This past week CBE announced that Jazmine Lawrence has won first place in their 2024 Conference Student Paper Competition. CBE’s student paper competition is an opportunity for students to develop a research paper on an issue pertaining to CBE International’s 2024 conference, “Tell Her Story: Women in Scripture and History.” Jazmine will have the opportunity to present her paper at the conference in Denver, Colorado this July. Following that, CBE intends to publish the paper in the Autumn 2024 Priscilla Papers.
Jazmine lives in Nova Scotia, Canada, with her husband and son and attends Acadia Divinity College as a second year MA (Theology) student. She hails from Vancouver, British Columbia, growing up as one of five girls before joining the Royal Canadian Air Force for fourteen years. Congratulations, Jazmine!
A summary of Jazmine Lawrence's first place article:
Amidst a flurry of narratives that make up the book of Numbers, a brief but purposeful eleven verses in chapter 27 tells the story of the five daughters of Zelophehad. This paper explores how Numbers situates these five women as key in Israel's pivot from faithlessness and rebellion, to faith for taking the promised land alongside the activities of Israel’s future high priest, Phinehas, and leader, Joshua. These five daughters stand before all levels of Israel’s government and challenge the God-ordained inheritance law to secure their own survival, contextualizing their case in the patriarchal culture as posthumous justice for their father. They actively seek responsibility to steward the promised land, an activity otherwise passively assigned to sons in Israel, and do so by challenging the cultural norms of God's people. This reflects God’s own desire expressed later through Jeremiah for all of God’s people, likened to daughters who God desires to give an inheritance with which to work and thrive. God affirms Zelophehad's daughters’ request, potentially fulfilling Jacob's Genesis 49 blessing over the daughters' tribal father, Joseph, which is usually translated symbolically and, thus, misses the literal Hebrew reference to daughters “mounting over a wall.” This should be encouraging to women in the contemporary Church who find themselves disadvantaged within church culture, to continue actively and wisely seeking responsibility for church ministry that they feel called and equipped to undertake.
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