Phyllis Trible, an eminent scholar of sacred texts whose feminist interpretations of the Bible challenged long-held presumptions that women were unequal to men in the eyes of God, died on Friday in Manhattan. She was 92.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Union Theological Seminary in New York, where Dr. Trible (pronounced tribble) was a professor of sacred literature from 1979 to 1998.

In books and articles beginning in the early 1970s, in tandem with the larger feminist movement of the era, Dr. Trible touched off a revolution in biblical exegesis, insisting that an alternative view of the Bible could be arrived at through close textual analysis. She argued against interpretations in which the authors of Scripture intended to promote misogyny or give men primacy.

Two books set out her credo. “God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality” (1978), which re-evaluated the Bible as holding women no longer subordinate; and “Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives” (1984), in which Dr. Trible amplified the significance of nameless or often-overlooked women who sometimes met grim fates in the Old and New Testaments.

Her vision defied centuries of biblical interpretation in which, for male scholars, it went without saying that men alone are made in the image of God, and in which, for feminist critics, the Bible was irredeemably patriarchal and should therefore be looked at askance.

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