Date
21st Oct 2018
For this session I wanted to emphasise the prophetic woman’s voice in the bible. I worked with songs that were explicitly by named women. I also explored the sounding out of women prophets particularly as the prophet is considered to be the voice of God.
Sounding 1 – 3-Song Mash
There are three songs that are explicitly attributed by named women:
- The song of Deborah in the book of Judges after a battle (Judges:5)
- The song of Hannah after she is pregnant (1 Samuel 2)
- The song of Mary after her meeting with cousin Elizabeth (Luke 1)
Common phrases and themes (e.g. ‘Blessed’) from the texts were analysed and were brought together as a spoken chorus. The participants were divided into two groups of three participants. One group listened while the other read. The three who were reading had a different text each. Towards the end of the reading the text of each reading becomes the same. The reader who finished first had to listen to where the others were in that portion of text and join in with them. This meant that what was previously different and asynchronous became synchronous at the end. The second group then read aloud while the first listened. This process was repeated once. The whole group reflected on what was heard and experienced.
There are other songs by women in the text which are either mentioned as a fragment (Miriam in Exodus 15:21) or in passing (the women singing after David defeats Goliath in 1 Samuel 18:6-7). We focussed on these three texts as there is a full song detailed with a certain progression occurring in the movement of the text and we tried to catch the resonance between the songs.
Resonance 1 – Blessed
Deborah sings of another woman Jael who hammers a tent peg through the head of Sisera characterised as an oppressor to their people. She calls Jael ‘Most blessed.’ Elizabeth mother-to-be of John the Baptist calls Mary the mother-to-be of Jesus: ‘Blessed are you.’ Mary responds in her song by predicting that ‘all generations will call me blessed.’ I took the various ‘blessed’ phrases and put it together as an ending to the piece where it would be heard both asynchronously and synchronously.
Most blessed of women
Blessed are you
Blessed is she
Resonance 2 – Lifting up and Bringing down
The three songs play on the idea of the raising up of the ‘lowly’ and the bringing down of the powerful. Deborah rises up to lead the Israelites (‘they held back until I arose’) and sings of the fall of Sisera at Jael’s feet: ‘At her feet he sank, he fell.’ Hannah’s song sounds this lifting up and falling with several repetitions of the theme in different situations. Mary’s song sings of bringing down the powerful from their thrones and lifting up the lowly, repeated as the hungry being filled with good things while the rich are sent away empty.
This theme is captured in Psalm 113, one of the Psalms of the ‘Egyptian Hallel,’ the group of Psalms recited (or sung) at Passover.[1] There is significant overlap between Psalm 113 and Hannah’s song. Marianne Grohmann says: ‘The majority of scholars assume that the Song of Hannah is older than Psalm 113.’[2] The text in used in ‘3-song Mash’ reading ends with this overlap alluding to the possibility that a woman’s voice has found its way into the Psalter.
Resonance missed – Nails and Pegs
In the discussion that followed this sounding it came out that the tent peg and being nailed to cross had a resonance. A rereading of this will probably need to incorporate this especially for its sound possibilities.
Sound missed – Lifted up and falling
Though the process of being lifted up and being brought low is central to this sounding, we didn’t incorporate that within the piece in sound. This would be again brought into a rereading.
Sounding 2 – Whispering Grove 2
We spent a bit of time reflecting on the previous version of Whispering Grove. We then did the sounding where a verse was spoken repeatedly at low volume while one of the participants stood in the middle listening. Previously the first listener had spent a long time in the ‘grove.’ This time everyone seemed to hurry through the process. We discussed and reflected through what we had heard.
Previously different texts were chosen based on genre. This time the texts were chosen at random through a randomizer. Instructions were reconfigured to account for issues that had arisen in the previous version. We placed a limit on how long the listener should stay in the middle. Bringing up this sense of time limit meant that the listeners hurried through their listening experience. People were catching on to different words from others while reading and while in the listening zone they again caught fragments of the phrases. Certain listeners could not hear some of the voices but were reticent to step closer to the sounding voice.
Since the last session I have started engaging with Janet Cardiff’s Whispering Room,[3] where through 16 speakers various women speak their experiences. I should have engaged more with this and made the choice of texts to be sounded to be of women’s voices. This error was more glaring since the other two pieces were about sounding women. Another rendition of ‘Whispering Grove’ will need to deal with this. I need to do more research to allow listeners the time to listen more closely to the texts while being mindful of others.
Sounding 3 – Thus Whispereth the Lord
The third sounding was the ‘Thus Whispereth the Lord.’ The group was divided into 3 groups of two each. There was a score prepared to be performed. We briefly went through the score, clarifying certain parts. One group read a relevant text while the other groups expanded them through different sounds. We then reflected through what had been experienced.
This was a sounding of female prophets. Male prophets form a significant portion of the text. Women prophets are not absent but are rare. This reading aloud was meant to thread together, however tentatively, the female prophets from the time of Moses to the time of the church.
The title is a play on the phrase ‘thus saith the Lord.’ This phrase is what the leaders and prophets in the Old Testament would say (in the 1611 King James Version) when bringing God’s message. The whisper on the other hand reflects Jacqueline Lapsley’s ‘Whispering the Word’[4] but also the fact there are far less women prophets in the bible. So, the female prophetic voice is a whisper compared to the male prophetic voice. Each passage is read by one group while the other two groups accompany in sound.
I engaged with passages that described the woman (or women) as a prophet. These were:
- Miriam – Exodus 15:20
- Deborah – Judges 4:4
- The three daughters of Heman (unnamed)
- Huldah
- The wife of Isaiah (unnamed)
- Anna
- The four daughters of Philip (unnamed)
Miriam is described as taking a tambourine and leading a time of praise through singing and dancing. The word ‘tambourine’ is broken up and spread across the two groups with a resonant consonants offering lower frequencies. The words ‘singing,’ ‘dancing’ and ‘sister’ are used to get the ‘sss’ sounds offering higher frequencies. The aim was to capture the sounds of the words to capture both frequencies. Unlike most other women in the texts, Miriam is referred to as a ‘sister’ rather than a daughter, wife or mother.
Deborah was one of the leaders of Israel. Her name possibly means ‘bee’ or ‘swarm of bees.’ Blaženka Scheuer considering Deborah and Huldah suggests that these women prophets are named after unclean animals in order to constrict the reception of these stories.[5] It therefore seemed apt to sound the bees as it desacralizes the ‘serious’ voice of the Lord. The ‘z’ sound incorporates both voice and channelled breath and by going through the different pitches it allows for an opening up to how we can listen to the ‘voice of God.’
In the midst of long list of male musicians in the temple suddenly ‘three daughters’ are mentioned. The musicians of the temple were to ‘prophesy with lyres, harps and cymbals.’[6] As the musicians are listed out we hear of Heman one of the chief musicians: ‘God had given Heman fourteen sons and three daughters. They were all under the direction of their father for the music in the house of the Lord with cymbals, harps, and lyres for the service of the house of God.’[7] The presence of women in this male dominated space is brought out by the repetition of the instrument names; both the ancient ones and their modern variants.
Huldah is the prophet who is approached by the king’s officials when they rediscover the scriptures. Huldah means ‘weasel’ or ‘rat.’ Like Deborah, she has a name of an unclean animal. Hence the sound of squeaking. Huldah’s ‘squeak’ resounds the voice of God and I can’t help but rephrase the little boy Samuel’s response to his name: ‘Squeak Lord, for your servant is listening.’
The wife of Isaiah is unnamed. She is referred to as the prophetess and theologians like Susan Ackerman think that this is merely because she is the wife of a prophet.[8] Old Testament professor Claude Mariottini argues that no other prophet’s wife is referred to as prophetess and therefore the title prophetess isn’t honorific but that she ‘exercised the prophetic ministry.’[9] Her particular prophesy is to have a son named Maher-shalal-hash-baz which means: ‘The spoil speeds, the prey hastens.’ As her story is a whisper we played with the name of her son, or rather her prophesy.
Anna is present when Jesus is presented at the Temple in Jerusalem. Her name means grace and being a widow for most of her life meant that she was on the fringes of society. The sounds accompanying her, bring out what her life was like according to the description in the text.
The four daughters of Philip are mentioned by Luke in passing. Nothing is known of them other than that they are unmarried, their father is Philip and that they prophesy. This is another whisper. So the whispers accompany this reading. It ends with an emphasis on ‘four daughters’. The hope here is that the whispers of the many accounts of prophetic women are fleshed out in emphatic sound.
References
[1] Elizabeth Hayes, ‘The Unity of the Egyptian Hallel: Psalms 113–18’, Bulletin for Biblical Research, 9 (1999), 145–56 (p. 145).
[2] Marianne Grohmann, ‘Psalm 113 and the Song of Hannah (1 Samuel 2:1–10): A Paradigm for Intertextual Reading? (2009)’, in Reading the Bible intertextually, ed. by Richard B Hays, Stefan Alkier, and Leroy Andrew Huizenga (Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009), pp. 119–35 (p. 123).
[3] Janet Cardiff, Whispering Room, 1991
[4] Jacqueline E Lapsley, Whispering the Word: Hearing Women’s Stories in the Old Testament (Louisville, Ky.: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005).
[5] Blaženka Scheuer, ‘Animal Names for Hebrew Bible Female Prophets’, Literature and Theology, 31.4 (2017), 455–71
[6] 1 Chronicles 25:1
[7] Other translations like NIV say: ‘All these men were under the supervision of their father’
[8] Susan Ackerman, ‘Why Is Miriam Also among the Prophets? (And Is Zipporah among the Priests?)’, Journal of Biblical Literature, 121.1 (2002), 47–80 (p. 49)
[9] Claude Mariottini, ‘Isaiah’s Wife’, Dr. Claude Mariottini – Professor of Old Testament, 2013