Timshel Is the Gospel According to Women

Bonnie Lewis (Courtesy of Bonnie Lewis)

From 2014 into 2015, Bonnie Lewis and her family marched through what they would come to call "The Shit Parade." The year would challenge the family with a stillbirth, a family-wide case of black mold poisoning, Bonnie's mother's cancer diagnosis, and debilitating injuries to Bonnie's leg and back.

Lewis, then a traveling pastor on the California preaching circuit, took a step back and examined her faith, and "The Shit Parade" became the unlikely title for a year of spiritual transformation. "That for me was such a turning point because my entire life I had done everything the way I was taught: 'If you do these things, you will be blessed,'" she says. "It was the beginning of this big unravelling for us."

In early 2020, Lewis (now based in the Austin area) released Timshel, an idiomatic collection of Bible stories consisting of 20 well-known Bible passages (10 per testament) translated into English and interpreted through a woman's lens – a viewpoint largely absent in Bible translations. In fact, only one woman has ever translated the entire Bible into English unaided: Julia E. Smith, who completed her version in 1855.

Timshel was born through collaboration with both a rabbi and a psychologist as well as countless hours of work, translations from the original Greek and Hebrew, over $75,000 in crowdsourcing, "The Shit Parade" of course, and a general climate of spiritual deconstruction.

"Because I was a pastoral figure, I started getting lots of emails and questions of like, 'I'm having a hard time with this,' and I was like, 'Oh, I have been through this journey. You know what, I am going to do something with it,'" Lewis said. "Writing [Timshel] actually changed me in a very different way."

In case you hadn't noticed, Christianity has historically been pretty big in the U.S. And, if you really haven't noticed, things in the U.S. have been changing massively: technology, communication, politics, etc., but also religion. So when bird-loving 2020 Democratic candidate Marianne Williamson called for a "spiritual awakening," it, along with her eccentricities and often left-of-center-left politics, gained her a cult following. But she brought up an interesting point – religious belief in America has been more or less in a state of steep decline for decades now. In fact, a 2019 Pew survey revealed belief in Christianity was down 12 percentage points from 10 years before, while the number of people who said they attend religious services at least once a month dropped from 54% to 45% but that's clearly not for lack of a spiritual hunger. "That one person being upfront," she says, "and telling everybody how to read a passage, that model in and of itself I think could be better."

The title Timshel roughly translates to "we have a choice" in Hebrew, which is meant to evoke the concept of midrash: another Hebrew word that sums up a particular form of textual analysis and interpretation. "The saying goes that there's everything that's written on the page, and then there's all the things that are in between the lines that are written on the page. The idea of midrash," Lewis says, "is to leave with more questions than answers, because it reminds them how mysterious and how big God actually is."

She cites one passage she translated for Timshel in which a prostitute anoints Jesus' head with oil from an alabaster jar – her sole possession of value. It's a story that Lewis says is often highly sexualized and in need of recontextualization. Instead she interprets the story as one of an abused woman who is showing love and willing to give up her most prized possession for Jesus. It transforms the story into one that helps readers build empathy for the female Biblical figure and people in general.

At a time when beliefs seem more sectarian than ever, Timshel offers a more inclusive reading of the world's bestselling book, and with noticeably increased female representation in particular.

Though her 4-year-old daughter describes Timshel as a "very pretty book" and her 10-year-old is mostly just proud that his mom wrote a book, Lewis says she and her husband are giving her children a different interpretation of God. "It's opened up a lot of freedom for our whole family to explore our belief system and give our kids the tools and this space to explore their belief system. Which is very different than the way my husband and I grew up."

Timshel is available now in hardcover, softcover, and digital edition at timsheltranslation.com.