ABSTRACT
Granting knowledge is one of the major strategies God employs for determining how his plan unfolds. God reveals Himself and his plans to his chosen, and by their special access to this valuable knowledge they enjoy authority and status. For the most part, as has been pointed out by feminist critics, in these stories it is to the men to whom God grants overt revelation. Attention to covert forms of revelation in these narratives–intuition, emotional sensitivity, and the exercise of recognitional capacities–discloses an epistemology in which gender distinctions are more nuanced and fluid. These forms of unreasoned, immediate, direct knowledge conform to externalist theories of knowledge rather than the traditional internalist, rationalist theories. Sarah’s demand of Abraham to banish Ishmael and Rebecca’s initiative in Jacob’s stealing of the blessing and her direction of the undertaking, attest to inherent cognitive abilities, epistemically advantageous in some ways as compared with the revealed knowledge that is reserved for men elsewhere. Moreover, the epistemological differences between the genders are neither absolute nor fixed. As the narrative proceeds, overt divine revelation is less frequent, and we see Jacob and Joseph exhibiting the kind of knowledge with which the matriarchs had been privileged.
