Phyllis Trible, an eminent scholar of sacred texts whose feminist interpretations of the Bible challenged long-held presumptions that women were unequal to men in the eyes of God, died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 92.
Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Union Theological Seminary in New York, where Dr. Trible (pronounced tribble) was a professor of sacred literature from 1979 to 1998.
In books and articles beginning in the early 1970s, in tandem with the larger feminist movement of the era, Dr. Trible touched off a revolution in biblical exegesis, insisting that an alternative view of the Bible could be arrived at through close textual analysis. She argued against interpretations in which the authors of Scripture intended to promote misogyny or give men primacy.
Two books set out her credo. “God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality” (1978), which re-evaluated the Bible as holding women no longer subordinate; and “Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives” (1984), in which Dr. Trible amplified the significance of nameless or often-overlooked women who sometimes met grim fates in the Old and New Testaments.
Her vision defied centuries of biblical interpretation in which, for male scholars, it went without saying that men alone are made in the image of God, and in which, for feminist critics, the Bible was irredeemably patriarchal and should therefore be looked at askance.
Dr. Trible, who was conversant with many languages of biblical times, rejected both points of view.
“Two things are beyond question for me: I am a feminist and I love the Bible,” she told the journalist Cullen Murphy, who profiled Dr. Trible in his 1998 book “The Word According to Eve.”
The challenge for her, as she told Mr. Murphy, was to reconcile her feminism with her belief that the Bible remained, in his words, a “repository of spiritual sustenance for women.”
To many scholars, she largely succeeded. “Her impact on the field was tremendous,” John J. Collins, emeritus professor of Old Testament criticism and interpretation at Yale Divinity School, said in an interview. “She was quite right that the prevalent interpretation before she wrote was more sexist than was warranted.” He called her “one of the most influential biblical scholars of the second half of the 20th century.”
Her opening shot came in 1973, at the height of the women’s liberation movement, when Dr. Trible, then teaching at Andover Newton Theological School in suburban Boston, published a bold declaration in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion.
“I affirm that the intentionality of biblical faith, is neither to create nor to perpetuate patriarchy but rather to function as salvation for both women and men,” she wrote in the journal article, titled “Depatriarchalizing in Biblical Interpretation.”
In that piece she laid out a blueprint for all of her subsequent work. “I perceive neither war nor neutrality between biblical faith and Women’s Liberation,” she wrote. “The more I participate in the Movement, the more I discover my freedom through the appropriation of biblical symbols.”
Dr. Trible gave examples in the article, writing that “feminine imagery for God is more prevalent in the Old Testament than we usually acknowledge.” Referring to the God of the Hebrew Bible, she added that “murmuring themes focus often on hunger and thirst. Providing food and drink is woman’s work, and Yahweh assumes this role.”
She pursued this “appropriation” further in “God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality.” She argued, as Professor Collins noted in his 2005 book, “The Bible After Babel,” that the Hebrew word for the first human being, “ha’adam” is not gender-specific, suggesting that the first being is not necessarily male.
Woman, whom Yahweh “builds” from the rib of Adam, was not an “afterthought” at all, in Dr. Trible’s interpretation, but the “culmination” of creation.
“The Hebrew verb build (bnh) indicates considerable labor to produce solid results,” she wrote. “Hence women is no weak, dainty, ephemeral creature.”
Professor Collins said, “I think she was quite right that the text wasn’t proclaiming the subordination of women.”
In “Texts of Terror,” Dr. Trible rescued minimally recognized and therefore widely forgotten women in the Bible like Adah, the daughter of Jephthah the Gileadite; she is sacrificed by her father in thanks for his victory over the Ammonites.
“Though not a ‘survivor,’ she becomes an unmistakable symbol for all the courageous daughters of faithless fathers,” Dr. Trible wrote of Adah in the Michigan Quarterly Review, a year before her book was published.
Dr. Trible was determined, in much of her writing, to make God genderless.
“The God of scripture is beyond sexuality, neither male nor female, nor a combination of the two,” she said in a 1989 interview with Sunstone, a journal of liberal Mormon thought. “Many places in the Bible, God is described as a male and a few places as a female. But that is not to say that God as God is male, or female, or male and female.”
Phyllis Lou Trible was born in Richmond, Va., on Oct. 25, 1932, the older of two daughters of Samuel and Elsie (Harris) Trible. She was a year old when her father died, and she was raised by her mother and stepfather, M. Alvin Franck Jr.
Seeds of her later feminism were sown early. Sent every summer to a coeducational camp run by Southern Baptists, the faith in which she grew up, she recalled a teacher asking her class of girls who God created last — with the teacher answering: “Woman.”
She also chafed at the designation of boys at the camp as “Royal Ambassadors” while the girls as a group were “Girls Auxiliary.”
“The little girls would just be put aside with somebody to take care of them,” she told Mr. Murphy.
She graduated in 1950 from Thomas Jefferson High School in Richmond, where she was editor in chief of the student newspaper. She received a bachelor’s degree in religion in 1954 from Meredith College in Raleigh, N.C.
In 1963, Dr. Trible completed her doctorate in Old Testament studies through a joint program run by Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. She wrote her dissertation on the Book of Jonah with guidance from the renowned biblical scholar James Muilenburg.
While doing graduate work, Dr. Trible taught at what was then a girls’ prep school, the Masters School, in Dobbs Ferry, N.Y. In 1963, she was hired by Wake Forest College (later university) in Winston-Salem, N.C., as the first female assistant professor in the religion department. She spent eight years at Andover Newton before joining the Union Theological faculty.
Dr. Trible, by then a past president of the Society of Biblical Literature, taught biblical studies at the newly established Wake Forest School of Divinity from 1999 until retiring in 2012.
She is survived by her sister, Barbara Pickrel, and a niece, Debra J. Pickrel, and a nephew, Douglas Pickrel.
Dr. Trible guided generations of female students in theology, teaching them that the Bible shouldn’t be seen merely as a statement of oppression.
The Rev. Liz Edman, an Episcopal priest taught by Dr. Trible at Union, said in an interview: “She was concerned that false readings of scriptures were directly impacting women in a negative way. She wanted an interpretation that took women’s experiences seriously.”
Sheelagh McNeill and Kitty Bennett contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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