Journal: Priscilla Papers
Volume: PP 36:1 (Winter 2022)
Article: I Tertius
Author: Jeff David Miller

PP 36:1 (Winter 2022) p. 2

I Tertius

Jeff David Miller

Cara Quinn created and graciously provided the artwork displayed on the cover of this issue of Priscilla Papers. Cara runs Know Your Mothers, a project seeking to empower women in the church by uncovering buried stories of women from the past (see https://knowyourmothers.com and @Knowyourmothers on Instagram). Cara also created the artwork for the fall 2020 cover of CBE’s Mutuality magazine and wrote the article, “Six Black Female Artists Christians Should Know,” in that same issue (https://cbeinternational.org/publication/mutuality-blog-magazine/print-archives).

The cover art is titled, “The Levite’s Concubine.” In the context of Know Your Mothers, it accompanies “Take My Story to Heart: Thoughts from the Levite’s Concubine in Judges 19, ” a creative writing piece by Kimberly Dickson. Kim also wrote the opening article in this issue of Priscilla Papers, “Rape, Dismemberment, and Chaos in Judges 19–21.”

When I became editor of Priscilla Papers, I knew I would be working with many articles about what could be called the core biblical texts, those texts over which complementarian/egalitarian debates are commonly held: Genesis 1–3, Deborah in Judges 4–5, Song of Songs, 1 Corinthians 11 and 14, Galatians 3:28, Ephesians 5, 1 Timothy 2, etc. And I knew, of course, that I would encounter other texts and themes as well.

What I did not expect, however, was how frequently articles submitted to Priscilla Papers would grapple with “texts of terror,” to borrow a now-common phrase from Phyllis Trible’s 1984 book, Texts of Terror: Literary Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Nevertheless, the first issue I worked on (fall 2014) included pieces on Jephthah’s daughter and on Tamar of 2 Samuel (by Rollin Ramsaran and Deirdre Brouer, respectively). In that same issue, we reviewed Philip Esler’s book, Sex, Wives, and Warriors (Cascade, 2011), which includes chapters on Bathsheba, both Tamars (Gen 38 and 2 Sam 13), and other alarming texts. Over the years, the horrors of Judges 19 keep coming up, again (“A Negative Model of Manhood in Judges 19” by Craig Keener, spring 1995), and again (“The Levite’s Concubine:...