Clarice Martin

The Woman Babylon and the Marks of Empire

Biblical Studies & Commentaries

““In this book, Shanell Smith articulates a postcolonial womanist approach to address one of Revelation’s most troubling images—the Great Whore. In so doing, she adds an important dimension to our approaches to the text. Her writing modulates between personal insight and careful navigation of scholarly debate. This will be a book to return to multiple times!” —Lynn R. Huber Elon University "Shanell Smith takes the reader on a journey through the multiverses of John’s Apocalypse. She sounds an ethical call for readers who attempt to make sense of this biblical book that is so thick with oppressions. In new and creative ways, Smith cracks the codes of traditional masculinist and feminist interpretations of the Apocalypse. As the woman of Babylon continues in her veiled dance, Smith shows how to render these veils to expose the mirror to her own self. She sees her own story in the Babylon slavewoman/queen’s story and traces her own genealogy back to Babylon, through the history of slavery and (the new) Jim Crow. Can the woman Babylon be freed from John’s prison house of language and theopolitical agendas? The woman Babylon speaks on her own accord in this important book, and Smith shows us how to listen. Smith makes metaphor, this woman, and this dangerous book of the bible recognizable and relatable and shows us why this text, and the interpretive act, matters." —Tina Pippin Agnes Scott College "Shanell Smith’s provocative and pioneering study breaks new ground in Revelation scholarship. Her incisive and meticulous postcolonial reading destabilizes theoretical notions of the ‘Great Whore of Babylon’ as either the scion of a symbolic sex-gender system imaged by a misogynist male author, or more centrally, the cryptic embodiment of staggering Roman imperial power. Smith’s groundbreaking and convincing ‘womanist hermeneutics of ambiveilence’ establishes a robust conceptual raison d’être for revisiting this symbolic figure, with a provocative hermeneutical strategy that privileges the epistemological necessity of attention to gender, race, and class as essential elements in decoding the interpretive matrix and range of the letter’s meaning and legacy. She argues that the interweaving of a simultaneity of seemingly disparate perspectives—often held in creative, disruptive, and irreducible tension—provides essential clues for unlocking the key to Revelation’s tenacious and ubiquitous hold on the human imagination."”