An Uncomfortable Text: An Uncomfortable Reality — Reading Tamar Today

[Terry_Sampson]

• The Cry of Tamar: Violence against Women and the Church’s Response [2nd Ed.: 2012]
• In this comprehensive, practical, and gripping assessment of various forms of violence against women, Pamela Cooper-White challenges the Christian churches to examine their own responses to the cry of Tamar in our time. She describes specific forms of such violence and outlines appropriate pastoral responses.
• The second edition of this groundbreaking work is thoroughly updated and examines not only where the church has made progress since 1995 but also where women remain at unchanged or even greater risk of violence.

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The book takes as its point of departure the biblical story of Tamar in 2 Samuel 13—a text that may rarely be preached, rarely lingered over, and often treated as an unfortunate but marginal episode. Cooper-White argues the opposite: that Tamar’s story is not incidental but structural, exposing how sexual violence against women is sustained by power, family systems, and institutional silence, both in Scripture and in contemporary religious life.

The central claim of the book is not merely that violence against women occurs—even in religious contexts—but that it is frequently misunderstood, minimized, or spiritualized, especially by institutions charged with moral authority. Violence is framed not as loss of control or individual pathology, but as a deliberate use of power and control, reinforced by cultural, theological, and ecclesial structures.

If Tamar’s cry still disturbs us, that disturbance may be doing moral work. The question this thread raises is whether the church learns to hear it—or continues, like David, to be angry yet inactive.

[Terry_Sampson]

• From the Preface to the 1995 version of the book:

  • I felt drawn, even compelled, to write this book for many reasons. In my first parish ministry setting in 1979, I opened a program for homeless people and had my eyes
    opened to the realities of battered women. The very first family to come to supper in our
    simple parish hall was a battered woman who had fled with her two children from her
    violent husband, preferring the streets to the terror of their apartment. Deeply convicted
    by that encounter, I went on to become involved in the battered women’s movement, a
    commitment that I have carried throughout my ministry in secular agency, church, and
    seminary settings. Later, while teaching at the American Baptist Seminary of the West, I discovered the lack of a book addressing the multiple forms of violence against women from one author’s unifying perspective and analysis. I found myself assigning dozens of books and articles and wishing for one source that could serve as a primary text for the class. As an episcopal priest, I write with a Christian and, at times, distinctively Episcopal/Anglican voice. The book carries the assumption of a certain shared world with the reader, that of the Christian church in the United states. I hope it may also be of some transferable value to readers of different religions, although I do not pretend to represent in a universal way all the complexities of their traditions.
    Beyond these reasons for writing the book, there is another: I am a woman. As I
    have shared in various places throughout, I have personal experiences with some of the specific forms of violence I am describing. Additional stories in this book have been gathered from others. The stories of my friends and colleagues, if compiled, easily fill in any gaps in experience in my own life. The stories if laid end to end could be wrapped around my entire community, perhaps around the world. These stories are included in order to model an important aspect of our witness, namely, giving voice to the voiceless. The forms of violence against women are not limited to those detailed in this book. Medical violence, female infanticide, traffic in women, and economic violence against women are all areas for further exploration, but ones that go beyond the scope of this book. There are also controversial international and cross-cultural practices, such as female genital mutilation, which cannot be adequately dealt with here. These issues need to be incorporated someday in a comprehensive work on violence against women. What I have selected, however, is one central cluster of abuses out of which a community can build a stance against violence and model an important aspect of our witness, namely, giving voice to the voiceless.

[jpm (Phil McCurdy)]

Good stuff. We perhaps are called not to be angry, but to action against the all the injustice in our world, including that of course focused on the subject of injustice towards women. How that looks, I am still working out. So far, on course my looking at my own actions and repenting of my complicity, then speaking out against the actions we see around us, perhaps supporting financially those who are pursuing justice through the legal system as well as helping those who have been wronged. I’m still on the fence about some other actions that are probably too political for the open forum.

[Andy7 (Andy)]

It may encourage you, Terry, that my church, an Anabaptist congregation, had a series last December on the women in the geneology of Jesus – Ruth, Bathsheba, Mary, Rahab, … and Tamar. The story should disturb us. @jpm notes some good starting places for how it should affect us.