Bible. If that’s
not a provocative title, I don’t know what is.
GLAHN: Thank you, I’m really happy to be here.
Before we get started, I just learned that this book has been nominated as one of the
Religion finalists for the 2017 Indies.
Yes! Isn’t that fun?
That is so exciting. Good for you.
Coming out of nowhere. One of my colleagues
forwarded it to me, saying he had seen it in the
media. Like wow, that’s fun.
Cool. We will jump right in, then.
Vindicating the Vixens is a collaboration,
of which you are the editor, of an inter-
national team of scholars. Could you tell
us how the concept and execution of this
book came together?
“I start collecting who is
doing research on a spe-
cific person — what have
they found — and even-
tually I had enough peo-
ple — black/white, male/
female — from around
the world to revisit some
of these women that I
think we have wrongly
sexualized ...”
I would love to. It has been sort of a brain child
for about a decade for me. I was serving as the
Editor in Chief of my alma mater, but also the
educational institution where I teach, and that
put me in touch with some of our best thinkers
and writers and as I did more traveling around
the world as a journalist, I became increasingly
convinced that our Christian subculture bubble
was distorting our reading of the scriptures, in
many cases. For example, one of our authors is
an Arab scholar relooking at the Hagar story. As
a person who is in the majority in America, I read
Sarah and Hagar and I sort of wrongly overlook
that she is abusive. Sarah is abusive. We love
Sarah for lots of reasons, but let’s have an hon-
est assessment of her. And so I therefore missed
that God made incredible promises to Hagar and
her children because I was looking for the power
story. The love story. And so seeing that through
his eyes opened my eyes.
And then another scholar relooked at the woman
at the well and raised the question — this is a
Samaritan woman, Jesus meets her, he asks her
for a drink, he says, “Where is your husband?”
She says, “Sir, I have no husband.” Jesus says,
“Yeah, you’ve had five and the one you have now
isn’t your own.” As Westerners, we read that as
you’ve dumped five husbands, you’re an immoral
woman and now you’re shacking up with some
guy. But if we rewind back to what we remind
people every Easter, which is women did not
have a voice in a court of law and we also factor
in what we know about backgrounds, which is
that the number one cause of death for men at
this time is war, then this woman is probably
not a twenty-two year old flirt. She is probably
an older widow, maybe even missing a tooth or
two, who has had to resort to being a concubine
in order to eat. So as I’m traveling, as I’m meet-
ing people of different ethnicities looking at the
text, I start collecting who is doing research on
a specific person — what have they found —
and eventually I had enough people — black/
white, male/female — from around the world
to revisit some of these women that I think we
have wrongly sexualized, or, in the case of the