Women’s Relationship With Scripture: Reconcilable Differences?

The might of Scripture in the lives of women has been at best ambiguous. It has served as an impetus for living, for desire, and for freedom. Women’s lives have been enriched, nourished, and endowed in communities of interest that assert that within the Bible one comes across not just the inspired wish for mortal living and conduct, but the very presence of God.

Women see their own lives reflected in the accounts of serene, valiant women who receive God’s grace upon them. Women of misfortune long accustomed to feeding their households with a smattering of flour and a little oil (1 Kings 17) receive assurance to go on. For centuries, women have avowed with Paul that “neither death, nor life, … nor anything else in all existence, will be able to sever us from the love of God” (Rom. 8:38-39).

Simultaneously, women reading the Bible have found themselves on foreign even uncongenial ground. Seldom if ever do women in the Bible get to speak for themselves. Instead, they are portrayed from the view of male writers and in the context of religious brotherhood where authority ultimately came to be vested in men and where men’s experience was the standard. Women are therefore missing from the Bible as individuals reckoning their own religious journey.

It is unmistakable that women have always taken on such journeys, but within the Bible itself their legacy is not to be encountered. Rather, women come on the scene as direct and indirect “objects” and not “subject” of the verbs of religious acquaintance and convention. Whether depiction of lives or dictation of conduct, or where women’s lives serve as metaphors of religious truths (such as in Hosea or the book of Revelation), women are frequently one-dimensional personas. Either they are absolutely virtuous, villainously depraved, or disposable possessions.