Dr Phyllis Trible (1932 – 2025) will be remembered as one of the most courageous interpreters of Scripture in our time. Her work invited us to read the Bible not as a closed canon of authority but as a living text that bears both wounds and wisdom. Within India, Trible’s work gave a language to what many were already sensing—that faith and patriarchy must be held in tension, that lament can be a form of resistance, and that the silences of the Bible are holy invitations to speak.
Through her landmark book Texts of Terror (1984), she opened our eyes to the silenced voices of women in the Bible—Hagar, Tamar, Jephthah’s daughter, and the unnamed concubine of Gibeah—and to the pain and power their stories continue to hold. For many generations of women theologians belonging to the Association of Theologically Trained Women of India, Texts of Terror was more than a scholarly text. Trible gave us a key that taught us to read between the lines, and fill the gaps in the terror with critical analysis, courageous reimagination, and truthfully exposing how patriarchy enslaved women in biblical history as it did in contemporary contexts. Trible’s raw expose revealed that while reading the Bible can be painful, we still draw strength from it as well. We resist while we heal.
For many Indian women theologians, Texts of Terror was a clarion call. It gave language to experiences of marginalisation and offered a method to read biblical texts as both wounding and liberating. Across seminaries and many generations of women theologians, Trible’s hermeneutics have shaped interpretive practices that challenge patriarchal readings and reclaim women’s narratives as sites of revelation. Trible taught us that reclaiming women’s stories is also a way of reclaiming our theological agency as women. Texts of Terror spoke not just to women theologians. It enabled survivors of sexual abuse and gender-based violence to understand their stories in the light of the fact that theyare not forgotten by God and that God sees them and validates their pain.
Trible’s pioneering work in feminist hermeneutics, God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality (1978)boldly exposed that domination of one sex over the other was a consequence of sin and was not divinely ordained. In this ground-breaking work, Trible was one of the first feminist theologians to highlight feminist imagery for God in the Hebrew Bible and challenge the exclusively patriarchal portrayal of the divine. This struggle for the use of inclusive God-language continues to this day within theological circles, and we continue to draw from Trible in this fight to acknowledge feminist imagery of God.
Across Asia, Phyllis Trible’s influence impacted theologians who were crafting feminist and postcolonial readings of Scripture in their own contexts. Filipina theologian Virginia Fabella, a pioneer of Asian feminist theologies, shared with Trible the conviction that women’s suffering and faith must shape our understanding of God. Kwok Pui-lan, from Hong Kong, widened the conversation by weaving Trible’s literary insight with postcolonial imagination that reminds us that gender, race, and empire are intertwined in how Scripture has been interpreted. Indian biblical scholar Monica Jyotsna Melanchthon often acknowledges Trible as a trailblazer whose courage made it possible for later generations to confront violence in the Bible and in our societies (Terror in the Bible: Rhetoric, Gender, and Violence (SBL Press, 2021). Trible’s work made it possible for minoritized people groups in the Global South to situate the “texts of terror” within our own lived experiences and read the Bible with both transformative anger and constructive subversive intent.
Dr Phyllis Trible’s scholarship endures as both an academic touchstone and a moral summons. Her work continues to inspire those who dare to read against violence, to teach against silence, and to write theology from the fragments of women’s stories. As Indian and Asian feminist theologians we testify that her legacy lives not only in libraries but in lives committed to transforming faith itself. In our classrooms, workshops, and church gatherings, Texts of Terror continues to teach us that theology must have ears for pain of the unheard and a voice for justice, and God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality reminds us of the intentional need for gender inclusive god-language.
Dr Phyllis Trible leaves us not only her scholarship but her spirit—a fierce compassion for women’s stories and a deep faith in the transforming power of reading truthfully and resisting courageously. For those of us who learned to read “against the grain,” she remains a gentle yet insistent companion on the journey toward justice, and critical feminist liberation for transformation.
Rest well our feminist foremother Phyllis Trible!
Thanks to you so many of us so many of us found voice for the questions we were told not to ask and silences we were forced to maintain!
– Jessica Prakash-Richard on behalf of ATTWI
Links to know more about the life and legacy of Dr Phyllis Trible: https://www.womenshistory.org/dr-phyllis-trible
https://library.columbia.edu/libraries/burke/special-collections/archives/awts/exhibit/trible.html