Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 34:3 (Summer 2020)
Article: Book Review The Gospel According To Eve: A History Of Women’s Interpretation By Amanda W. Benckhuysen (Intervarsity, 2019)
Author: Allison M. Quient

Book Review
The Gospel According To Eve: A History Of Women’s Interpretation By Amanda W. Benckhuysen (Intervarsity, 2019)

Allison M. Quient

Allison Quient holds an MDiv from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, a ThM from Fuller Theological Seminary, and is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen (Scotland) in the areas of NT studies and systematic theology. She and her husband, Nick, co-manage an online repository of ministry and academic resources at SplitFrameOfReference.com.

The gospel is indeed good news for women. However, as Dr. Amanda W. Benckhuysen observes, it also “tends to come to women with strings attached.” Men may be free in Christ, yet “women assume the yoke of a new law—restrictions and requirements assigned to them” by virtue of their gendered status as the “weaker vessel.” To depart from this gender ideology “is to reject God’s divine commands and undermine the authority of God’s Word, the Bible” (1–2).

Yet not everyone, and certainly not the female interpreters this book surveys, agrees that the Bible teaches that women are the weaker vessel. The strengths of The Gospel According to Eve are that it makes the interpretive insights of numerous women accessible and gives attention to how women have challenged the way Eve has been viewed as archetypal for all women. Although Eve has predominantly been interpreted as a negative representative for all women, this has not been without dissent.

This book provides a sampling of female interpreters, primarily from the Christian West, ranging from the fourth to the twenty-first century and, secondarily, interacts with some of the influential interpreters or interpretations from their time. While not all interpretations presented are uniform or “feminist,” reading about centuries of interpretation makes it evident that each generation of women interpreters has had to reinvent the interpretive wheel, arriving at many similar, yet independent, female-friendly conclusions. Toward the end of the book, readers are presented with a woman’s representation of Eve and an “alternative reading of Scripture, reflected in the voices of women and their interaction with Genesis 1–3” (2).

The Gospel According to Eve, as well as works such as the Handbook of Women Biblical Interpreters,1 are necessary in the quest to overcome the neglect of female voices in biblical interpretation. One cannot help but wonder what further interpretive and theological reflective insights could have been possible if each generation were aware of the women who came before them. And one can only consider what sorts of reflection could have been possible if others also shared the keen awareness t...