Josephine Butler

I finished up The Bible As a Human Witness to Divine Revelation today. Today, I want to comment on Marion Ann Taylor's "'Cold Dead Hands Upon Our Threshold': Josephine Butler's Reading of the Story of the Levite's Concubine, Judges 19-21."

Taylor talks about Josephine Butler, a nineteenth century activist in England. Butler had a heart for outcast women. She "worked with women in the local workhouse and rescued young prostitutes from the streets, often bringing them home to be nursed back to health or to die in peace." She also "campaigned for women's rights in education, law, and employment." She opposed brothels and the trafficking of women and children, as well as the Contagious Diseases Act, which was intended to protect men from women with venereal disease. Butler's problem with the law was that it subjected women to abusive investigations, and that it did not address the issue of men with venereal disease (making it discriminatory).

Butler appealed to the story in Judges 19-21 to support her cause. She highlighted the helplessness of the man's concubine, who, after being gang-raped, flung her hand over the threshold, which separated the safety of the indoors from the horror that she had experienced outside. Butler referred to the war that the rape of the concubine ignited within Israel, contending that poor treatment of women could lead to societal instability. And she appealed to Jesus' kindness to outcast women.

Butler was "not formally trained to interpret Scripture," and she was unaware of "nineteenth-century scholarly debates about Scripture's nature and pre-history". But renowned writers praised her exegesis, including John Henry Newman, who remarked that "She reads Scripture like a child and interprets it like an angel." According to Taylor, Butler's interpretation of Judges 19-21 "models an early feminist approach to interpretation at a time in history when such approaches were neither recognized nor even named."

Taylor's essay makes me think about the role of religion in politics. Should it play absolutely no role whatsoever---as if religion is a matter of personal taste, and thus should not be used to tell people how to live their lives? But what about the times when religion champions the vulnerable and the oppressed? (I would include the unborn under this category, but I recognize that there are women who deem anti-abortion legislation to be oppressive.)