New Film - Rape Culture and the Bible: Scholars Reflect

University of Leeds impact funds from the School of Philosophy, Religion and History of Science and the Leeds Arts and Humanities Research Institute have made generous contributions towards the creation of a short film centred on some of the work of The Shiloh Project. This project is an international research collaboration centred on investigating and challenging the connections between, on the one hand, rape cultures, and, on the other, religion and the Bible.

The Shiloh Project was co-founded and is co-directed by CRPL director Johanna Stiebert. It has its own blog, podcast, and book series. The current Shiloh Project directors are Emily Colgan, Christopher Greenough and Johanna Stiebert. The series editors of the Routledge Focus book series ‘Rape Culture, Religion and the Bible’ are Emily Colgan, Johanna Stiebert and Barbara Thiede. The Shiloh Podcast is produced by broadcaster Rosie Dawson.

You can find the film here!

But first, a little background… (What follows is slightly adapted from a post by Barbara Thiede.)

Since the 1980s, scholars have turned their focus to the distressing nature of depictions of sexual violence in the Hebrew Bible, as well as, though more tangentially, in the Greek Bible, and extra-canonical texts (for an annotated bibliography see here). But the first application of the term rape culture to the Bible did not appear until 1997, in biblical scholar Harold C. Washington’s landmark article, “Violence and the Construction of Gender in the Hebrew Bible: A New Historicist Approach” (Biblical Interpretation 5/4, 1997: 324-63).

Despite decades-long efforts to identify the pervasive normalisation of sexual assault and sexual violence in biblical texts, terms like rape and rape culture remain controversial. Hence, this film! The film is called Rape Culture and the Bible: Scholars Reflect, which is the same title as that of the forthcoming monograph (Routledge Focus, 2025, see here), which gave rise to and expands on it.

In this film, scholars and scholar-activists reflect on their own contributions to the study of rape culture and the Bible, as well as on the field’s history and legacy. They make clear the ethical foundations of this work: namely, that ancient Jewish and Christian texts reflect harmful ideologies. And, as many of them note, these ideologies continue to sanction and permit abuse that is ongoing—even pervasive—in contemporary communities, cultures, and religious institutions.

Pioneering and newer voices in the field, including, importantly, scholar-survivors themselves, demonstrate herein, again and again, how human and embodied, how personal, and how meaningful and urgent this work is.

Each participant shares in the conviction that academic work on sexual violence in biblical and related texts cannot be confined to scholarly settings. All understand that they are working with a phenomenon that extends beyond the page. Some describe their public work as a form of activism.

The film is narrated by Johanna Stiebert and Barbara Thiede. It features Caroline Blyth, Yehudis Fletcher, Pamela Gordon, Sandie Gravett, Sarojini Nadar, Lisa Oakley, Mitzi Smith, Ken Stone, David Tombs, Eric Vanden Eykel, Harold C. Washington, Gerald West and Sithembiso Zwane.

All contributors in the film and two additional participants, too, namely Miryam Clough and Meredith J. C. Warren, feature at more length in the forthcoming book. The book will be open access.

Please watch and share this film.

NB: The film will be shown at our event on Religion and Violence on Wednesday 8 October 2025 at the University of Leeds (see here). Sarojini Nadar, David Tombs, and Eric Vanden Eykel (all featured in the film) will be in attendance, alongside many other impressive scholars, artists and activists. Barbara Thiede, who is co-organising the event, will also be there and will be presenting the first CRPL seminar of the new academic year – on Thursday 9 October, 11.30-13.00 in Botany House 1.03.