Prof. Halyna Teslyuk of the Department of Biblical Studies of the Ukrainian Catholic University (UCU), herself an UCU graduate, spoke about women in the Bible in an interview with Vasyl Shandro of Hromadske [Civic] Radio. Teslyuk is also coordinator of UCU’s UNWLA Lectureship in Women’s Studies, established by a generous endowment of the Ukrainian National Women’s League of America.
Teslyuk: [In the Bible] we can look at certain accents, how men and women are presented. Such detailed, careful analysis of the images of men and women demonstrates that we can look for and hear these women’s voices, see the female view of history. We can hear women of the Old and New Testaments. We can also say that the patriarchal order from the biblical point of view is not the best. It is not a hyperpositive phenomenon. This is a phenomenon after sin, after the fall of Adam and Eve…
[In the first chapters of the Book of Genesis] we see that the Lord creates the Human Being, who is created in the image of God. The Biblical author emphasizes that both man and woman are bearers of the image of God. The text, written sometime in the 5th-6th century before our era, is revolutionary in those times, inasmuch as, for the nations which live around ancient Israel, to talk about an image often was to think, above all, about the king and his children. Generally, the bearers of the divine image were kings, men who were rulers. Here the author speaks of the fact that both man and woman are bearers of the divine image; they represent, they are responsible for the creation, they present themselves as divine messengers to this world.
[Shandro]: Is woman in Holy Scripture equal to men or without rights?
[Teslyuk]: If we talk about the public sphere, outside the domestic, we can say that women have no rights… But we also have a few examples in the Old Testament which definitely emphasize that a woman was appealed to and she made a decision…
If we want to have a balanced vision, we should avoid a certain radicalism in reading Holy Scripture. Only this kind of reading allows us to see the polyphony of voices which are present in Holy Scripture…
We should sit in a time machine and try to see in the categories with which the people who wrote these texts thought. In those times, women did not have the rights that men had, if we talk of the public sphere. Still, there are stories that say that, regardless of general tendencies, there are exceptions when women achieved their own rights and became the agents of their own fate and not only objects in someone else’s whims or stories.
