There are male Christians, and there are female ones. But which gender predominates in their holy book, and how can this be explained in a more egalitarian society?

		Judy Fentress-Williams has always been enchanted by the Bible. As a young girl growing up in rural New Jersey, she was spellbound by the stories and mesmerized by the beauty of the language. As she grew older, she began questioning the role that women play in the book she loves. To begin with, women are relatively scarce: Of the roughly 1,400 people named in the Hebrew Bible, fewer than 200 are female. Men also dominate the New Testament.
	Same Story, Different Meaning The Bible is the bestselling book of all time, a sacred text for Jews, Christians and Muslims alike. But the Scriptures contain many mysteries, and much of their meaning is open to interpretation. Through the ages, men usually did the interpreting. Now, a new generation of feminist scholars is taking a fresh look at the Bible. These scholars are casting off traditional interpretations and viewing biblical women in a different light. Here are three examples. Lot's wife In the Hebrew Bible, Lot's wife turned into a pillar of salt after looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah, which had been set ablaze because they had become sanctuaries for sinners. The Bible makes no other mention of Lot's wife, but most scholars and theologians have interpreted her fate as punishment for sneaking a glance at the burning cities. Miriam Therese Winter, a Hartford Seminary professor, reads the story differently. Why would God condemn Lot's wife for looking back? After all, Winter asserts, "we have always been taught that looking back is a good thing." She combed the Scriptures for references to salt and discovered that most of them were positive. Salt is used to purify water. It is rubbed on babies. And it is essential for human survival. "In the desert, without salt, you die," Winter says. Perhaps, she says, the Bible celebrates Lot's wife instead of denouncing her. Delilah Delilah was a Philistine woman who seduced Samson into revealing that his hair was the source of his strength. Traditionally, she is viewed as sly and treacherous. But some feminist scholars believe Delilah was motivated by a desire to help her fellow Philistines, many of whom were killed by Samson. Instead of being viewed as a traitor, Delilah might be considered a freedom fighter, doing what she could to help her people. Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Bathsheba These four women are mentioned in the New Testament Book of Matthew, which traces the genealogy of Jesus. Each of the women are either foreign or sexually suspect. Tamar seduced her father-in-law. Rahab was a prostitute who offered refuge to Joshua's spies when the Israelites fought to conquer Jericho. Ruth was a Moabite who married Boaz. Bathsheba had a relationship with David while she was married to Uriah. The Bible doesn't usually include women in genealogies, explains Judy Fentress-Williams, who is completing her doctoral dissertation on the Hebrew Bible at Yale University in New Haven. "Usually, only the fathers are listed," she says. But in this case, "the Bible celebrates what these women did to preserve the line," she says. Sources: interviews with Miriam Therese Winters and Judy Fentress-Williams and Cullen Murphy's book, "The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own."	Moreover, many of those biblical women are troubling to feminists. After all, Delilah, Jezebel and Bathsheba aren't usually held up as role models for young girls. But instead of simply branding the Scriptures sexist, Fentress-Williams and other scholars are challenging the old ways of reading the Bible. By clearing away centuries of interpretation and shining a light on some less-known biblical women, they are reclaiming the ancient text. "Yes, the Bible is patriarchal," says Fentress-Williams. She directs the Black Ministries program at Hartford Seminary and is completing her doctoral dissertation on the Hebrew Bible at Yale University in New Haven. "But if you take a closer look, there's something more going on." Feminist biblical scholars are motivated by many factors. Some are on an intellectual quest to, in their view, set the historical record straight. Others are theologians who hope their work will presage a greater role for women in the ministry and the rabbinate. Many came of age after the first flowering of the women's movement -- everything they do is imbued with feminism. They usually work in the shadows, far from the capricious gaze of the public. They are engaged in serious scholarship, work that delves far deeper than simply seeking "gender-neutral" translations of the Bible and other attention-grabbing issues. But this isn't just an ivory-tower exercise. The feminist perspective has infused Sunday morning sermons and influenced rabbis and nuns. It has provided fuel for those who argue that women once played a larger role within the hierarchy of organized religion. It has also prompted women such as Beth Mazadoorian to take a fresh look at the Bible. Mazadoorian, a Hartford Public High School English teacher who recently took time off to care for her newborn daughter, belongs to a Bible study group at South Church in New Britain. The group, which is called the Daughters of Ruth, meets about once a month to discuss biblical women. "For women, it's interesting to see there are role models in the Bible that we never heard about," Mazadoorian says. Indeed, the members of the group have discovered parallels between the lives of biblical women and their own. Not everyone is embracing a feminist view of the Bible. Some critics have accused feminist scholars of placing contemporary values and a sheen of political correctness atop ancient stories. Fentress-Williams doesn't hold the Bible to modern standards. "My goal is to understand it in its context," she says. "I find it fascinating that a text so ancient is so progressive. The Bible has a lot of liberation in it." In his new book, "The Word According to Eve: Women and the Bible in Ancient Times and Our Own," Cullen Murphy says the new scholarship "has been greeted in some quarters with impatience, irritation, dismissiveness, even contempt." But, he writes, "it has also established women's issues as a permanent focus of biblical studies." The research, revolutionary though it may be, rarely garners the big, brassy headlines reserved for women seeking spiritual solace from sources less traditional than the Bible, such as those who embrace paganism, witchcraft and the goddess within. "Whenever we talk about the female face of God, they accuse us of goddess worship," says Hartford Seminary Professor Miriam Therese Winter, a nun who has written extensively on women in the Bible. But Sister M.T., as she is known, doesn't indulge in New Age thinking. The author of several books on women in the Bible, she points to the Scriptures to support her thesis that God has a feminine side. There are passages in the Bible that describe God as having breasts and a womb, she says. She cites several examples, beginning with a passage in Genesis where Jacob blesses his son. He invokes "Shaddai," a Hebrew word that has traditionally been translated as "the almighty." But "shad" is a Hebrew word meaning breast. "Shaddai really means 'God the breasted one,"' Winter explains. In Genesis 49:25, Jacob says "By Shaddai who will bless you...with blessings of the breast and of the womb. "Now, how much more feminine can you get?" she asks. 'A Banner Of Strength' When she was a girl, Rosemarie Greco would stand before her siblings and say Mass. "I imagine almost every Catholic girl played priest," she recalls, chuckling. Since the priesthood wasn't an option, she became a nun. These days, Greco runs Wisdom House, a religious retreat with a decidedly feminist bent located on a quiet side street in Litchfield. "Some people are scared of the word 'feminism,' " says Greco, 54. "They think it goes against the Bible." She aims to prove them wrong. In her discussions with women, Sister Rosemarie asks them to re-imagine Mary. In her view, the mother of Jesus is one of the most misunderstood women in the Bible. "The church says she is a virgin and she is a mother and she is held up as a model for women," says Greco, who is studying for her doctorate at the University of Dayton in Ohio. "Well, it's impossible to be both at once. No matter what we do, we can never live up to that ideal." To Greco, Jesus' mother is "the banner of strength," a woman whose duality speaks to modern women struggling to balance their careers and their families. "But when you get her into the church she's been a banner for wimpiness." Some might dismiss such talk as irreverent speculation, an awkward attempt to reconcile modern feminism with a centuries-old text. The Bible, after all, is hardly a feminist manifesto. Indeed, women throughout history have fretted over passages such as Genesis 2:21, which presents Eve as an afterthought plucked from Adam's rib, and Ephesians 5:22-23, which urges wives to "be subject to your husbands as to the Lord." Winter looks past such passages for a deeper meaning. The Bible, she says, is God's word written by men who brought their own biases and beliefs to the task. "We have to go back to the oral tradition which predates the text," she says. "We're finding much more in the Bible than the Scripture texts have let us believe." Many of the stories were recorded years, even centuries, after the events they describe occurred. "The stories in the Bible are like any stories," Winter says. "It's told from different perspectives and sometimes things didn't happen exactly as people remembered them. Sometimes, tilting the facts just a little could change the whole thing." Feminist scholarship is booming now because previous generations of women didn't have the opportunity or the tools to study the Scriptures. The demands are rigorous, says Fentress-Williams. Like all biblical scholars, she had to master Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek, the languages of the Bible, before she could begin to interpret the text. Fentress-Williams, who is 35, credits an earlier generation of women such as Winter and renowned Wake Forest University scholar Phyllis Trible for preparing the way. Fentress-Williams looks forward to the day when she can share her love of the Bible with her daughter, who is 3. "I want to tell her the stories so she'll realize there are heroines in the Bible as well as heroes," she says. "That's going to build her self-esteem and help her understand this God who she might one day have a relationship with."