“Believed that. Lived that. Still got sacrificed by my dad.”

CW: Contains some strong language (though not nearly as much as it could have) and references to sexual violence.

A recent blog post unironically claimed that men prefer debt-free virgins without tattoos. We asked biblical women to respond.

Rahab: Weird. The Israelite spies definitely preferred women of negotiable affection.  *raises hand.* [1]

Tamar: Ditto. [2]

Other Tamar: How about that. I believed this, and it not only destroyed me personally but set off a round of fratricidal murders that decimated my family and destabilized the political regime for a generation. [3]

Bathsheba: No. [4]

Ruth: No. [5]

Delilah: No. [6]

Jephthah’s daughter: Believed that. Lived that. Still got sacrificed by my dad. [7]

Jael: Burn it all down. [8]

Miriam: I am debt-free, but only because women aren’t allowed to inherit. [9]

Daughters of Zelophehad: Hold our beer. [10]

Woman at the well: Based on my personal experience, four out of five husbands recommend non-virgins for their next wife. [11]

Mary, Mother of God: Any official word on how they feel about pregnant virgins?

Mary Magdalene: How about about women who are not prostitutes but have been painted as such by the church for two thousand years? [12]

Mary, sister of Martha: I wasted all that time getting an education sitting at Jesus’ feet and now I’ll never get a man. (Luke 10)

Martha, sister of Mary: If only you’d invested that time in learning how to keep a house instead, you wouldn’t be single even after we’ve had 13 probably mostly unmarried men stay with us repeatedly. OH WAIT. I ALSO SEEM TO BE SINGLE. IT’S ALMOST AS IF JESUS DIDN’T CARE.

Salome: I don’t have any tattoos, but what’s the word about the tongue of fire over one’s head and the ability to speak in tongues? Does that scare off the menfolk? [13]

Lydia: The choice to begin a church in my home actually had nothing to do with my marital status—except that it was being single and thus the head of my own household enabled me to do any of that in the first place. (Acts 16)

 

Upon being informed that they only feel this way because they haven’t read the Bible with men there to explain it to them, a wave of subversive murmuring began, led by Lois and Eunice (2 Timothy 1), whose dedication to explaining the Bible to one young man helped shape the early church, and Jael abruptly left the room. She was last seen walking into a local hardware store, just before our reporter remembered that he had an urgent appointment elsewhere.

“Jael and Sisera” by Jacobo Amigoni. Wikimedia Commons.

…

 

Postscript: Fearing that I may be erring unhelpfully on the side of snark in this writing, I asked my kickass ladypastor friend Linnea to give this a read before posting. She was familiar with the original blog post, and described it as hilariously awful. Then she went into her church and found that one of the groups that meets there had left pamphlets that echoed and expanded on the original blog post’s views.

“I laughed at it,” she told me. “Then, this morning, I went to a domestic violence training for faith leaders, and it wasn’t funny anymore.”

I have read and spoken with complementarian theologians who can make a compelling cases for a healthy way to understand the teaching that women ought to submit to male authority, and in certain cases I can admire their dedication to finding a life-giving way to interpret this kind of submission.

But to me, the Bible does not support it. As in: the New Testament might TELL women to submit (especially in one particular letter whose Pauline authorship is contested, whose context is largely ignored, and whose content is contradicted in more reliable parts of the Pauline canon)…but the stories of the Bible nowhere SHOW that this kind of submission leads to healthy, mutually-affirming, life-giving relationships. Nowhere.

Theology teaching that it’s a woman’s job to submit to her husband—that a woman’s job is to make her husband happy (and therefore implying that any abuse is her fault) is harmful. It is physically dangerous. It is not OK. And the Bible is full of examples of women who lose their lives at the ends of this toxic perversion of gender relationship.

Yeah, I said it. The Bible itself describes women’s submission to men to be part of the Genesis 3 curse. It is not the way God created things to be. That female submission is part of what Christ, whom Paul describes as the second Adam, died to save us from, not tie us to forever.

[Eve: I affirm this.]

In Galatians 3:28, Paul writes: “There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus.”

I’d be happy to sit down with you sometime over coffee and tell you why Christ breaking down the barriers that segregate humans from one another holds so much more meaning for me than the 2 Timothy strictures against women speaking in church and not being saved unless their children grow up believing in God (YES IT SAYS THAT), but if you want to save yourself the trip, it boils down to this: Which one of those things did Jesus actually die to accomplish?

Personally, I’d feel just awful if the Son of God went through all that trouble—becoming incarnate. preaching and teaching and healing and casting out demons and ultimately dying on the cross–just to make sure I don’t have a tattoo.

 

 

 

[1] (Joshua 2) Rahab is the prostitute who shelters the Israelite spies in the land of Canaan. Without her, they would have died. One of the spies, Joshua, is Moses’ successor.

[2] (Genesis 38) Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute to sleep with her father-in-law because he’s trying to screw her out of economic justice.

[3] (2 Samuel 13) This Tamar is raped by her half-brother, the son of King David (also her dad). After he rapes her, Amnon is “filled with loathing” towards her and sends her away. Tamar rips her clothes and pits ashes on her forehead and is apparently never heard from again. David maintained plausible deniability in knowing what his son was going to do, and then refuses to punish Amnon, because he’s a firstborn and a favorite. Another son takes this personally and two years later kills Amnon, setting off a cycle of family violence that David does not live to see the end of.

[4] (2 Samuel 11) Bathsheba’s husband was killed because King David apparently preferred already-married women to virgins.

[5] (the Book of Ruth) At her mother-in-law’s instruction, the widowed Ruth seduces Boaz. While not a virgin, she IS one of Jesus’ many-times-great grandmothers.

[6] (Judges 16) Delilah was not married, but was probs sexing it up with Samson—which, incidentally, was a path to financial independence for her…so she was debt-free?

[7] (Judges 12) Jephthah makes a stupid, unrequired oath to God that if God gives him victory over his enemies, he’ll sacrifice the first creature he sees when he gets home from battle. Guess how that ends?

[8] (Judges 4) Jael drives a tent peg through the head of her enemy, but not before seducing him with dairy products, which I’m sure are not a metaphor at all.

[9] (Exodus/Numbers) Miriam is Moses’ sister, and one of the most influential women of the Hebrew Bible.

[10] (Numbers 27) These five sisters protested the law Moses handed down from God, insisting on inheritance rights in the absence of sons. They won their suit. Their line was “translated” by Mother Elaine Ellis Thomas, who is awesome.

[11] (John 4) And the man she’s with now is not her husband!

[12] No, but really. Church tradition conflates Mary Magdalene with the sinful woman of Luke 7 (whose sin, btw, is UNCLEAR). Mary Magdalene had seven demons cast out of her, and that’s basically all we know about her from scripture.

[13] (Mark 15/Acts 2) According to Mark, she and several other women were at the cross, suggesting that she followed Jesus throughout his ministry (such women are referenced quietly but repeatedly throughout the gospels) and was therefore likely in the upper room at Pentecost.