What is a Woman... Biblically?

The scholarly consensus is that there was a story about a dude named Elhanan who killed this giant named Goliath. And suddenly there’s a five-finger discount going on by whoever is responsible for the David history. And this just makes perfect sense of how his tradition developed over time. Hey everybody, I’m Dan McClellan.

And I’m Dan Beecher.

And you are listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion and combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How are things, Dan?

Things are good, man. I am looking forward to today’s show. Today’s show is. Is a heavy hitter. It’s a big one. I’m looking forward to it. I think maybe we’ll be combating some misinformation or maybe we’ll just be muddying the waters and confusing everybody about everything.

You know what? Sometimes that’s, that’s what you got to do to, to advance the football.

That’s right. That’s right. So, so today for our first segment we’ve got a Bible versus Bible contradiction match. Bible style. And then at the end of the show we are going to be taking on a, a one of the questions of our time. A big deal question. I will make sure that I provide a trigger warning that we will be discussing some things that might be difficult for people who have been beat up a little bit based on their sexual identity. We’re going to be asking and, or answering the question what is a woman biblically. Biblically speaking. What? Yeah, because here’s. Yeah, we’ll get to it. We’ll get to it.

We’ll get to it.

Uh, but first Bible versus Bible.

We’re going to introduce our teams. We actually have one side of this is 2nd Samuel 21 Missouri State. The other side is 1st Chronicles chapter 20 from Ball so Hard University. And we have two different tellings of more or less the same story, but they are going to present a different picture. And that picture wildly conflicts with one of the most famous stories from all of the Bible, namely David and Goliath.

Yeah, I was surprised you didn’t start with First Samuel because. Because that’s sort of our, our ground zero.

Our base point. Our. The, the, the. The idea. The, the story that we’re all familiar with is the story from 1st Samuel 17. I think it is chapter 17 about David killing Goliath. David is a little up-and-comer in, in the Israelite army. Goliath is a very large. A real up-and-comer on the Philistine side. And, and so, and you know, we all know the story. David has a little slingshot, bing, bang, boom, down goes the giant sort of thing.

And, and it’s an interesting story if you read it closely. David doesn’t kill Goliath with the slingshot.

Oh, that’s a good point.

He kills him when he cuts his.

Head off with a sword.

Yeah, the text actually says he killed him and cut his head off. And, and so, yeah, the, the slingshot basically incapacitates him.

Just knocks him out.

Yeah, and so it’s, it’s an interesting little thing that generally we kind of scoot past without paying too much attention. But I bring up the other passages because they reflect a different take and they actually conflict with each other. And one of them seems to as.

Well as conflicting with First Samuel.

As well as conflicting with First Samuel. Well, one of them does not because the secondary one actually tries to massage the text back towards what we see in 1 Samuel 17 . And the question we’re trying to answer here is basically, who killed Goliath?

Now you mean that’s not a settled question after the conversation we just had?

You would think it were settled. But we have this interesting story when we go to 2 Samuel 21 , where we have a story about four different giants who are called the children of the giants who are killed by different people. And this is kind of like this is lore. This is giant lore. And so this one giant showed up and this guy killed him. And then this other giant showed up and this other guy killed him. And so in 2 Samuel 21 , verse 19, I’ll go ahead and read it from the NRSVue. The. Then there was another battle with the Philistines in a place called Gob. And Elhanan son of Jaare-oregim, the Bethlehemite, killed Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam. And the interesting thing here is this notion that Goliath was a Gittite and the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam is word for word how Goliath is described in 1 Samuel 17 .

Right.

So when we’re talking about Goliaths out there, this is the one who had the spear, right, whose shaft was like a weaver’s beam.

We’re not, they’re not that many Goliaths with enormous shafts and giant spear shafts.

Don’t take that there.

Don’t. Let’s, let’s. Let’s get your mind out of the… Out of the Philistine gutter, please.

And so it seems like the killing of Goliath is being attributed to some dude named Elhanan.

Right.

And then we look at 1 Chronicles 20 , verse 5, and we have a slightly different telling of the same story. It says again, there was war with the Philistines, and Elhanan son of Jair killed Lahmi, the brother of Goliath the Gittite, the shaft of whose spear was like a weaver’s beam. So, okay, so we have 2 Samuel 21 that seems to be telling a story that is a little contradictory to what’s going on in 1 Samuel 17 . And then we have 1 Chronicles 20 , which seems to be going back in the direction by identifying this individual, this giant that was killed as Goliath’s little brother.

Right.

And this actually contributes to a bit of eisegesis, a bit of reading into the scriptural text that I have always found fascinating. I have seen a number of videos and people have preached sermons on this where they say, why did David pick up five stones from the creek when he only needed one? It was the very first one that killed Goliath. And they say it was in case his four brothers came after him. And then they go into this… they go into this story about how Goliath had these four giant brothers and David was concerned that they might come after him too once they saw that he had killed their big bro. And so what that story does is looks at 2 Samuel 21 , which talks about these four different giants that got killed, and 1 Chronicles 20 says one of them is Goliath’s brother. And so they think, well, all four of them must have been Goliath’s brothers.

And so that’s why… and so people have preached wholesale…

I mean, it’s plausible. You could make that or possible at least.

Yeah. I would say it’s about the same as Russell’s teapot.

So I think it’s better than Russell’s. I think they’ve got… they’ve got Russell beat. Bertrand Russell went a little too far.

Okay, we’re not. We’re not that far out in the stratosphere then. But. But there’s an interesting. There’s something interesting that bubbles to the surface when you look into the Hebrew of the difference between 2 Samuel 21 and 1 Chronicles 20 . Because 2 Samuel 21 called Elhanan son of Jaare Oregim the Bethlehemite, and Bethlehemite would be Beit Lahmi. And when we look at 1 Chronicles 20 . Elhanan was the son of Jair who killed Lahmi, right, the brother of Goliath. And basically the Hebrew is that has some kind of fuzzy edges that kind of overlap with each other where if you just tweak a letter here and a letter there, you can get from one to the other. And so some people have said, well, this is textual corruption. Somebody mistook one letter for another. And then the next scribe down the road was like, whoa, who’s, oh, this must be some dude named Lahmi.

And other people say it was intentional. But the direction of change, I would argue indicates that the First Chronicles reading is the secondary one, is the later one, is the corrupted one. And that is the one that identifies Lahmi as the one who was killed as the brother of Goliath. And there are a few reasons for this. One is that Lahmi would be a name that means my bread, which is not a naming convention that we know from, from this time or place. Nobody called their kids my bread. Additionally, it would be a Semitic name, not a Philistine name, because the Philistines were not a Semitic people when they first arrived. It was not until the centuries after that they began to kind of merge with the Semitic people. So Goliath is a Philistine name. The notion that he would have a brother with a, with a Semitic name that meant my bread is pushing it a little bit.

The other issue is that the word brother is probably a corruption of the direct object marker. So when you do something to a direct object in Hebrew, you don’t always have to, but you can indicate what the direct object is with this two-letter word et, aleph, tav. And this, this just indicates that’s, that’s who this happened to. And in English we use word order. In like German you use cases. The accusative case is the, is the object and so forth. And et could be confused for ach, which would mean brother, but only in the Aramaic square script. And the Hebrew Bible would not begin to be written down in the Aramaic square script until the post-exilic period. And between 2 Samuel and First Chronicles. First Chronicles is the later text, one that would have been written in the post-exilic period, which would have been recorded in the Aramaic square script.

That’s the one where we would expect to see a confusion like this happen or it may be an intentional change. And so what it seems happened is that 2nd Samuel 21 seems to preserve an alternative story. At least a brief mention of an alternative story. Regarding the killing of Goliath. And then 1 Chronicles 20 , which is being copied down much later, seems to recognize there’s a problem here. And so kind of massages the text a little bit to distance or to reconcile the, the, the problem and say, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Elhanan didn’t kill Goliath. Elhanan killed this dude named Lahmi who was the brother of Goliath. And so we have an attempt to try to make the contradiction go away.

I, I, I, I, okay, so when I was looking at this in preparation for the show, I, I knew that that was going to be one of the possible explanations. That one of the possible explanations is what you just laid out. Yeah. So I went and I also read an explanation from an apologetic source. And I gotta be honest, it also seems totally reasonable to me. Just, yeah, it’s just in the other direction. It seems totally reasonable to me that Chronicles and First Samuel are in harmony and that it was this, it was a mistake of the writer or a translator or a scribe of 2nd Samuel that got the, the, the, the brother thing wrong or, or sort of mixed that up. So I, I, I just wanted to blow your mind by saying, like the apologists, like I, okay, so going into this, I didn’t know any of these, you know, the linguistic things that, you know, I didn’t know how much the Bethlehem thing lines up with the brother thing or whatever.

I, but just on its face, it seems reasonable to say that if 2nd Samuel is the place where it got it just wrong and it’s just a couple of verses, it’s not, it’s not, you know, repeated over and over again.

Right.

That would make total sense to me.

There are in addition to the text-critical issues that I would suggest throw the weight of support to 2nd Samuel 21 being original. We also have a text-critical principle known as lectio difficilior, which I think I have mentioned before on the show, the more difficult reading, and this is, this is not a hard and fast rule, but it is a trend, right? Normally when a text changes, it changes from a more problematic reading to a less problematic reading, right?

Somebody, somebody’s fixing something, right?

Things tend to get fixed more than they tend to get broken when the text is trans being transmitted. Now you can have text being broken, but we need to see evidence that this can account for why this would happen incidentally. And there is, there is actually a case to make that there is, there is some textual corruption in both of these verses. Because we have this Jaare-oregim is supposed to be the name of, of Elhanan’s dad in 2nd Samuel 21, but that’s not really a name. And Oregim occurs again later on at the very end of the verse because that’s the word for beam in the weaver’s beam. So like neither has a good case to make for being textually pure, however. And you could make the argument that the confusion went in the direction of changing Lahmi, the brother of Goliath to the Bethlehemite killed Goliath.

But I would say it’s probably, I would say the evidence is 80/20 in favor of saying 2nd Samuel 21 preceded 1st Chronicles 20 and that 1st Chronicles 20 is the corruption. And this would make sense. There are a lot of scholars who are written, who have written about this. The developments of the David tradition has several layers and scholars have talked about how David seems to be initially just a mercenary. He’s just a merc going around trying to scrape out a living where, you know, he has to feign being insane in front of the Philistine king so he can escape with his life. And he’s got his little band of, of merry men going around and, you know, robbing people and killing people and stuff. And he gets propped up in these stories as, you know, this like legendary miraculous guy who just ascended to the throne because of how cool he was.

And taking over other people’s accomplishments is a classic move for people who are later writing hagiography about these people. You get your guy to go tell your stories and they’re gonna go and steal other people’s stories. And so the scholarly consensus is that there was a story about a dude named Elhanan who killed this giant named Goliath. And suddenly there’s a five finger discount going on by whoever is responsible for the David history. And this just makes perfect sense of how his tradition developed over time.

Do we think that First Samuel was written after Second Samuel?

The. No, they’re. They’re basically part of the same text. However, there are many layers to the whole thing and some of those layers are earlier and some of those are later. They’re drawing from a variety of, of traditions.

So somebody, somebody could have just been adding some stuff, some fun stuff to First Samuel and then forgot to tell his buddy, hey, by the way, delete that out of your version on the second Samuel part. I got this over here now. Yeah, putting this for David or.

Yeah, that the whole David tradition could have been developed by one team and then later on down the road, the other people are like, hey, we got to put all this other history on here. Okay, let’s just slap it on there. And there wasn’t somebody going through at the very end to make sure all the eyes were dotted and the T’s were crossed.

All of. There wasn’t a continuity person.

Right. There was no style committee that went through. However, at the same time, maybe there was, and they could have easily looked at this and been like, meh, we can deal with that. That’s, that’s. No, that’s. That’s not catastrophic.

Or we’ll just kick the can to whoever’s going to write Chronicles.

Yeah, yeah, we’ll just.

Somebody in Chronicles. Will you fix this later? Fix it in post in Chronicles.

Yeah, I think, I think we might be surprised how frequently a lot of these authors and editors were just like, we elect to punt.

I, I, you know, the more I dig into this book, the, the more I wouldn’t be surprised about how often that happened.

Yeah, they’re like, we’re just trying to clear tickets, man. We’re just trying to clear tickets and get it off my desk.

That’s right. That’s right. Well, that’s a, that’s a fun story. Elhanan, David, whoever it was, whether Goliath versus his brother Lahmi. What.

What was Lahmi?

My bread. All right. Well, that’s great. I, I like it. Much more difficult topic coming up. Everybody strap in. You know, put on your seatbelts. And let’s move on to taking issue.

Taking issue.

So taking issue, the issue we’re going to take today or tackle is one that is tricky. A real dingbat of a guy named Matt Walsh made a whole movie called What is a Woman?

Where he thought he had the best gotcha in the world by asking a bunch of people what that is. Dan, you’re our linguist. What’s the definition of a woman?

Yeah. So we’ve got a show on why I don’t like definitions. Don’t we? Somewhere in the back there. Yeah. This is like a gotcha that is about at the same rhetorical level as pronouns in bio. Opinion Rejected.

That’s right. Yeah.

It’s “Define woman”. And it’s annoying for me because it’s like I don’t define anything. Like, I am dogmatic about avoiding definitions. So this isn’t the gotcha you think it is. But. But yeah, normally the. The. The traditional definition. And, and I was making a video about this earlier today just because I’m in a little spat right now with somebody about definitions. But there, there is no the dictionary, there is no the definition. There are definitions and none of them has any authority over anyone else. You know, the, the ministry of what words mean doesn’t exist. And they did not crown any definition. The, the Academie definition of, of what is a woman because that would be technically in French.

The Ministry of what words mean does exist, I think.

But, but it doesn’t actually have any real authority beyond. Because people can use words to mean whatever they want. It’s not like the, the ministry falls out of the sky. If you use a word in a way that they don’t approve of and they, and they beat you up or something.

The black helicopters come.

Yeah. Or like the words get stuck in your throat and you’re like Jim Carrey in Liar Liar. Liar.

That’s right.

The ministry has not authorized me to say this word to mean what I want it to mean.

Right.

But yeah, if you look in a dictionary, many of them will have something like adult, female, human. And one of the problems with this is that many people today and for a long, long time have treated the word woman as a member of a gender rather than a sex. And we’re going to look at an article from.

Oh, you said two words that a lot of people think mean the same thing.

Yeah. There’s this place called GotQuestions: Your Questions. Biblical Answers. And they have an article, “What is the definition of a woman in the Bible?” And so they’re going to also use sex and gender as synonyms.

But many, many, many, many people in the world today, in English and, and in other languages acknowledge that these are two different things. Yeah.

And maybe more than two, you know, even though they’re two different words. It is. Can we first acknowledge that like these are conceptual categories, to use a phrase that you’d like to use in.

In your TikToks. Anyone who follows you on there knows the phrase conceptual categories. But even like biologists don’t all agree on how these things work and linguists don’t all, like, you can’t. The reason I think that you, Dan, don’t like definitions is because language isn’t the precise thing we wish it was.

It just isn’t. And so even the words sex and gender mean different things in different, in different contexts and different like used by different people. So I think we need to acknowledge that like it’s not an easy, even if you, you know, even if you’re talking to a biologist or whatever, these are not easy things to, to, to nail down.

Yeah. It’s it’s very messy. And. And far too many people think that, um, it’s their prerogative to just assert that their understanding, like, reifies reality.

Or something like that. When it’s like, no, the best you can do is say, more people agree with my definition than with your definition.

Right.

And that’s the extent of it.

Right.

Wow. More people agree. Great, great. That doesn’t mean anything. And so I think, yeah, right off the bat, we need to acknowledge that this is messy and it differs from time to time, from place to place, from person to person.

It is something that I used in my dissertation a lot that I like. I think it’s a great phrase. But a lot of people are like, that’s way too confusing. It’s situationally emergent. In other words, it’s not there until the situation calls for it and it shows up in whatever form it needs to show up to respond to the needs and exigencies of the given situation. But what I thought we could do here, because neither of us are biologists.

Or sociologists or psychologists or any of.

That sort of thing, and we. We could point to the fact that there is no definition of sex. That also creates a hard, fast binary that works in absolutely all examples. No, there are exceptions to everything, of course.

I mean, if you. Even if you, you know, get biological, you don’t get a binary. You get a whole bunch of. A whole bunch of stuff.

Yeah, you get. I. I think a spectrum is how I would describe it. You have majorities on these ends, but then you also have a lot of integration and overlap and. And stuff in the center.

So stuff that’s missing, stuff that’s there twice. You never can.

Yeah, it’s one from one side, one from the other.

It’s a smorgasbord. It’s a free for all. You can’t. It’s. It’s. It’s. It’s not. It’s not just a binary, as anyone can. Who’s looked at it even a little bit can tell you. But that’s not our question. I think what you’re getting to is that our question is what the heck does the Bible have to say about it?

Yeah. And. And I thought the way we could do the. A way we could do this is we could just go paragraph by paragraph. Whatever.

Oh, wow. Okay.

Does that sound reasonable?

Ten little paragraphs are like two to four sentences each. We can just skip over the references, but just… just read. Do you want to read the first paragraph? And then. And then we’ll. We’ll commentate.

Okay, here we got, we, we got. By the way, this is the question proposed in this article is, what is the definition of a woman in the Bible? And I love that they have “answer” as they—like they have the answer. So that’s good. Yeah, we can, we can consider this definitive, I assume. Yeah. God made all of humanity, both men and women, in his image. And then there’s a quote that says, “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” Male and female. He created them. That’s what Genesis 1:27 . A woman is a person of the female gender and a man is a person of the male gender.

And here female and male are actually references to sex. And so “the female gender” would be confusing those two categories, right?

Yeah. I mean, generally speaking, in today’s, in today’s society, sex is a biological trait. Gender is a social construct or something.

Link to the other, anytime somebody says a real man does this, says this, and you know, wears this. That is an observation that gender is a social construct. It is all of the behaviors and the relationships and the norms and the circumstances that are around this concept of what a male person is.

Right. All right, spiritually—we’re going on here—spiritually, men and women are equal in God’s eyes. And then there’s a reference to Galatians. Both reflect God’s nature and character, yet the two genders each possess separate, distinct God-designed identities.

Okay, so first thing I want to point out here is we’ve got some univocality being presupposed here.

Oh, of course.

And in ways that obscure some of the things that the Bible thinks and does and says that this, whoever wrote this, does not want you to be aware of or does not want to have to deal with. For instance, we’re merging Genesis 1 and 2, even though these are entirely distinct creation accounts. Yeah, this is something that we’ve been over. In fact, I think our first episode ever was about the fact that these are two distinct creation accounts. The one in Genesis 2 and 3 was earlier, and then the Priestly account in Genesis 1 was like, I don’t like that other one. We’re going to write a better one and we’re going to replace it. And so when you try to merge the two and treat them as one and the same, you’re basically having to impose an overarching kind of unifying framework, which means it’s not either of them. You’ve created a new third thing because you’ve had to.

You’ve created a third thing that is going to subordinate the one thing and the other underneath it. And so this is not what any of the authors of any of these texts thought. This is what you think when you want to force them to kiss. And when you’re like Darth Helmet in his room. Oh, your helmet is so big, you’re trying to force them together, and they don’t want to be together.

And, and the same thing goes with, with Galatians 3 . I mean, men and women are equal in God’s eyes. Not if you read several parts of the New Testament.

Not if you read literally any part of this book. I’m sorry. Like, I, I, I, I’ve read a lot, and there are some nice portrayals of women, but for the most part, they don’t even get names. So.

Yeah. And they, and they even had to qualify that sentence by saying spiritually.

Right.

Men and women are equal in God’s eyes, which is basically like saying physically, temporally, in every other way that a woman can exist, she is inferior.

I also think it’s fascinating that in, in order to present equality between men and women, they present a text that their version of it says, there is neither slave nor free. There is no male and female, for you are all one in Christ.

Say that doesn’t just.

It’s not saying they’re equal.

That doesn’t say they’re equal. It says it doesn’t exist.

Yeah, the, the binary does not exist.

It eliminates the categories.

Yeah. So, yeah, that’s, that’s a big problem. And partly because there is going to be a concern to preserve this complementarianism, this notion that there are different roles. And it’s like, well, the roles are equal. No one’s in charge of the other.

Right.

Well, they’re equally important. No one’s in charge of the other. So that is, you know, the way.

That the CEO is equal to the guy that vacuums his floors at the company. Okay, I’ll go, I’ll move on to the next, the next paragraph. It is impossible to consider the definition of a woman in the Bible without also contemplating the substance of a man, since the woman was created from the man. Yeah.

Okay. And, and here we’re, we’re going into Genesis 2 , because Genesis 1 doesn’t say the woman was created from the man. Genesis 1 says God created humanity, male and female. He created them.

Boom. Created, roasted. There is no distinction. Until you get to Genesis 2 , and you’ve got the earlier problematic creation account.

Where it says, oh, we created the man. Then he was like, something’s not right here. We’re missing something. And then had to go. And it was like, I know, animals. Turns out Adam doesn’t want to be a— Doesn’t want a pair bond with any of the animals that you created, oddly enough. So we need to try again. So. Yeah, this— That’s problematic.

Yeah, this— This paragraph goes on to sort of quote Genesis 2 and says, “Then the Lord God said, it’s not good for the man to be alone. I will make him— I will make a helper who is just right for him.” And it stops the quote there, which I think is amazing because it pretends like that quote is about the woman and it’s not. God tries a whole bunch of different animals before. Like, no, dogs are pretty good, but not— How about a cow? Cow. Is that a good helper? No.

And then the serpent is—the way the story is crafted— The serpent was created as a part of this as well.

Yeah, exactly. Who does turn out to be quite a good helper in the end. But just to the woman, not to the man.

Oh, and also “helper who is just right for him.” Yeah, sounds like complementarianism. It sounds like she is a supplement. She is just what he needs.

Right, but is the word “servant” or something in that rendering?

But in the Hebrew, it’s more like a helper equivalent to. Because the word in the Hebrew means “across from,” the idea being this is the counterpart. This is equivalent to. This is suitable. And— And so I think that’s— That actually is a point for Genesis 2 over and against the translation that they have chosen. By the way, it looks like they’re going back and forth between a bunch of different translations. Yeah, they do the NLT, the ESV, because they’re looking for the things that are going to best serve their rhetorical goals. But the ESV is— Is a complementarian translation. We would not have the ESV except for the fact that they were going to publish a version of the NIV in the United States in the mid-90s that was going to include gender-inclusive language. So instead of saying “brothers,” it was going to be like “brothers and sisters” or “siblings” or something like that. And this just sent a bunch of evangelicals through the roof.

And they were like, “Not in my country.” And they got together in Colorado Springs and they actually talked the publishers down so that they said, “Okay, we won’t publish this translation of the Bible in the US,” and then they said, “Not good enough.” We need our own translation so we can preserve our complementarian gender ideology for all the world to see. And so they created the ESV. And a lot of people read it these days because it’s new. Like, it was published in, like, 2002, and they think, “Wow, this is a great translation. This is up to date. This is brand new.” And it’s actually a bunch of people who thought the NIV was too liberal. So. So when it comes to— When it comes to “What is a Woman” according to the Bible, and they’re like, “Let’s go to the ESV,” you already know there are problems.

Yeah. All right, so blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m gonna go on to the third paragraph. As God carried out the task of creation, he observed only one thing that was not good, and it was for man to be alone. That’s, again, a reference to that same Genesis 2 thing.

But. And this is. This is one of the. The indications that the Priestly account in Genesis 1 doesn’t like Genesis 2 , because what does God say after every single thing that they create?

And it was good.

It was good because they’re like, no, no, no, God doesn’t create things that aren’t good.

Right.

And. And Genesis 2 is like. And then God created the thing. And then God.

Oh, God created a man. And the man was, like, bored, and he was like, oh, I didn’t see that coming at all. Let me.

He’s got anxiety.

Let me. Let me make you an emu and see if that makes it any better. All right, so going on, the GotQuestions says, thus, God, quote, made a woman. The Hebrew word banah translates, translated as made in this verse. Literally means built, correct?

That is correct.

Okay. The woman is the only created being described this way as built by God. Does it also describe her as a brick house?

Mighty. Mighty. Letting it all hang out. Yeah. And. And this is, you know, you. You build buildings and you build towns and. And you build altars and stuff like that. So it’s. It’s talking about the fact that God took this rib or. Well, it’s actually not a rib. Sorry, excuse me. That. That’s the traditional translation.

What? You just blew my mind. What is it?

The word there actually means side.

And so. And like, if. If we had to give a gloss, it would be side. And so literally, it’s. He took one of Adam’s sides. And there is a. There is an ancient Jewish reconciliation of these two creation accounts that sees them as two. Two subsequent creations that. First, we have the creation of male and female together, and then in Genesis 2 , later on, we take 1/2 of that creation to make woman. And. And how this has worked in this Jewish tradition is this was. The original creation was of an intersex person, a person with male and female sexes.

And then in Genesis 2 , what happens is basically that individual is split in two.

And this has blown my mind, because side is so different from rib.

Yeah, well, it’s. It’s used to refer to, like, the sides of a ship or something like that. And I think people are. Their imagery is like, okay, you got, like, beams along the side of a ship. Looks kind of like ribs. Okay. It’s a rib.

Yeah. But the meaning is, like, if it could be just. I mean, could it be side? The word side is used in a lot of different ways. So I’m just. I just want to dig into this. Could it mean that literally, they. God took the left whole half of Adam and created Eve out of half of Adam as opposed to a chunk?

So that could be. Yeah. And in fact, when you. When you look later on, what does Adam say? Doesn’t say, this is. This is my. My floating rib. This is. It says, this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh. And so you have bone and flesh together. Yeah, whatever was taken off from him is bone and flesh together.

And so, yeah, that is. That is a. A rational. That is a. A plausible reading of what’s going on here.

That is entirely different. I’m sorry. Like. Like, the meaning to me in that is literally, like, completely different. That’s. My mind is actually blown. That doesn’t happen too often because usually I do a lot of, like, research before we do our show, but, like, this one, that one has me thinking there’s some Hedwig and the Angry Inch stuff. This is some good cool. Like, I. I really dig that imagery of just slicing him in half and building two totally separate people out of it.

Well, and then we get to Genesis 2:24 . Therefore, a man leaves his mother and his father and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And that’s basically saying sexual union is the return to the male and female together. So that. That’s a reading within that comes down from ancient Judaism that is still popular with a lot of people today.

It also very much sort of takes the wind out of the sails of, well, the man’s the important one and the woman’s not the important one, because they’re just the same thing. They’re clones. They are the same thing, just differentiated in a. In a new way.

Well, we do have. We do have some. There’s going to be some pretty intense patriarchy that’s going to come barreling through the walls like the Kool-Aid Man. Next chapter where you have part of the curse and is that your desire will be for your husband, but he will rule over you.

And that’s. And so one thing to point out is that, hey, this. This patriarchal arrangement that’s. That’s a consequence of the Fall. There are. There are a lot of Christians who like to say we have to try to overcome our fallen natures. Well, the patriarchy would be a part of the Fall, so.

Oh, my gosh.

Overcome that as well.

Yeah, a lot. Like. Like, it is not like the patriarch. The. The biblically speaking, the fact. The idea of the man ruling over the woman isn’t inherent to male and female. It’s. It’s inherent to humanity after the Fall.

Right. So they’re. They’re created as. And. And again, if you go back to what she is, she is a helper that is equivalent to. And it’s only because of the Fall, at least as we reconstruct this concept of a Fall, that we have this. This power asymmetry.

And so if you. If you want Genesis 2 and 3 to be a part of your. Your understanding of the biblical idea of sex and gender, and you want to try to, you know, mush it all together in one rather than preserve the different perspectives from the different time periods, then you.

This is a… …a dynamic duo. This is… This is a… …a buddy comedy. All right, all right, we’ll keep going with the… …with the nonsense from… GotQuestions. Okay, where was I on the fourth paragraph? I think…

“When God constructed the woman, he supplied what was lacking and necessary for a man’s fulfillment or completion.” Gross. I think that’s gross. That’s a gross…

It’s gonna be… It’s gonna get even worse, if I remember correctly.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So women are… …are there… …like, the man was, like, bored and not feeling fulfilled. So that’s… …that’s all she’s for anyway. “Eve was custom made to be Adam’s corresponding opposite.” Now that says, that gives us a link to Genesis 2:21 , but “corresponding opposite,” does that… it doesn’t feel like that’s…

So that’s the… …that’s the… …that’s the “help meet” from the King James Version. That’s the… …the… …the equivalent helper. “Suitable helper” or something like that, which… …up… …up above, from the New Living Translation, they shared as “a helper who is just right for him.”

Yeah, but I don’t know about opposite. It doesn’t say that. Anyway, “Only with God’s unique gift of Eve could Adam become not merely a solo male of his species, but a legitimate model of the human race.” What, what do you say?

Like, yeah, this, this doesn’t make any…

…sense because how does that follow from anything that you’ve presented to us in the Bible? I don’t. Yeah.

And one thing here is they continue to try to eat their cake and have it too.

Because it’s Adam. Adam is not by himself. He’s nothing. But with Eve, it’s not that the two of them are now the model. It’s still just Adam who is the model. But Adam needs this, you know, this feature that is being added to him in order to… he… it’s just a supplement that is being added.

It’s the upgrade package.

Yeah. Okay. It goes on to say, “Intrinsic in the biblical definition of a woman is this quality, this gift. Woman is man’s cooperative complement or reciprocal.” “She is not merely a helpful assistant.” I think you literally just said she is merely a helpful assistant or an add-on accessory. Literally, that’s what you just said. “Fitted together as woman and man, the two become… become symbiotic humanity created in God’s image.” That you just contradicted what you just said. Okay, so, so see Dan, they do think that it’s both of them together are the symbiotic humanity. Okay. “Only as such do men and woman…” It keeps… Yeah. “…find their sexual counterparts and necessary procreative match.” All right.

I keep thinking of the, the Spice Girls song to become one. I don’t know if I just think.

I, you know, I read several of these articles and they all eventually. And, and I also like watched clips. There’s a real peach of a clip by Jordan Peterson where he can’t talk about a woman without just all she. All he can think about that makes a woman is to do with procreation. Yeah, like it was, it was absurd. I, I, with, without a, like, his contention was essentially, if I were to boil it down, I believe that without procreation, you know, if a woman just chooses birth control, she’s a man like that, that’s basically what she ends up being. It’s like what the, what the hell are you talking about?

Yeah, I, I think the, he’s, he’s suggesting like in the eyes of society, what do you contribute to society? You’re either, you’re either Making babies or you’re making money. One of the other two. Because that’s all that evidently matters.

Right.

And if you’re not making babies, well, then you’re horning in on. On the, the territory of the man, which. Which is just such a bizarre worldview. Yeah. Because it’s like women don’t reproduce asexually. Like they carry.

They carry children. But men and women both contribute to procreation and the notion that, that it is the unique or it is the role of one of them because they happen to be carrying the child and the other has this, this other responsibility is like subordinates everything to this just patriarchal idea about, about power and social role and social hierarchy.

Yeah. Isn’t it weird that this book that was written by, by men pretty much exclusively suddenly puts the, the, the women in a subordinate place to the men? Isn’t that interesting?

Well, that’s what the next paragraph is going to start off.

Here we go. Wait, where. What am I on? Oh, okay.

Since the ancient world.

Since the ancient world was a patriarchal society, most written records of that time include scripture. Including scripture present a predominantly male perspective. True.

And therefore. So do we.

Therefore. And that makes it good. Yeah. Nevertheless, throughout the Bible, women play significant roles in the community, home and church. Different biblical words are used to refer to a woman in relation to these roles. The most general Hebrew term for woman is ishshah. But it can also mean wife. Huh. We. We talked about that a little bit with.

Jennifer.

Jennifer. Yeah, absolutely. The Greek counterpart is gyne. Okay. Many other Hebrew and Greek words are used to describe women at different ages and stages of life. Life. I don’t know what, what point they think they’re making when. When they say that the language refers to. Uses the same word for woman and wife. I do. They think they’ve proven that the only job a woman can have is the only way a woman can be a fulfilled person is by being a wife. I don’t know this.

The same is true of the word for man, ish.

It means. It is used to refer to a husband as well. But it’s, it’s just like, it’s, it’s just like the way we, we sometimes use it today. Like a woman might say that’s my.

Old man or that’s my man or.

Or a guy might say that’s my lady over there or that’s my woman or whatever. It’s starting to sound a little creepy.

A little.

A little ick. A little cringe, as the kids would say. Yeah.

And from Clueless, you know, I told you about calling me woman. The.

Yeah. All right. The foremost role of a woman in the Bible, according to. Sorry, we’re back to Got Questions here. The foremost role of a woman in the Bible is that of a wife. She is a companion who supports her husband, enriches his life, and brings him joy and pleasure.

So this. This is literally saying that the foremost role of a woman in the Bible is to supplement the life of a man.

And to contribute to his enjoyment of life.

Yeah, it. It is saying that it say. And I love the use of the word foremost there, considering that the next sentence starts. An equally defining role of women in the Bible is childbearer or mother. Yeah, I like that distinction between childbearer and mother. They are two different things.

The, the Bible also refers to women who are queens, women who are prophetesses, women who are generals, warriors, women who do all of these things. Yeah, but because they’re not the most frequently mentioned roles, we’re going to suppress those.

Yeah, exactly. Well, they’re. They’re. Who could possibly be interested in those things? That doesn’t sound fascinating at all. All right. The ideal Old Testament woman. Oh, God. We’re getting into the ideal Old Testament woman. This terrifies me. Resembles many women of strength and character today. She is dignified and virtuous.

I wanna. I wanna stop you real quick. Yeah, we think. We think of virtuous as. As having to do with, like, chastity and things like that, because it’s a holdover from the King James Version. But when the King James Version was translated, virtue meant strength. And like, this is why when Jesus has the. When the woman with the issue of blood touches Jesus’s robe and he says, I felt virtue go out of me. That doesn’t mean that Jesus’s chastity or morality suddenly vanished.

He got horny.

All of a sudden, he felt power leaving him. But the word virtue gets associated with women. And so even though in. In the. In the Hebrew Bible, this word khayil, which. Which means like strong, powerful, when it’s used to refer to men, they translate it differently from when it’s used to refer to women. And when it’s used to refer to women, it frequently gets interpreted to refer to some kind of moral character rather than what it refers to: strength and power.

Wow. Okay. Yeah. I don’t think that the authors of Got Questions knows that she is dignified and virtuous, works productively, not only at home, but is capable of running a profitable business. What, supervising people with kindness and wisdom, making investments and planning for the future, all while managing her household, building a solid family, and caring for the needy in her community. What are they talking about?

So this is. This is from Proverbs 31 . This is. Have you. You’re not. You’re not familiar with. With this passage? Let me. This is so in. In Proverbs, this is supposed to be the king talking to his son and giving him counsel. And so we have this ode to a woman of strength. And this is. This is Eshet Khayil. This is that word khayil that I mentioned before. But. And you know, you go look in the King James Version, who can find a virtuous woman? So. But a woman of strength who can find. She is far more precious than jewels. The heart of her husband trusts in her, and he will have no lack of gain. She does him good and not harm. All the days of her life. She seeks wool and flax and works with willing hands. She is like the ships of the merchant. She brings her food from far away. She rises while it is still night and provides food for her household and tasks for her female slaves.

How does she have time for any of this?

Because she’s got a bunch of slaves.

Okay, there is that.

That’s nice. She considers a field and buys it with the fruit of her hand. She plants a vineyard. She girds herself with strength and makes her arms strong. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable. Her lamp does not go out at night. She puts her hands to the distaff, and her hands hold the spindle. Blah, blah, blah. She opens her hand to the poor, reaches out her hands to the needy. She makes herself coverings. Her clothing is fine linen and purple. Her husband is known in the city gates, taking a seat among the elders of the land. She makes linen garments and sells them. She supplies the merchant with sashes.

Holy cow. This woman is on fire. Fire. That is a Kardashian. We’re talking.

This is a girl boss.

Yeah, man.

Now, it—it does have her primarily overseeing the management of the household. But this is written probably in the Persian period, in the time when we’re starting to get this idea that’s closer to the Greco-Roman idea of the household, where the woman manages all the household. But. And this actually conflicts with other things. So when we talk about modest clothing, we. We talked about this a little bit modesty in the Hebrew Bible and. And even in the New Testament, you know, it says don’t braid your hair, don’t put on makeup, don’t wear fancy clothes. But here, it’s like, no, she wears fancy clothes. Her linen. Her clothes are fine linen and. And purple and stuff like that. That’s fancy clothes.

Yeah, that’s. So it’s not modest dress.

No, this is. This is a. An ideal from a different kind of social standard. But, yeah, this is. This is a pretty famous ode to. To the powerful woman. So they’re. They’re trying to. They’re trying to sound egalitarian here, even as they.

Yeah, it’s. That’s crazy. Like, literally, the woman that they just described, first of all, has no need for a man. Like, I don’t.

There is. She is a powerhouse. Nobody needs.

She doesn’t need anything from anybody. And second of all, I mean, this is Taylor Swift stuff here. Second of all, like, she. That. Yeah. What you’re not describing is a. Is a, you know, a little church mouse housewife who.

A trad wife.

Yeah, exactly.

All right.

Whether. Whether you like the. Yeah. Whether you like the. The Taylor Swift version or the WWE version, she’s the man.

She is.

She’s killing it. I like that. But what she isn’t is, like a companion who supports her husband and brings him joy and pleasure. Like, that’s not what that is. That is a woman. She doesn’t have time to be like, yeah, go. Go find yourself a therapist, honey, I’m busy.

She. She has a long jacket if you. And picking up slack.

What is it? Touring the facilities and picking up slack.

But apparently the Bible says that you can have it all, ladies, so that’s good. Let’s see the. So the article goes on. In the early church, women ministered alongside the apostles and supported the work of the church.

I’m. I’m gonna have to. I’m gonna have to. To correct this right here.

So one of the things they quote there is Romans 16:6 , when they talk about ministering alongside the apostles.

Romans 16:6 says, Greet Mary, who has worked very hard for you. They skip over Romans 16:7 , which says, Greet Andronicus and Junia, my fellow Israelites who were in prison with me; they are prominent among the apostles.

Right.

Junia is a woman’s name. Yeah. So this. They. They quoted a passage that does not say women ministered alongside the apostles and skipped over the passage that says, no, women were apostles.

Because they don’t want to acknowledge that a woman had that role.

I mean, I’m impressed that they acknowledge women ministering at all. You know, so many of these articles just went straight to whatever the. Whatever the one was that said women be quiet in the church or whatever?

Yeah. Oh, they’re going to get there, though, aren’t they?

Oh, probably, yeah.

Yeah, they’re going to get there.

These have all blended together in my mind. I don’t know what’s coming. So women ministered alongside the apostles, support and supported the work of the church. No, they did the work of the church. Hosted church meetings, prophesied, mentored and taught.

Yeah, and hosted church meetings. I mentioned that when, when we get into the Greco Roman world, you have this concept of women being the managers of the house.

Right.

And within early Christianity, you had women who owned homes and a lot of church— hosted church meetings. It does. Doesn’t tell half the story. These are women who owned their own homes who said, “You can have my home to use as a church.” So it’s more than just hosted church meetings. These were women who owned property and we have— and donated things to the church. And we have funerary inscriptions and we have frescoes in catacombs and things like that that make reference to women as leaders, ecclesiastical leaders within the church.

Okay, if you say so. In God’s perfect design for the home, he intends— Oh, my. Oh, this is not going to go well. He intends for a woman to be submitted to the leadership of her husband. Now that— that quotes Ephesians 5:22 and 1 Peter 3:1 . 1.

Yeah. Notice they’re not, they’re not quoting 1 Timothy. What is 1 Timothy like? “Shut up.” Well, 1 Timothy’s the one who, who says that, you know, “I do not permit a woman to…” Well, actually, it’s— it’s also probably the interpolation in 1 Corinthians 14 . But also in, in Timothy, we have this idea that women should learn in silence.

Right.

And— and let her ask her husband when they get home. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, just as good, they’ve got the Ephesians thing that says, “Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord.” “For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church.”

Yeah. And maybe you’ve seen on social media, sometimes you’ll see this picture of three different umbrellas. The outer one, the big one, the smaller one, and the smallest one. Right. Where the big one is Jesus, the middle one is— is a man, and then the smallest one is the woman. Right.

And the woman’s umbrella protects her and the kids, and the man’s umbrella protects him and them. And then Jesus protects everybody.

Yeah, but— and there’s a, there’s another metaphor that is used to try to gin up a sense of egalitarianism, which is the— I don’t remember what the word for it is, but it’s like the fire brigade buckets, where you’re handing buckets—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

across. And so one, somebody has to be first, first, and then— and then the others go— go behind. So that’s— that’s a metaphor that, that is sometimes used to refer to that. Yeah, but—

But this goes on. It says, “A wife’s submission and obedience are to be reciprocated by the husband’s love and self-sacrifice.” Wow. Okay. Yeah, in this way.

And also Ephesians, by the way, an awful lot of scholars don’t think that Paul wrote Ephesians, that this is another pseudo-Pauline epistle.

Yeah. Okay.

And Peter definitely didn’t write 1 Peter.

Okay. In this way, the woman’s relationship with her husband portrays the church’s relationship with Jesus Christ.

In other words, men— you’re Jesus.

Yeah, yeah. Basically, until he shows up, you get to be that guy. Yeah, yeah. I— It— And it feels a little uneven.

Yeah. And it reminds me of. Oh, shoot. 2015, 2016. Somewhere around there, there was a, a precinct chair in Davis County GOP who like posted on social media that our. Our society started going downhill when, I forget the exact words he said, but it was basically when women left the kitchen and started voting. And, and there were some people in the, in the GOP who were like, please don’t say that. And then there were other people who were like, damn straight.

And yeah, it was. It was a pretty revealing time as. As there were other very revealing things going on with. With the election of a serial sexual predator. So. Yeah, yeah, it was bad.

I feel like this article does what so many of these articles do, which is. Tries so hard, as you say, to have its cake and eat it. Where it’s like, women are equal, but the man’s in charge. Women are. It’s egalitarian, but it’s not. It’s this, but it’s that, like, you have to submit, but you have to be strong. You have to be like, again, putting no onus on men to do anything but like, love her.

Where.

Whereas she has to be everything to everyone. And like. And like she. And she’s just there for. As an accessory to help out this important person who’s there.

Yeah. And in. In the last paragraph, this one sentence says it all. I think God created the woman to complement and complete the man and thereby become a God glorifying representation of his nature and character. In other words, you’re being glommed onto the man to make sure that he is all that he can be.

I mean, I guess, I guess the point, like one of the, the sort of takeaways of all of this is that even if you’re a Bible-believing person, we don’t have to like we, there’s a million ways that society has improved on the Bible. The Bible, what the Bible has to say about mental illness is not useful in a modern society.

And, or illness.

Yeah, exactly.

The cause of illness. Guess what? It just, despite what some Christians still think, it’s not demons. We, we learned that, we figured that part out. It’s okay for us to not look to 2,000-year-old, 4,000-year-old texts to define how we want to do our gender relations and how we want to look at sex and gender in a modern context.

And, and I think it is so disingenuous to try to, in one of these paragraphs, since the ancient world was a patriarchal society, to try to like fob off the fact that this is, this is just straight up patriarchalism on the ancient world and say, oh yeah, they, we have a better idea now about how to make women subservient.

Yeah, we have a better idea now. And that idea is do the same thing they did.

Yeah. And, and really this is, this is just an attempt to rationalize using the outdated ethics of the Bible as a proof text for structuring power in a way that serves their interests today.

If, if they weren’t doing that, they would take a little more seriously the differences in these texts. They wouldn’t presuppose the univocality of everything from Genesis 1 to Genesis 2 all the way over to Galatians 3 . And imagine that it all reflected the exact same perspective because it manifestly does not.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, well there’s that everybody. If you would like to hear us talk a little bit more about this and I, you know, I think we’re gonna, we’ll get into some interestinger stuff as well as answer some of our patrons’ questions. You can become a patron over on patreon.com/dataoverdogma. If you sign up at the $10 a month level, you’ll get every week. We do the, the, the afterparty with lots more cool content. So sign up for that or you can just sign up for early ad-free access. That’s just the $5 a month level. So head on over there if you want to, if you need to contact us, it’s contact at dataoverdogmapod.com and we’ll talk to you again next week.

Bye, everybody.

What is a Woman... Biblically?

Segments

The Transcript

Scripture Index

Terminology