By Chelsea Kim Long, author of “Faithfully Dissident Daughters”
Excerpt From Chapter Four: The Divine Feminine and a Mother’s Choice | Pages 64–65 | ~500 words, reprinted with permission
These ideas might be unfamiliar, yet they are undeniably there. Throughout the Hebrew Scriptures, what Christians refer to as the Old Testament, God is a fierce mother bear who attacks anyone who tries to steal her cubs (Hosea 13:8) and an eagle mother who pushes her baby birds out of the nest so they learn to fly yet is always waiting to catch them and carry them back to safety with her expansive wings (Deut. 32:11–12). She is a human woman gasping and panting with the pains of labor as she gives birth (Deut. 32:18). Even Jesus compares himself to a mother hen, wishing to gather her chicks under her wing and provide them safety (Luke 13:34).
You may have, like me, grown up listening to Amy Grant’s recording of the song “El Shaddai.” El Shaddai, one of the names for God found in the Hebrew Scriptures, is often translated in our English Bibles as “God Almighty.” However, in ancient Hebrew, shad is a word that can be translated as “breast.” Some scholars believe that El Shaddai could mean “the many-breasted God.” In fact, when we look at the context for El Shaddai being used as a name for God, it’s in the context of provision or the blessings of fertility and prosperity, like a mother feeding her child. In Genesis 49:25, the patriarch Jacob blesses his sons before his death saying, “by the Almighty [El Shaddai] who will bless you with blessings of heaven above, blessings of the deep that lies beneath, blessings of the breasts and of the womb.”
God with breasts? This feels like sacrilege. I never learned this in Sunday school! Sure, yes, they’re metaphors; metaphors, after all, are all we have when we speak of the mystery of God. But why is it just a metaphor when the Bible portrays God in the feminine, yet when God is portrayed in the masculine, it’s capital T truth? We know that in a literal sense, God is not our father. But why do we never hear people dismiss God as Father as just a metaphor?
Knowing the impact of patriarchy throughout church history, I have to wonder if the reasons had to do with limiting the power of women. Theologian Meggan Watterson writes:
This anthropomorphic idea that god is a paternal human male, a father, perpetuates a deeply engrained belief that males are not only entitled to inherent power due to their sex but also that this power is divinely ordained. An ideation of god as only a male, and not also female, and also beyond an expression of gender, places boys and men at the top of the hierarchy of existence. This has created and continues to create a hierarchical ranking of worth along a vertical axis. When in fact all of humanity is inherently worthy, and that worth is seen and known, along the horizontal axis. We are all theologically eye to eye, equally worthy of our existence.
