BIBLE HISTORY DAILY

Milestones: Phyllis Trible (1932–2025)

Pioneering feminist biblical scholar

Phyllis Trible, an internationally renowned biblical scholar, died in New York City on October 17, 2025, at the age of 92. She was a pioneer in feminist biblical interpretation whose teaching and writing changed how generations of scholars came to understand the very task of biblical interpretation.

The older of two daughters, Phyllis Lou Trible was born in Richmond, Virginia, on October 25, 1932 to Samuel and Elsie (Harris) Trible. Following her father’s death when she was very young, she was raised by her mother and stepfather, Alvin Franck Jr. In a 2009 interview, Trible recounted how there was not a time in her life when she was not a feminist. Recalling her childhood experiences at Baptist summer camps (she later became a Presbyterian), she remembered when a female missionary asked her group of campers, “Little girls, everything God created got better and better. What was the last thing God created?” When they answered, “man,” the missionary quickly corrected them, “No, woman!” The young Phyllis never forgot that lesson.

In 1954, she received her bachelor’s degree from Meredith College, where she majored in religion. She graduated with her Ph.D. in Old Testament studies in 1963, having completed the joint doctoral program offered by Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University. At Union, she studied with James Muilenberg, a leading scholar of the Hebrew Bible, and wrote her dissertation on the Book of Jonah. From 1963 to 1971, she taught at Wake Forest College (now University) as the first woman hired as Assistant Professor in the Religion Department. She left her post as Associate Professor at Wake Forest to teach for eight years at Andover Newton Theological School. In 1979, she joined the faculty of Union Theological Seminary, where she was named Baldwin Professor of Sacred Literature in 1981. In 1998, Trible returned to Wake Forest as a founding faculty member and Associate Dean of the university’s new School of Divinity. She was appointed University Professor in 2002. After retiring from Wake Forest in 2012, she returned to Union for the fall semester of 2015 to serve as Visiting Professor. In 1994, she was also President of the Society of Biblical Literature.

Trible’s most well-known books, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (Fortress, 1978) and Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives (Fortress, 1984), are required reading in feminist biblical studies. Together, they exemplify Trible’s genuine love for the Bible, her rigorous methodology and exacting use of rhetorical criticism, and her deep ethical commitment to feminism.ⁱ Her approach not only inaugurated feminist biblical interpretation, it helped fuel a sea change in the field by bringing method and the ethics of interpretation to the fore.

I had the good fortune to know Trible in not only one, but two important seasons in my life. I first encountered her as a divinity student at Union in the late 1980s and later came to know her as a colleague at Wake Forest, where I joined the religious studies faculty one year before she returned to campus. As my teacher, she opened my eyes to completely new horizons in biblical interpretation, where I learned that “feminist” and “biblical” were not oxymorons. In lectures that regularly kept me spellbound, the biblical text came alive in unexpected and compelling ways. Furthermore, in the job that I took directly following my graduation from Union, I felt her imprint on the work I did with women who had lived through multiple forms of abuse. Because I had, under her tutelage, confronted biblical Texts of Terror, I found the strength and courage I needed to be able to offer support to—and advocate for—women whose own lives had been fraught with violence.

Throughout her career, Trible kept asking new questions and leading new conversations in feminist theology. As her colleague at Wake Forest, I witnessed how her scholarship had come to include more interreligious conversation, particularly through the Phyllis Trible Lectures that the Divinity School hosted for ten years. There, I met generations of students whose minds and lives, like mine, had been changed by her work and who attended the lectures to be inspired again by Trible and other leading feminist scholars. In 2014, she published her final book, Faith and Feminism: Ecumenical Essays (Westminster John Knox Press), the second collection to emerge from the lecture series. As her co-editor, B. Diane Lipsett notes, “The volume included a multiplicity of feminist viewpoints: authors from many continents, experts in Islamic feminism, emerging scholars alongside some from the vanguard of feminist theology that Phyllis herself represented. To show feminism as complex and self-critical was for Phyllis both a goal for this book and a point of pride.”

A meticulous scholar of generous spirit, Trible dedicated her life to feminist interpretation that was complex and self-critical.

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Notes

i Trible also frequently communicated these ideas to Biblical Archaeology Review and Bible Review readers. See, for example, “If the Bible’s So Patriarchal, How Come I Love It?” Bible Review, October 1992; “Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows,” Bible Review, February 1989; “Wrestling with Faith,” BAR, September/October 2014; and her interview with BAR Editor Hershel Shanks, “Wrestling with Scripture,” BAR, March/April 2006.

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Mary Foskett is Wake Forest Kahle Professor of Religious Studies at Wake Forest University, where she teaches courses primarily in New Testament studies.

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Phyllis Trible’s contributions to BAS

God and Sex

If The Bible’s So Patriarchal, How Come I Love It?

Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows

Biblical Views: Wrestling with Faith

Wrestling with Scripture

Eve

Bringing Miriam Out of the Shadows

Feminist Approaches to the Bible

Eve and Miriam: From the Margins to the Center

Elijah and Jezebel