The Bible As Graphic Novel

R. Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” relies on scholarly research to inform his illustrations. Most notable is his use of feminist scholars, who take issue with the patriarchal language of the text. But feminist scholars today say that one critical source Crumb used is flawed.

R. Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” relies on scholarly research to inform his illustrations. Most notable is his use of feminist scholars, who take issue with the patriarchal language of the text. But feminist scholars today say that one critical source Crumb used is flawed.

by Eric Herschthal
Staff Writer

In R. Crumb’s illustrated “Book of Genesis,” a much-anticipated work that was published this month, the notoriously crass cartoonist emphasizes that the book is not a satire. He’s doing, as he writes in the introduction, a “straight illustration job, with no intention to ridicule or make visual jokes.”

But if Crumb isn’t drawing the Bible for laughs, he is nonetheless providing commentary. After all, the Bible is almost impossible to understand without the help of either rabbis or scholars who have parsed every word in search of its true meaning. Any reading begs for interpretation, and certainly Crumb’s drawings are just an alternative form if it.

So what’s Crumb saying?

For starters, this: the Bible is a male-centric text that

has overlooked the prominent place women have in it. Crumb relies heavily on feminist scholars to inform his work, a point he stresses in the book and in several recent interviews. In a rare public appearance last Friday evening at the Barnes and Noble in Union Square, Crumb, who lives in France, spoke about the four years of research he put into the book, which included a close reading of both the King James and Robert Alter translations, as well as a number of scholarly books. “Even they admit they don’t always know what it meant,” Crumb said of the scholars he read. “Sometimes it’s anyone’s guess, including my own.”

But his guesswork may have led him astray in at least one important way. Notably, the feminist work he frequently cites — Savina Teubal’s “Sarah the Priestess: The First Matriarch of Genesis” (1984) — is either outdated or never had much credibility to begin with, according to many prominent scholars today.
“I’m not sure that it ever had any sway in the academy,” said Alice Bach, a professor of religious studies at Case Western Reserve University, and a widely cited feminist Bible scholar. Esther Fuchs, another prominent feminist scholar, said that by relying on a limited amount of archaeological evidence, scholars like Teubal undermined their argument. “To the extent that they can claim themselves to be scientific, this posturing is questionable.”

Nonetheless, Crumb depicts these questionable theories as fact. “The historical record shows that in the earlier millennia ... there existed a powerful matriarchal order alongside the patriarchy,” Crumb writes in the book’s back pages, concluding, “as Savina Teubal so clearly explains.”

To be sure, Crumb is writing a graphic novel, not a scholarly text. He has to answer to the general public, not academic colleagues. And scholars are themselves no strangers to fits of revisionism, driven by an all-too-human mix of personal and political agendas. As Bach acknowledged herself, the lack of evidence to support Teubal’s claims “may also be because not enough people wanted to find it.”

Still, by citing the work of scholars to buttress his claims of textual accuracy, Crumb invites questions about his own credibility. And many feminist scholars hold Crumb’s sources at a critical distance. “My own view is that the Teubal book is admirable in attempting to recover positive aspects of women’s lives in biblical antiquity but flawed in its assumptions about the historicity of the ancestors,” said Carol Meyers, a leading feminist biblical scholar at Duke University, in an e-mail response. By historicity, she meant knowing conclusively the realities of life in biblical times.

Teubal’s diminished reputation highlights a shift in the field of feminist scholarship altogether. When Teubal published her book in the early 1980s, feminist scholarship was in the midst of great change. A new school of scholars trained in literary theory began challenging the so-called traditionalists who privileged archaeological evidence and the re-reading of ancient texts to understand the Bible in its specific time and cultural context.

“Sarah the Priestess” was part of the traditionalist school, arguing that women in the time of Abraham and Sarah were the social equals of men. Relying on archeological findings like small clay feminine figurines, Teubal argued that perhaps these icons were goddess-idols worshipped by women and men alike in the surrounding cultures. Women, she argued further, may have even held positions in the priesthood.

But the rising clout of postmodernism within the academy challenged the traditionalists’ claim to objective truth. Scholars began to question whether the archaeological evidence clearly aligned itself with any one interpretation and could not instead be read in other ways. “You have to be careful about archaeological evidence,” said Bach, who uses the literary approach. “It doesn’t show you anything about how women were treated at the time.”

Perhaps the most influential feminist scholar to use the literary approach was Phyllis Trible. Instead of relying on archaeological evidence, Trible argued that the text itself offered the best clues into its meanings. For instance, if men were mentioned more often than women, then it seemed likely that men held a more significant role in the time the Bible was written. (For the record, according to journalist Cullen Murphy’s “The World According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own,” women are referenced by name 111 times in the Hebrew Bible compared to the 1,426 men mentioned by name.)

It was Trible’s book “Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives,” published the same year as “Sarah the Priestess,” that captured the attention of most scholars, not Teubal’s. Trible’s book “would appear in anyone’s canon of feminist biblical studies,” wrote Murphy, whose 1998 book offered an in-depth overview of the field. “Ask graduate students in their twenties or established scholars in their thirties or forties how an interest was awakened in women’s issues and biblical studies, and the answer will often turn out to involve an article or book by Trible.”

(Indeed, that is the case with Bach, who said she went to the Union Theological Seminary for graduate school specifically to study with Trible.)

Crumb’s illustrations reflect Teubal’s scholarship most notably in Chapter 12. He illustrates Sarai as a brawny woman more powerful looking than her husband, Abram. (This is before God changes their names to Abraham and Sarah.) According to the text, Abram asks Sarai to pretend to be his sister, not his wife, after God orders him to enter Egypt.

There is no explanation why Abram should do this, but in his notes, Crumb offers a theory. He quotes Teubal to suggest that Sarai’s “elevated religious status in her community” would have prompted Pharaoh’s handlers to bring her to their king. In those times, a “hieros gamos,” or sacred marriage between a man and a priestess, was believed to bring spiritual powers to the man. In the Bible, God strikes Pharaoh with a plague after he takes Sarai for his wife because, Crumb/Teubal argue, he broke the rules of the “hieros gamos.” The priestess had to choose her husband, not be chosen by him.
But it is perhaps easier to read this story in a more straightforward way. After all, the text suggests the pharaoh gets hit by a plague because he slept with a married woman — “Why did you not tell me she was your wife?!” the pharaoh howls at Abram. That explanation fits more easily with the moral code espoused later in the Bible, Commandment Seven: “Thou shalt not commit adultery.” This is also how a literary scholar might read it.

In any event, there are other more prominent feminist perspectives that could have made Crumb’s illustrations more “literal” — at least according to the prevailing scholarly wisdom, to which Crumb shows deference. A well-known case concerns Hagar, who Sarai, unable to conceive, allows to have sex with Abram.

Trible was one of the first scholars to draw attention to the fact that Hagar is described in ways common only to the Bible’s greatest heroes: she is the first person visited by an angel, for instance; she is the only woman promised innumerable descendants; she is the only person in the entire Hebrew Bible to have the power to call God by a name (“El-Roi”).

Fuchs said that perhaps the entire story of Hagar and Sarai could be read as an indictment of the polygynous system of the Bible. After all, it is because Abraham allows himself to sleep with another woman that his wife Sarah and her slave Hagar get caught up in a fight.

By “focusing on the women’s rivalry as the ‘real’ cause of their misery,” Fuchs once wrote, we “shift our attention away from the source of the problem to its symptoms.” How Crumb may have illustrated this is anyone’s guess. But he probably would not have drawn Sarai as he did, her eyes either narrowed in anger or scowling with rage.

Whatever one makes of Crumb’s scholarship, the irony is that he still may not have alienated scholars. If nothing else, he will make the Bible accessible to new generation of readers, they say. Bach said she plans to include Crumb’s “Book of Genesis” on her syllabus next semester, despite disagreeing with some of its interpretations. “First of all, these are 18- and 19-year-old kids,” she said about her students. “They probably have read an R. Crumb comic before, and that makes my job easier.”

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