ABSTRACT
A critical feminist reading of the Bible entails perspective, experience and commitment. The perspective is that of the multi-faceted social location occupied by women. Perspective is largely a given of the data of one's existence: gender, race, class, ethnicity, physical condition, relationships in which one is involved, and so on. Those data are transformed into experience as one becomes aware of how the data of social location intersect with events of personal, local and global history to result in suffering or wellbeing, inclusion, or marginalization, participation as the subject of one's own life or merely as the object of others' decisions and actions. The commitment that makes a reading from such a perspective and experience specifically 'feminist' is commitment to the physical, psychological, and social wellbeing of all women through the unmasking, revisioning and transformation of the institutions, social systems and ideologies that define women's lives in 'kyriarchal' social realities-that is. those in which a small group of elite males is dominant over all women and many men. 1
