Al Mohler recently let the internet know he finds it a bit sus when a woman talks about the Bible on a podcast. Today’s guest is one of four women who just launched a podcast where they talk about the Bible. Four. Plural. It’s called Bible Divas, and Anna Sieges says she plans to email Al every time an episode drops so he doesn’t miss one — and maybe gets an opportunity to be moved by the Spirit, repent, and embrace the gift of half the species thinking, reflecting, teaching, and wrestling with scripture. Anna teaches Hebrew Bible at Gardner-Webb in North Carolina, and her research love is the Book of the Twelve, which most of us learned to call the minor prophets while memorizing them in order for Bible drill. She wants that name retired, and her argument is good: these are not twelve guys yelling on twelve different street corners. It’s a long conversation, stitched together over generations by communities arguing with God about empire, land, and whether mercy actually extends to the people you hate. We got into locust plagues as a table of contents, Jonah as the Colbert Report, why Habakkuk asks God to fix the violence and God says sure, I’ll send the Babylonians, why you’re probably Assyria and not Israel when you read this stuff, and — at the end — what actual repentance would look like for the harm done to LGBTQ people by a single chapter in a widely assigned textbook.
Highlights from the conversation
- The Twelve is one long conversation, not twelve street preachers. Anna’s core claim, and the thing that hooked her as an undergrad sitting in a prophets class with a MacArthur Study Bible in her bag. There likely was a Micah — an actual man. But after his death, disciples came along wanting to reuse his words for a new situation, and to connect what he said to what other prophets were saying. What you get across Hosea through Malachi is not a stack of pamphlets but a mosaic of prophetic witness: God’s people listening for God’s voice and making it relevant again and again, through Assyrian domination, Babylonian domination, and the Persian period.
- The scribes were DJs. Anna’s working metaphor, and it earns its keep. A DJ takes older music and makes it relevant again — drops a little ABBA into a wedding set so the older cousins light up. That’s what the scribes were doing with Isaiah, and what the shapers of the Twelve were doing across the whole collection. Her contemporary parallel: an artist superimposing the Letter from Birmingham Jail over images from the Black Lives Matter movement — I’m tired of the white moderate laid over a young Black woman in a flowing dress facing down riot police. Prophetic wisdom, reused, speaking into a new moment.
- Joel’s four locust plagues are the table of contents. Anna’s reading of how the whole collection is organized. Joel opens with four successive locust plagues, apparently context-free — and they map the arc. First: the fall of the Northern Kingdom to Assyria (Hosea, Amos). Second: Babylon defeating Assyria (Jonah, Micah, Nahum — repentance, backsliding, destruction). Third: the big one, Babylon wiping out the Southern Kingdom (Zephaniah, Habakkuk). Fourth: the always-looming one, hovering over Malachi in the Persian period. The day of the Lordrecurs throughout as a day of God’s decisive action — sometimes for good, sometimes very much not.
- Joel and Jonah are arguing with each other. The best piece of intertextuality in the collection. Joel calls Israel to repent and says who knows? Maybe God will relent and be gracious. A couple of books later the Ninevites — Assyrians, the actual worst — enact exactly the repentance Joel called for, and the king of Nineveh says the same line. God relents. Jonah is furious, and his complaint is a quotation of Exodus 34:6-7: I knew you were gracious and compassionate. Anna reads Jonah as satire, the character functioning like Stephen Colbert playing a right-wing pundit — an over-the-top nationalist whose whole position is the joke. Which makes Jonah a direct counter-argument to Ezra’s foreign-wives policy, sitting a few books away in the same canon.
- You are probably not Israel. The interpretive move Anna says Western Christians most need. Israel is always Ed Sheeran playing basketball against LeBron James — never strong enough to actually get her enemies. So when Americans read the oracles against the nations, it can make us bloodthirsty in a way the text never was for its original audience, because we are Assyria. We are Egypt. Which also means Tripp’s undergrad Hebrew Bible professor performing Amos in mandatory chapel right after 9/11 — running the litany of every other nation before landing on and you, America — was doing exactly what the text does. It was not well received. It was literally the Bible.
- Repentance is bigger than a book. The closing turn, on Richard Hays’s revised position on LGBTQ inclusion. Anna’s about darn time was kinder than what went through Tripp’s head, but her real question is the one that gets skipped: what does repentance look like for decades of harm caused by one chapter in a textbook that shaped a generation of clergy? Hays has a section on metanoia. Anna doesn’t think it goes far enough, and she isn’t sure anyone knows what collective repentance would even look like — but she’s sure it isn’t another white guy writing another book. Her proposal: stop building better arguments about proof texts and start loudly, matter-of-factly celebrating these people as bearing the image of God. Her frame comes from Heschel and the prophets: few are guilty, but all are responsible.
About our guest
Dr. Anna Sieges is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Gardner-Webb University in Boiling Springs, North Carolina, where she teaches Hebrew Bible. She grew up overseas in Papua New Guinea, where her father provided counseling support for people on the mission field and her mother worked in HR — and where family Bible trivia on Saturday nights was, in her words, cutthroat. Her research centers on the Book of the Twelve, redaction criticism, and the scribal shaping of prophetic literature.
She is one of the four Bible Divas, with Jennifer Garcia Bashaw, Angela Parker, and Cynthia Shafer-Elliott. Two Old Testament scholars, two New Testament scholars. Go subscribe.
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