Reading the Bible during Women's Month

by David Neuhaus SJ

Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church. (1 Cor. 14:34-35)

Abraham Joshua Heschel, the great Jewish philosopher, taught that “words are sacred, God’s tool for creating the universe, and our tools for bringing holiness — or evil — into the world.” He continued, “words create worlds and they must be used very carefully.” Words are particularly powerful when they are drawn from Holy Scripture. These words are no longer only infused with human breath but are inspired by the Spirit of God. As we celebrate the women in our world and our lives, we must recommit to reexamining the words and the sacred texts that have been used over centuries to build prisons, forge chains and shut off the horizons of women too often and in too many places.

Needless to say, in the Bible, there are texts that extol women and texts that put women down. Like with so many subjects, one can find everything in the Bible when one fishes for convenient verses to shore up personal interests, ideologies or systems of oppression. Not everyone even agrees on how to distinguish between those Biblical texts and images that extol women or put them down. For one reader, a text or icon might indeed put women on a pedestal, whereas for another reader, that same text imprisons women in a stifling box.   

There is nothing new in the personal, ideological and socio-political abuse of sacred texts. Antisemites used the Bible to justify Jew-hatred, apartheid apologists used it to legitimise racial discrimination, and Israeli defenders of occupation and genocide use it to promote ethnocentricity. The Bible has been brandished since time immemorial in support of male patriarchy, subordinating women and blocking their development. Mobilising an idea of God and sacred narratives that speak of God adds authority to humanly manufactured ideologies of domination and exclusion. This gives the Bible a bad name amongst those who struggle for dignity, freedom and equality. 

For Christians, the Bible provides the words to speak about God, the human person and the relationship that is established between the two. It provides a vocabulary, a grammar, and a syntax, according to which Christians can try to say “God”. The Biblical narrative sketches out a story of origins, of actuality and of hope that inserts believers into a long history of humanity in which they can find meaning, vocation and a sense of mission in a world in search of redemption. And yet, like all treasures, there are also dangers in appropriating it.

Ultimately, the Bible read with faith, love, and charity reveals itself as the living Word of God. This reading is best done in a community, a community that listens to all voices, those of men and women. Discerning the Spirit in which the Bible was written is an essential part of this reading. If that reading leads us to positions that deny the dignity of our sisters and imprison them, we need to read again. The Bible, read as God’s Word, teaches the values that are consonant with the God who created us all in the divine image and likeness.