The Harlot Shall Be Burned with Fire: Biblical Literalism in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

Religion Dispatches: Sarah Sentilles

I must admit that part of me is relieved to have these disturbing passages out in public. These bloody verses that insist women be punished with violent death—often for perceived or imagined sexual transgressions—are usually overlooked, downplayed, skipped over, ignored. Most people like to pretend they aren’t really in the text. Especially people who claim to take the Bible literally.

Passages like these should render biblical literalism impossible. Their existence illuminates that literalists always engage in selective literalism, choosing the passages that support the arguments they want to make. And what is the rubric for selective literalism other than convenience and the maintenance of oppressive power relationships? When faced with such verses—or even passages about keeping kosher or not being around women who are menstruating—many a literalist will argue something like “that was then and this is now,” while in the very next breath (I’m talking to you, Rick Santorum, and you, Michele Bachmann) they’ll insist that homosexuality is an abomination or that women should submit to their husbands. Why? Because it’s in the Bible.

The film could, in fact, be read as an argument against biblical literalism; a warning about the misogynist violence embedded in the biblical text…

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Defending Misogyny With The Bible

Look at the men behind him nodding in agreement.

Women Should Keep Their Mouths Shut–Yes, I Said It

That’s right ladies. You should not be opening your mouth to speak during church services. Just ask Pastor Jack Schaap. Wonder what he has to say about the black church. Many women are quite vocal and physically expressive.  I can imagine the private conversations this man has with his buddies brothers in Christ.

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.