Review of Lost Women of the Bible: Finding Strength & Significance through their Stories by Carolyn Custis James
Oren Martin and Barak Tjader
This book review appears in the Annotated Bibliography for Gender-Related Books in 2005, JBMW Volume 11 No. 2.
Category: Undeclared - books that do not give sufficient indication of their fundamental stance for us to classify them more specifically.
James suggests that the model of womanhood presented in the church simply does not fit the experiences of many women today. The book tries to apply examples of marginalized women in the Bible to the struggles of women in the modern context. Problematic is James's picture of marriage as a "blessed alliance" in which the woman is called as a "strong warrior" to fight alongside man in every sphere of life. James claims that a proper understanding of the Hebrew word ezer—usually translated as "helper"—sees the Garden of Eden as a war zone in which man and woman co-labored to exercise dominion over the earth and fight against the enemy. This ezer-warrior motif characterizes the entirety of the book, as James sees this as the essence of biblical femininity.
