The Audacity of Achsah
I am a Christian who believes:
that God loves everyone unconditionally,
that every person is, first and foremost, good in the eyes of God,
that homosexuality is not a sin,
that the gospel is woke,
that God ordains women to preach the gospel,
that our climate crisis is real and demands immediate action,
that science and faith can coexist
and that love is the most important thing.
Because I believe these things, every so often, I get asked: “How can you believe these things in spite of what the Bible says?”
And I need to make it clear that it’s not in spite of what the Bible says that I believe these things. It’s because of what the Bible says. It’s because I take the Bible seriously, if not always literally.
It’s because I believe that the most important command is to love God and love one’s neighbor, and that our love for our neighbor should be complete, whole, and genuine, just as God’s love is for us.
And it’s because of my research into just what the Bible is actually trying to say, and how the Bible has been misinterpreted and misunderstood over the years, usually in ways that reinforce the fears and prejudices of the ones doing the interpreting.
And all this, I’m going to demonstrate to you, using today’s scripture.
At the start of today’s story, Achsah’s father Caleb trades her away to a man named Othniel in exchange for some land.
So, just like Rizpah (who we heard about last week), Achsah lacks power and agency and even the right to her own freedom, just because she is a woman.
By now you know that that was a common experience for women in Bible times. Women did not have rights. Society was patriarchal; the men made decisions for and about the women.
In some ways, women really were like slaves. They were the property of men.
And yet, if you heard my sermon about Shiphrah and Puah a few weeks ago, or my sermon about Rizpah last week, you know that, in the Bible, women have a way of going against the norms of society and exercising initiative, even manipulating the men who control them in order to preserve life or bring about justice.
So: Who thinks Achsah will also speak out and challenge the patriarchy of her male-dominated world?
That is exactly what Achsah does.
According to the scripture, after she was sold for some land by her father Caleb, Achsah then turns around and asks Caleb to give her some land… Actually, she doesn’t even ask. She’s bold, and audacious, and she just says, “Give me some land.”
It’s very short—it happens very quickly—and it’s easy to read through this story and not think much of it, until you realize what boldness and audacity Achsah had, to make this request. Getting involved in matters of property and finance was something women just didn’t do! And, according to what was then considered acceptable behavior, a woman would never make such a request; the proper thing would be to leave it to her husband.
Women just didn’t take part in public affairs.
Think of the disciples, who were shocked (shocked, I tell you!) to find Jesus engaging in conversation with the woman at the well, talking to her about theological issues, treating her as an equal…
…or think about how shocked they were when they saw how Jesus affirmed Mary, who chose to sit and listen with the men rather than help Martha in the kitchen (which would have been the proper thing for a woman to do). Martha said, “Jesus, tell her to help me!” And Jesus replied, “Nah, she’s good.”
What’s doubly surprising in the story of Achsah is that, after she boldly demands more land from Caleb, Caleb doesn’t object. He says, “Yeah, sure; here you go.” And he gives her not just any land, but good land, with springs of fresh, flowing water.
This is Caleb, Achsah’s own father, who traded her off as property, treating her as less than human,.. now engaging in business with her as if she had equal status of a man, because she was bold enough to insist on being treated that way.
Many people today read right past this story and don’t think much of it, but for some, it presented a problem, because it challenged male-dominated ways of thinking. This was a challenge to people in ancient times, who lived in patriarchal societies, just like the stories of Shiphrah and Puah and Rizpah were.
But Achsah’s actions don’t just challenge the patriarchy of an ancient male-dominated world; her actions (and the actions of many other women in the Bible), continue to challenge patriarchy and notions of male superiority in our world today…
So much so, that in some versions of the Bible, the translators have altered the story. They’ve altered it, because they couldn’t handle the challenge to their patriarchal way of thinking.
In the story of Achsah, it’s actually quite easy to do. Just change the phrase, “she urged him” to “he urged him…” And change “she said” to “he said” and voila! Now it appears that Othniel, her husband, does the speaking, and the challenge to male superiority has disappeared!
They changed it, because when they read this story, they thought, “that can’t be right,” because they couldn’t imagine a story in which a woman acts so boldly and with such audacity.
So they changed it. They “fixed” it. So that, in some translations, it’s Othniel her husband doing the talking, instead of Achsah.
Another example: there is an apostle mentioned in the New Testament, whose name is Junia. Junia is a female name.
But some translations of scripture list this apostle as Junias instead of Junia. Junias is a male name. The name got changed, because when the translators came to this passage, they said to themselves, “that can’t be right.” In their bias and prejudice, they assumed there were no female apostles, so they changed Junia to Junias.
And just like that, the challenge to their biases and prejudices is no longer in scripture.
You see the same thing in the Bible in regards to homosexuality. There really are no Bible passages that explicitly refer to homosexuality as we understand it today. (Say it again?) And the word homosexuality isn’t even in the Bible—or, at least, it wasn’t, until the Revised Standard Version of the Bible was published in 1946.
In 1946, the translators of scripture, who bore their own prejudices against homosexuals, tweaked the meaning of Bible passages so that the Bible would more closely mirror their own prejudices and biases, and so that Bible passages that really are about something else entirely are now misinterpreted as condemning homosexuality.
So when you study the Bible and use scholarly tools to understand what it’s really saying, you find nothing in the Bible that is against homosexuality as we understand it today.
In fact, for every one of those issues I mentioned at the beginning of my sermon, I can provide examples of how people have misinterpreted or misused scripture to support their biases and prejudices, when, in fact, scripture does no such thing.
Next week, we’ll hear one of the parables of Jesus, and I’ll tell you now: sometimes the meaning of parables gets changed, because what it actually means is too challenging to the ideas and prejudices of the one reading it.
We want something tamer. So the meaning gets changed.
In a few places, we see this happening already in scripture itself. There are places where, in Luke’s gospel, for example, Jesus tells a parable, and then there is a sentence at the end that says something like, “Jesus told them this so that they might have faith,” or something like that.
So, basically, Luke took this story of Jesus, and then added his own interpretation to it.
But sometimes, if you read the story, the interpretation doesn’t really make sense. It doesn’t match.
Because, for some reason, Luke felt compelled to include this story/parable, and yet also felt compelled to add his own explanation of what the story means, which is obviously not the point the story is actually making.
Why did Luke do this? Probably because what the story really meant was too challenging for Luke to accept.
Every parable of Jesus is meant to turn our world upside down. Every parable is a challenge to some deeply-held belief or understanding. Every parable is a threat to the prejudices and biases people have, then, and now.
The Bible challenges our preoccupation with wealth and consumerism. The Bible challenges our preoccupation with weapons. The Bible challenges our preoccupation with gender roles. The Bible challenges our preoccupation with tribalism, and our obsession with determining who’s “in” and who’s “out.”
And when our deeply held beliefs and biases are challenged, one way we respond is to downplay the challenge, to insist that the Bible doesn’t really say what it’s saying, and to change the story so that instead of challenging our biases and prejudices, the Bible ends up supporting our biases and prejudices.
And so, that’s how the Bible gets misinterpreted, to say something that it doesn’t really say. And people come up with other ideas of what they think the Bible says, that they think are important, because those ideas (the ones they’ve come up with) don’t challenge their own biases and prejudices.
And they’ll latch on to ideas, like “homosexuality is evil,” or, “women should be submissive” or, “science is contrary to faith,” and ignore the real issues that dominate the pages of scripture: things like justice for the poor, and welcoming the stranger.
But the gospel is about justice, and inclusion, and affirmation—even and especially of those we find it hard to include and affirm. As Catholic priest Richard Rohr says, “if your notion of heaven is based on exclusion of anybody else, then it is by definition NOT heaven.”
This is a conclusion he and I and so many other pastors and theologians and people of faith have come to, and it’s not in spite of how we read scripture or how we understand God.
And that’s why I keep on reading books and articles written by knowledgeable Bible scholars, so that I myself can continue growing in understanding of scripture. In fact, the most helpful books for me are those written by people who have often had the Bible used against them: female Bible scholars and queer Bible scholars and indigenous Bible scholars and immigrant Bible scholars. They help me see more clearly what the Bible is really all about.
And they challenge me to rethink the biases and prejudices that influence how I have interpreted scripture.
I want scripture to speak for itself; I want scripture to challenge me, and to challenge my biases and prejudices, so that I can become more loving, more welcoming, more affirming, which is in fact what God calls us to be.
I want to read the Bible in a way that “seeks justice, loves kindness, and walks humbly with God,” as our BKCC mission statement and Micah 6:8 command.
I want to let the Bible be the liberating, life-giving word of God that it is.
So that’s why I am a Christian who believes:
that God loves everyone unconditionally,
that every person is, first and foremost, good in the eyes of God,
that homosexuality is not a sin,
that the gospel is woke,
that God ordains women to preach the gospel,
that our climate crisis is real and demands immediate action,
that science and faith can coexist,
and that love is the most important thing.
