The divine female

In the Bible, the feminine is the way of holiness.

“Oh how I loathe religion,” Virginia Woolf writes in 1934. Who could blame her? A religion had been hell-bent on telling her, as a female, she was spiritually infirm, mentally weak, sexually evil.

But what is the Bible’s first story? A (male) snake is lying to a woman, trying to take everything from her.

Story by story, the Bible explains it all: males use their wiles to try to take her down. The female must learn to fight back.

Over in Jewish culture, you know, there’s the opposite view. “Women are not subjugated in traditional Judaism,” as Shaye J.D. Cohen explains, “they are venerated. In the spiritual sphere, they are naturally superior to men.”

I found that interesting? Then I started to read Bible scholars.

The Old Testament scholar Paul Heger observes: “there are no derogatory notions about women in Scripture and no claim that the woman was responsible for the first sin performed by humankind . . .”

Let’s go over a few points?

In Christian tradition, the woman is the cause of all the problems. “Eve” is the beginning of “evil.” But the first female’s name isn’t even Eve.

“Chava, as Eve is named in Hebrew, comes from the word chayim, which means ‘life’ in Hebrew,” notes Aviya Kushner.

As names in the Bible are meaningful, the first female’s name is ‘mother of all life’. The man is not the ‘father of all life’. His name is just ‘Adam’, the word for earth. His name is dirt.

“It appears from Genesis that whatever is superior was created later,” says Ahron Soloveichik. Christian tradition misled us: the woman is the crown of Creation. Coming along last, she’s the main event.

Her arrival is the moment that God’s estimation of the world shifts from “good” to “very good.” She brings the divine power of creating new life. She also brings a love of beauty.

Seeing the magic tree, in Genesis 3:6, she understands it’s “desirable” and a “source of wisdom.” As Jerome M. Segal notes: “Eve is someone who is moved by beauty and is motivated by a desire for wisdom.”

The snake who lies to her is “crafty” in Genesis 3:1. As Paul Heger notes, this shows a “sympathetic attitude towards the woman, displaying an understanding for her falling into the trap of this wily character, who skillfully frames the discussion to attain his goal.”

Eve is deceived, and must learn. She has to wise up.

Christian readers are deceived about Genesis 3:16, the passage in which, they say, the woman is ‘cursed’. In fact, the male is cursed, and the serpent is cursed. The woman is not.

Here is a typical translation of that verse: “To the woman he said, ‘I will greatly increase your labor pains; with pain you will give birth to children. You will want to control your husband, but he will dominate you.’”

But this is wrong. The Hebrew word translated ‘control’, teshuqah, was used three times in the Bible. Its meaning was unclear. The Greek Septuagint translated it as ‘turning’.

That made no sense to Christianity. What made sense was ‘control’.

With the Dead Sea Scrolls, scholars found additional usages of teshuqah, and it clearly meant ‘turning’, as in a change of direction, often with the idea of returning, or going back. Joel N. Lohr’s 2011 paper “Sexual Desire? Eve, Genesis 3:16, and תשוקה” discusses how the meaning of the verse shifts with just this one word.

Lohr says: “Despite increased pain in childbearing, Eve would actively return to the man.”

The context is the woman giving birth in pain. The context is human reproduction. Pain is required for new life, and God observes that the woman will pay that price, so life can be.

The man will have to go to work—that is his curse.

And so the man and woman leave the garden, and humanity is born.

The Bible has no words for humans having “sex.” The phrase often used is “to know.” The man knows the woman. The female is a source of knowledge. To “know” is to know her.

Even this suggests a fact of Biblical spirituality that Christianity never understood: union with the female is how the man connects with God.

This again is a feature of Judaism. Eliot Wolfson explains: “it is incumbent on each Jewish male to be conjoined to a female, so that the image below will be complete.”

Over and over, the female in the Bible has beauty, wisdom and knowledge.

The man is special if he gets her to marry him. Abram (later Abraham) is supposedly the great hero, but nothing much is said about him. His wife, Sarai (later Sarah), though, is “beautiful” in Genesis 12:11 & 14.

“Beauty” here isn’t saying that Sarai is sexy. Like the fruit on the tree she is beautiful as a sign of divine value. “All that Sarah says to you, listen to her voice,” God tells Abraham in Genesis 21:12.

The man learns wisdom as he pays attention to her. But Abraham is a bundle of fear. When they arrive to Egypt, he thinks the Egyptians will want her, and kill him to get her. He has an idea! If he pimps her out, he’ll live.

When Sarai is gone, Abram prays to get her back. It is the first wise thing that he has done.

Throughout the Bible, women have open access to God. Note Genesis 25:22, when Rebekah, concerned over her pregnancy, “went to inquire of the Lord.”

For traditional scholars, this made no sense at all. Rebekah’s inquiry was “no doubt through the mediation of a man of God,” says Karel Van der Toorn.

Feminist Bible scholarship was needed to intervene. “There is not one single reference in Genesis to any proto-Israelite figure needing an intermediary to converse with God,” notes Esther J. Hamori.

There are many women prophets in the Old Testament, like Miriam (Exo 15:20), Isaiah’s wife (Isa 8:1–4, 18); Deborah (Judges 4–5), Huldah of 2 Chron 34:22 & 2 Kings 22:14.

Walter Kaiser Jr. notes: “There also were false women prophets, such as Noadiah in Nehemiah 6:14, and those prophetesses in Ezekiel 13:17, but they were rebuked not because they were women or because they prophesied; instead, they were rebuked because what they said was false and not a revelation from God.”

I love Judges 13, when an angel visits Samson’s mother. “He looked like an angel of God, very awesome,” she tells her husband.

Her husband wants to see the angel, so when the angel returns, the woman runs to get her husband, who—however—looks at the angel, puzzled.

“Are you the man who talked to my wife?” he asks.

He doesn’t see a divine being. Only his wife does.

The mother in the messianic lineage, typically noted by being initially barren, kept apart for a special purpose, is a woman with extraordinary theological abilities. Note Hannah’s prayer in 1 Samuel 2:1–10, a prophetic epic, anticipating Mary’s song in Luke 1:46–55.

No husband listens to these songs, or sings them too. The divine female sings directly to God.

Traditional Christianity prized the virginal female, a type the Bible never celebrates. God loves sexy, adventurous women, and they often save the day.

Most glamorous and dangerous, perhaps, is Esther the slave girl, who, at a dire moment for the Jewish people, becomes Esther the queen after one night in bed with the king (2:9).

Why would that be, one wonders?

But before that, in Joshua 2, Rahab the harlot of (her name, scholars have worked out, means ‘vagina’), realizes two deities are in opposition, and she must choose between God’s Israelites, or Jericho’s gods—who don’t seem more powerful than Egypt’s gods, who’d been trounced.

She recognizes, as she tells the Israelite spy in 2:11, “the Lord your God is God in heaven above and on the earth below.” Rahab is the first Gentile to have this theological insight, and she becomes the prototypical Christian.

She sides against Jericho, and its walls come tumbling down. In the Bible, women makes the key decisions.

In Judges 5, Jael lures in an enemy male with sexual favors, and ends up on top. “Jael is acting like a male in the sexual encounter with Sisera,” notes Gershon Hepner.

Once Sisera’s guard is down, she bludgeons him to daze him, then pushes a tent stake into the hole she’s making in his head.

Then the Jews sing a song about it.

Her hand reached for the tent peg, her right hand for the workman’s hammer. She struck Sisera, she crushed his head, she shattered and pierced his temple. (Judges 5:26)

As Rhiannon Graybill notes, Yael’s narrative “inverts, subverts, or otherwise challenges conventional gender norms.” The Bible is often that way. Its great movement is for women to become masculine, and men feminine, leading to the perfection of divine androgyny.

But it starts with “beautiful” women, owning their sexuality and using it for God’s dangerous purposes.

In stories where the ‘blessing’ is given to a son, the fatherly action formalizes a choice the mother has already made. She knows which son is to be chosen because he’s the one who is like her.

We see this with Jacob, where the father and the mother disagree, and the mother wins. We see it with Joseph, whose “beauty,” in the Hebrew text of Genesis 39:6, is the same as that of Rachel’s, his mother’s, in 29:17.

The theme we see, starting with Joseph, is female “beauty” manifesting in men. This is an important update to the overall biblical project of the human being brought into the divine state, “male and female” like God.

We see it again with Moses, whose mother sees he is “beautiful” in Exodus 2:2. The great theme continues to be women’s appreciation of beauty, wherever she finds it.

Then comes the important narrative of the Egyptian midwives refusing to kill boys, even when told to, as the Pharaoh’s daughter likewise doesn’t hesitate in saving Moses’ life—she just does.

Women must intervene—with trickery and deception, if needed—to save the life of the special boy in the face of male attack.

Through her agency alone, the unified human becomes possible.

With Jesus, the gender wars were meant to be over. Always at odds with male authority, has nebulous gender. He discusses himself as a ‘mother hen’ (Matt. 23:37–39; Luke 13:34).

As Virginia Woolf writes, later, in Three Guineas: “He chose his disciples from the working class from which he sprang himself. The prime qualification was some rare gift which in those early days was bestowed capriciously upon carpenters and fishermen, and upon women also.”

Were the male disciples gifted, though?

Women followers understand Jesus perfectly, and follow him to the end. But his male disciples protest, cause trouble, deny and leave him, and generally misunderstand everything. This seems, notes Leif E. Vaage, “to eliminate them from the field of possible exemplars of discipleship.”

Jesus works with the male disciples. In two scenes intended to model Christian leadership, he bathes feet (John 13:1–17), and cooks (John 21:12–13), each perceived as female activities. This is an effort to move them into male-female spirituality, into divine androgyny, but they refuse.

A key verse is Luke 24:11. The women tell the male disciples about Jesus being risen from the dead. “But these words seemed like pure nonsense to them, and they did not believe them.”

The men never even learned how to listen? The male is finished. Christians might know, vaguely, the church is called the ‘bride of Christ’ (cf. 2 Cor 11:2; Eph 5:25–26), without thinking this through.

You become a woman, in spiritual terms, or you die off. There is no male Adam available to humans anymore. In the New Testament teachings, the future is female, or nothing.