The Uncovered Head

The Bible’s misogynist rant, 1 Cor 11:2–16, is actually feminist.

When a boy, in church, I’d see them: women with doilies or scarves on their heads. These Christian sisters wanted to make sure everyone knew—women are spiritually inferior to men. If you meet many Christian men, you might wonder?

When I set out to study the sexual teachings of the Bible, I believed it was a message of love. But 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, that violent labyrinth of text known as the ‘head covering passage’, kept staring back at me.

Paul looks at women and says: You’re horrible, cover your head?

“For if a woman is not covered, let her also be shorn.”

It’s actually a hair-raising spectacle of forced shearing? I imagined Christian ladies—as the razors were buzzing—screaming the words of Jesus in Matthew 6:28, “Why do you worry about clothing?”

It just didn’t make any sense. Paul had only just said, in Galatians 3:28, “there is neither male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

But in 1 Corinthians 11:2–16, there’s gender division so fundamental that women must wear a brand of inferiority?

Female head-covering isn’t noted anywhere in the gospels. Mary Magdalene’s flowing hair had washed the savior’s own feet. Female hair seemed mystical, divine.

Then “self-control” is an endowment of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:23; cf. Acts 24:25; 2 Pt. 1:6). How is Paul telling women to be controlled by men?

It made no sense.

I turned to Bible scholars, understanding it’s like professional guesswork. But with the head-covering passage, it got ridiculous.

The popular Bible teacher Michael Heiser favors the idea that, for Paul, female hair is . . . part of their genitals?

It’s very natural for Paul to be telling the Corinthians look, if you can’t figure this out, if you can’t judge for yourselves whether this is proper or not, for a woman to leave her hair uncovered, to display her genitalia when praying, then you got a problem. This should be obvious.

I wrote him, noting that early Christian baptisms were done naked. If women’s bodies were such an ‘obvious’ problem (to the Creator who made them?), early Christians hadn’t gotten the memo.

“I’d need some documentation for that,” he replied.

I sent some, and in his next book he repeats the same line: the head-covering passage is “a plea for modesty and sexual fidelity . . .”

The woman is forever the whore.

I’d go through scholarly literature, looking for clues? Then, there was one.

In Thomas P. Shoemaker’s “Unveiling of Equality: 1 Corinthians. 11:2–16,” he makes a suggestion. Maybe Paul quotes the Corinthians, then replies.

This relied on 1 Corinthians 14:34–36, where a quote-and-reply is more clearly happening, as Katherine Bushnell realized back in God’s Word to Women, published back in 1921.

I realized: we are still receiving illumination from that woman’s mind? She realized that Paul wasn’t the law-giver out to tell everyone what to do.

He’s having a conversation . . . with some very upset Jews?

He acknowledges their voices and perspectives, and contributes his own. The letter has snatches of their conversation.

This insight was inaccessible to traditional Christianity, which understood that men talk, talk, talk . . . without anyone talking back.

Shoemaker’s idea that was dismissed, as by Thomas R. Schreiner, because the quotation seems “incredibly long” and there’s no overt cue it’s happening.

But then, traditional readers hadn’t seen that 1 Corinthians 14:34 is a quotation? Maybe it can’t read the cues very well.

Maybe Christian readers haven’t realized: dialogue is what Paul does.

Take an earlier passage? Denny Burk, in “Discerning Corinthian Slogans through Paul’s Use of the Diatribe in 1 Corinthians 6:12–20,” points to v.18 as an example. Here is the KJV:

“Flee fornication. Every sin that a man doeth is without the body; but he that committeth fornication sinneth against his own body.”

Scholars, following the rhetorical signs, now suggest this:

Paul: Shun immorality. Corinthians: Every sin which a man may commit is outside the body. Paul: On the contrary, the immoral man sins against his own body.

The method, Burk says, is “dialogical, not monological. In other words, Paul is having a back-and-forth conversation with an interlocutor.”

In reading the 1 Corinthians letter, he notes, “it is very likely that the native hearer and reader of Greek could have picked up on a wide variety of subtle, inexplicit signals of quoted material.”

Following Shoemaker’s suggested markings, I re-approached the head covering passage? And it suddenly became . . . a story.

First of all, the first two verses of the chapter, 11:1–2, are probably wrapping up the previous discussion. The tone shifts from Paul’s kind tone (“Now I praise you, brothers,” etc.) to . . . the other one?

A Jewish convert is writing to Paul, lecturing him — undressing him!

“But I would have you know . . .”

The quoted passage spans 11:3–10. It is a rousing paean to male authority and female subservience, in a traditional Jewish style. It is a rant.

It is not citing or relying on the Jesus teachings. This is a lawyer speaking? He reminds me of the ‘teacher of the law’ that Jesus speaks to in Luke 10:29. He sees categories, hierarchies, definitions.

“A man ought not to cover his head, since he is the image and glory of God; but woman is the glory of man. For man did not come from woman, but woman from man; neither was man created for woman, but woman for man.”

The Jewish references may be unfamiliar to Christians. As Michael J. Broyde details in “Head Coverings and Jewish Law,” a rabbinic requirement that Jewish women cover their heads in public has remained, in many communities, a requirement to this day.

The lone scriptural foothold is Numbers 5:18, where a woman suspected of cheating on her husband could be put through an ordeal that begins with the priest “uncovering” her head.

There you see!—many rabbis extrapolated. A good Jewish lady keeps her head covered up.

Even among Jews, this was extensively debated. It’s not really a biblical law. Could this ‘covering’ require the context of the Temple?—where the Numbers 5:18 scene occurs, after all.

And, as Broyde notes, this practice would only refer to “the practice of modest Jewish women who are Torah-observant.”

In “Under Cover: Demystification of Women’s Head Covering in Jewish Law,” a feminist critique, Susan Weiss notes the basic assumption: “women as the chattel of their husbands.”

These head coverings, she notes, mark “the institutionalized class distinctions among women on the basis of their sexuality, and the accompanying property rights of men in that sexuality.”

In New Testament teachings, however, the woman is not owned, and neither is the man (cf. Gal 5:1, etc.).

There is to be no effort to follow Jewish law (cf. Heb 8:13; Luke 16:16; Rom 10:4, etc.). And remember: to follow one part means you have to follow it all (cf. James 2:10; Gal 5:3).

To enforce rules about head-coverings, if believing it’s a continuation of Old Testament law, would, for a Christian person, be to enter a very problematic theological state.

As I thought about the story the passage is telling, I realized it might be a bit complex, and even poignant.

“‘I have the right to do anything,’ you say,” as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 6:12. The Christian people are going a little wild with the new freedom?

This would extend, naturally, to women. The male controls are loosening and lifting . . . and Jewish men are getting concerned?

They worry: Free women will be vulnerable, abused, harmed? They need male controls. They need male protection.

Paul begins his reply, after all: “It is for this reason that a woman ought to have authority over her own head — because of the angels.”

This reference is to Genesis 6:2, where angels seize human women for an evil project of launching a new species — a scene that is essentially a rape.

Suddenly, I realized the meaning of Paul’s reply.

Human males can’t protect the females.

Are the women of Genesis 6 protected by men? Men are unable to protect women. In the most horrifying scene of sexual attack in all scripture, human males were powerless.

Rather, the women must protect themselves.

As Alan G. Padgett notes: “The word authority (exousia) is always, in Greek, the person’s own authority, not someone else’s.”

The scriptures are the story of women, after Genesis 6, re-gaining spiritual agency and ‘self-control’, and this occurs apart from male controls.

Moses’ mother, Yael, Esther, Mary, Mary Magdalene . . . these are women operating without male oversight, with decision and, when necessary, with extreme violence.

In Paul’s spirituality, there’s only interdependence. “For just as the woman is from the man, so also the man is by the woman—and all are from God.”

He never tells the Corinthians what to do.

He says: “Decide for yourselves . . .”

He urges them, as usual, not to fight: “we have no such practice, nor do the churches of God.” (cf. Rom. 14:5–6, etc.).

A passage in between—on hair—was tricky?

Does not nature itself teach you that if a man has long hair it is to his dishonor, but if a woman has long hair it is to her glory? For long hair has been given to her instead of a covering.

To explain this requires a deep dive into Jewish references, which is a magical world in which divinities are present on earth regularly, and interact with humans in a series of subtle signs.

Hair, throughout the Old Testament, is a portal between heaven and earth. Hair is divine. Note the hair of priests was highly significant (cf. Lev 19:27, 21:5, Deut 14:1, etc.).

Prophets were associated with lots and lots of hair (cf. Zech 13:4; Mark 1:6; Matt 3:4, etc.). As Rhiannon Graybill notes of the great prophet Elijah: “The text identifies him as ‘Baʿal- seʿar,’ perhaps translatable as ‘lord of hair’ or simply ‘hairy man.’”

She associates this hair with ‘masculinity’, but that isn’t Jewish thinking. Hair means spiritual receptivity. That’s why prophets have a lot. It’s an ongoing link to, and sign of divine order, and comes up again and again in divine instructions (Ezekiel 5:1, etc.)

But the Jewish Nazirite (which means ‘holy one’) is likely in the background of Paul’s associations, as Nazirite associations, from Jesus onward, seems to underlie all Christian character.

They’d view hair as Nazirites do? As a sponge of spiritual energy.

“If a dead body is accidentally contacted it is the hair that becomes defiled,” notes Stuart D. Chepey in a study of the Samson narrative.

Now fill in another key Jewish assumption: the woman is more spiritual than the man. “In the spiritual sphere, they are naturally superior to men,” as Shaye J.D. Cohen explains.

Women can have longer hair — because women are better.

“It appears from Genesis that whatever is superior was created later,” says Ahron Soloveichik.

For Paul, the female is the end-goal of all spiritual practice. The Christian becomes the Bride. Without arguing about Genesis, he signals that men are not very good at anything, and diverts to an outrageous praise of women.

With glory in their hair, women, he says, are drawing from an aspect of the divine that men are much worse at: for ‘glory’ is a sign of God.

‘Glory’ or doxa is a theological term. It is a manifestation of the divine presence, likely understood as the feminine aspect of God, as ‘power’ and ‘glory’ are paired (cf. Mt 6:13; 1 Ch 29:11, etc.).

Human women draw from the glory of God, and their hair doesn’t absorb the malign energy inherent in the world . . . as happens with men.

Male hair is kept shorter. Not too short—because hair is divine. Hair is a receptor for divine energy. You can’t have none.

This indicates is a curious difference here between the ancient world and ours. “In the ancient Near East, baldness was viewed as a disease,” as Graybill notes. “In the Hebrew Bible, it is treated as ugliness or deformity . . .”

Thus, a Jewish man’s hair is best kept at medium length.

“Most ancient and modern commentaries explain that he should wear his hair at medium length, i.e. ‘half length’,” notes Julius Preuss in Biblical and Talmudic Medicine.

An ornate and difficult hairstyle, he notes, was favored for Jewish men, in which “the hair is cut in such a way that the entire haircut looks like a kussemeth, in the form of steps.”

Steps? I think of Joseph’s ladder of angels, or the ziggurat design of ancient temples. These are Jews, after all. Every aspect of life is potentially an intricate sign, even a portal between heaven and earth.

The man with long hair enters a super-charged state, and can become dangerous. This recalls the story of Absalom.

As Gregory Spinner writes:

Absalom gloried in his long, supposedly Nazirite, hair: indicating haughtiness rather than holiness, the hair itself becomes implicated in rebelling against God, until the sinner’s hair is sinning hair.

Thus, a Jewish man’s hair is typically kept trimmed in accord with male nature . . . a nature lower than women.

A Jewish woman covers her hair, in part, to conceal the sacredness of it. The divine radiance, as in the Temple, is guarded, covered.

But for Paul, as he cuts his hair, hair is no longer magical. The way that the divine manifests among humans has shifted away from physical bodies. It is an effusion, now, of love happening in the spirit.

The woman, he says, is now to have authority over herself. He pushes back against male authority by reminding the Jewish men of the great humiliation of men in biblical narrative.

Now, women are protected by the ‘armor of God’ (cf. Eph 6:10–18)!

She’s expected to use it.

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