The Italian translation of the Queer Commentary on the Bible has recently been published by EDB editions. Many might wonder about the purpose of this endeavour, so I will try to explain it.

In recent decades, the issue of gender and its definitions has been widely explored by the international academic community. The category of gender allows us to investigate how traditional gender roles and stereotypes have impacted the lives and social and political relationships of both men and women, leading to privileges, marginalisation, unjust systems, and even violence.

Gender Studies and Scripture
Theology cannot avoid addressing these topics, as the reflections and insights of gender studies influence literature of all kinds, including biblical texts, and affect the biblical and Christian understanding of humanity and the institutional aspects of the Church.

To understand how a queer reading of the Bible emerged, one must start from the "Copernican revolution" brought about by feminist biblical readings. Feminist exegesis, first carried out by individual women throughout history and later more consistently by women as a collective subject (as seen in the Woman’s Bible project of 1895), began by challenging the idea that the Bible justified the sexist and patriarchal view of women as subordinate and functional. The American female exegetes of the late 19^th century, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, were motivated by the fight for women's suffrage. As their opponents used biblical passages to justify their exclusion from political and social rights, these American suffragists equipped themselves with the necessary cultural tools to approach the sacred text critically, examining it beyond current interpretations (through what is called "the exegesis of suspicion") and correcting the misinterpretations that had marginalised and oppressed them. They highlighted the presence in the Bible of significant women who had slipped through the transmission of male culture – women often non-conforming to female stereotypes, breaking social expectations. They applied the Bible's message of liberation to their exegesis, liberation from all oppressive structures – political, religious, and social – including patriarchy.

The authors of the biblical texts had anthropological and worldviews shaped by the knowledge of their time. The ancients certainly did not understand the complex development of a person's sexual and gender identity. They did not know the word "queer" and did not explicitly reflect on categories such as sexuality, sexual identity, or same-sex love. However, since biblical stories challenge expectations and easy categorisations, they are also stories of strange, porous characters that don't fit neatly into boxes. Applying the queer lens reveals new meanings in the text and challenges us towards new social liberations.

What Does Queer Mean?
The term "queer" refers to everything strange or crooked – in the sense of non-conforming – that may appear in a personal identity, deconstructing its public and social definition.

There are many such characters in the Bible. Abraham and Sarah, for example, are an anomalous couple – not a conventional one, as they are siblings by the same father. They cannot have children like traditional couples and do not hesitate to resort to unconventional means to do so. Many matriarchs do not conform to the patriarchal models prescribed for women, often being infertile – which places them outside the stereotype of the woman's maternal role. Even the patriarchs (consider Isaac or Joseph) do not realise the heteronormative masculinity expected of them. Biblical accounts include polygamy, surrogacy, incest, and marriage between close relatives; stories of women who bond as a couple after the deaths of their respective husbands (e.g., Ruth and Naomi) are also present.

A God Who Defies Expectations
God himself is queer – a God who transforms, disrupts, and revolutionises social and religious expectations and the norms that govern power, including sexual norms. Biblical narratives speak of a God who is always beyond where we expect him, a God who disorients like a stranger, a guest who is often unwelcome, a presence invoked but soon almost undesirable, as God's interventions overturn situations into something entirely different from what we might have hoped for. The commandment in the Decalogue to make no image of God should serve as a permanent reminder that God does not fit into any category but is rather the wholly Other, transcending all categories. Seeking queerness in the Bible, then, means recognising these oddities in the events and characters of the Bible that transcend traditional social and cultural characteristics, reminding us that God shines through every human being, no matter how strange, created in His image – a God always different from the images we make of Him.

The biblical God is queer because of His excessive love, reaching out to humanity, scandalously polyamorous and disruptive in the sense that He causes us to stumble on our straight paths. We refer to Him with a patriarchal role, calling Him Father, but in the Christian tradition, this is more a symbolic reference to a role, revealing instead a dynamic exchange of trinitarian love (perichoresis). The trinitarian God does not refer to a patriarchal family model – indeed, He shatters it. In the Bible, God also presents a feminine aspect in the figure of Divine Wisdom (Hockmah), and loves through a force that is feminine in Hebrew (ruah), neutral in Greek (pneuma), and masculine in Latin (spiritus). Depictions of the Trinity portray it as a drag queen with three bearded female faces (cf. fresco in S. Pietro, Perugia).

Jesus himself was especially sent to the marginalised and discriminated of His time. His aim was to offer them relationship and life, to integrate them into the community, and to communicate to them that they were God's sons and daughters.

The God of Jesus Christ does not appear as a patriarchal authoritarian figure but as a common source that places all human beings on the same level.

Even Jesus presents a masculinity that is quite unconventional: he does not conform to a phallocentric and dominant model of power, but one of service. He listens to the desires of the men and women around him. Jesus appears as a man who avoids the centre, travelling through villages of secondary importance. He does not allow himself to be called "master." He breaks free from the androcentric model of masculinity to offer a vision of humanity in which masculinity and identity are defined in relation to others: God, brothers/sisters, not primarily starting from oneself, like a phallocratic and self-sufficient identity. His whole life seems to transcend traditional relational models, breaking with conventional patterns: he turns to sinners, women, children, slaves, the sick, the despised, all those on the margins, excluded from the “normality” and citizenship of power, speech, and action. He mocks the blood family and surrounds himself with a chosen family where the focus is not on blood relationships but on relationships of love and care. He is unconcerned with his public reputation, freely associating with tax collectors and sinners. He calls men of his own gender to an intimate relationship with him, and he also addresses non-conforming women, calling them to follow him. He stands beside people as a teacher, friend, companion, and also as a stranger. Even his disciples struggle to fit him into a set framework as a rabbi, religious messiah, or political leader. He is always beyond, always elsewhere. A queer Jesus, bearing witness to a queer God.

Rediscovering a God who, in his otherness, remains a mystery

The God who "casts down the mighty from their thrones" (Luke 1:52) always appears alongside the oppressed, the excluded, and the persecuted: from slaves to social (and sexual) identities considered "deviant" from the model, that is, queer. By using queer as an exegetical method, we find ourselves highlighting something already present in the folds of the sacred text, but to which we have been blinded by familiarity with only one type of interpretation: the heteronormative one, often sexist, classist, imperialist, and colonialist.

Rediscovering a God who, in his otherness, remains a Mystery, who never fully fits into human frameworks and therefore pushes towards transformation and thus spiritual evolution, means adopting a queer (oblique) gaze on the world, challenging us to seek him. Consequently, a queer reading can liberate God himself from the narrow confines in which a patriarchal, androcentric, sexiste, binary, and colonialist culture placed him when the biblical texts were "packaged."

Since the image we have of God – even when we do not believe in his existence – always impacts the way we live and build our human and social relationships, an exegetical operation of this kind will have consequences in terms of social justice. Freeing God from the narrow sexual and ideological boundaries into which he has been placed also means freeing people who have been left outside those boundaries.

The entire Bible is nothing more than a series of stories of reversals and upheavals, a precursor to the reversal of values that Christ came to bring to the world, between life and death, between male and female, between slaves and free people, between power and service, between strength and weakness. The Gospel worldview, after all, is itself a displaced vision, because the faith of the biblical characters is ultimately a different (spiritual) perspective on the things of the world. Biblical narratives are all stories that unsettle certainties, or they wouldn’t be in the Bible.

The boundary crosses through us

It is not strange, then, that when we approach the biblical narratives with attention, we find the narration of porous events, personalities, social roles, and sexual identities. By porous, we mean exactly what the word "queer" conveys: that the biblical text always conceals a strangeness, the very strangeness that Revelation brings into the stories, the strangeness of a God who is other in himself, being Trinitarian; the strangeness of a revealer who is intertwined with the limitations, fragmentation, and misunderstandings of human words and communication. In this sense, one could also say that at least in the matter of incarnation, Christian theology presents a form of panentheism that collapses all binary categories of philosophical tradition, where the first subject in a pair is always positive, and the second negative: man/woman, high/low, God/world, self/other, man/nature, reason/emotion, inside/outside, etc.

Thus, before being a message about sexuality, a queer reading aims to propose a message of justice, a message of social equality, reminding us and others that the Bible is far from a manual of rigid codifications, but rather the place where we can rediscover the key to the complexity and porosity of our lives, identities, and experiences.

As M. Murgia, to whom the work is dedicated, concludes in her "God Save the Queer": “To accept queerness as a Christian practice means recognising that the boundary does not surround us, but passes through us, and that what we perceive as contradiction is in fact a fertile space whose vital potential we have yet to understand.”

See, Il commentario queer alla Bibbia