Stories that Victimize Women: Interpreting Challenging Old Testament Narratives
| This is one of three inspiring courses offered in ETF’s Summer Colloquium, scheduled August 18–23, 2025. This international study week includes lectures, various workshops and times for meeting and reflection.
Registration is open until 1 June 2025. |
In this course, students will explore the four “texts of terror” famously identified by Phyllis Trible—the stories of Hagar (Genesis 16 and 21), Tamar (2 Samuel 13), the Levite’s concubine (Judges 19), and Jephthah’s daughter (Judges 11). The goal of the class is to read the stories closely, in their narrative context and in conversation with various interpretive strategies, feminist criticism being chief among them. While the class will focus on close reading and narrative analysis, issues of literary criticism, canonical intertextuality, hermeneutics, theology, and ethics will also be considered as students seek to make sense of these and similar stories in the Hebrew Bible. Students should expect to gain skill in interpreting challenging Old Testament narratives, as well as a new appreciation for both the difficulty and promise of appropriating such texts for faithful living in the contemporary world.
By DR. MICHELLE KNIGHT (Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, Deerfield, USA)
| ETF’s Summer Colloquium in August 2025 features three inspiring courses which intersect theology, church and society. The two other courses are:
● “Theology and Practice of Hospitality: Challenges of Wartime” door Dr. Roman Soloviy (Eastern European Institute of Theology, Lviv, Ukraine) ● “Disability and Neurodiversity: Theology and the Practices of Faith Communities” door Dr. Léon van Ommen (King’s College, University of Aberdeen, UK) This international study week includes lectures, various workshops and times for meeting and reflection. Our Summer Colloquium is compulsory for ETF Open University students open to interested people with academic qualifications and can serve as additional in-service training for pastors, teachers, and other ministry professionals. |
