How the Hebrew Bible Dismantles the Patriarchy
Image of the Judaean desert courtesy of Unsplash
When arguing for gender equality and justice, progressive Christians argue often cite the New Testament’s occasionally subversive positions on the matter. In their explanation, Jesus’ teachings alongside various texts relating to women in the New Testament are subtly dismantling the patriarchal constructs instituted in the Old Testament. Plenty of Bible passages can be strung together to support this case, but as I’ve sat with it, I’m not sure the framing is quite right.
By elevating the teachings of the New Testament above the Hebrew Bible, we give birth to a schizophrenic Deity who lacks the courage to subvert unjust systems. And worse, it can nurture a not-so-subtle anti-Semitism by claiming that Jews’ God-concept is morally unevolved, or worse, barbaric.
We must remember that Jesus was a Jew, and quite an observant one. The Jewish Bible was Jesus’s Bible, and the Jewish God is Jesus’s God. If we keep this in mind and revisit the text with fresh eyes, we notice the subversiveness of the first testament as well.
The seeds of a dismantled patriarchy are planted in the first books of the Hebrew Bible.
In order to read the Bible well, a person must first be able to separate a text’s moment from a text’s message. If a person confuses a text’s cultural context with its central message, all sorts of problems spring up. It requires you to trade a living, breathing faith with the power to help you live today for a religion locked in liquid amber that’s perfectly equipped to help you live in a world that no longer exists.
As Carolyn Custis James writes in her book Maelstrom, “Patriarchy is not the Bible’s message. Rather it is the cultural backdrop that sets off in the strongest relief the radical nature and potency of the Bible’s gospel.” As we learn to separate the moment from the message, we discover that problematic patriarchal norms form the cultural backdrop of both the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. And in both, not just the latter, the Spirit seems to be subverting the system and dismantling the patriarchy.
The first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Torah, are considered the weightiest books in the Jewish canon. The Torah is to Jews what the Gospels are to Christians. As we read Genesis, the patriarchal cultural backdrop reveals itself quickly. Not only are women are subordinate to men—lacking an authoritative voice, devoid of agency, without legal rights, and dependent on men even to survive—but men are also given power over each other.
The custom of the day, “primogeniture,” ranked sons by birth order and functioned as “the lynchpin of the patriarchy.” The word patriarchy means “father rule,” and this system makes possible the formation literal “patriarchs.” The men above men ensure that all the lesser men—along with their women and slaves—stay in line and maintain the order. But against this cultural backdrop in the Hebrew Bible, good news begins to peek through the curtains, reshaping our tale by shattering the cultural order.
In the Torah, we repeatedly encounter what Hebrew Bible scholars call the “blessed second-son motif,” which is just a fancy phrase that refers to God’s disruption of primogeniture by favoring another child (often the second son) over the firstborn. To underscore the point, in these tales, the culturally-honored power-class of firstborns often look like ham-fisted grifters.
God favors the righteous second-born Abel over the firstborn murderer Cain. (The tale warns us early in our journey that upending the order can cost a person greatly.)
Abraham’s firstborn was Ishmael, you may remember, but second-born Isaac gets chosen instead.
Jacob is a conniving SOB who I wouldn’t trust with my laptop password, but he still catches God’s blessing over Esau, who seems totally blind to his cultural privilege.
At one point, God really shows off by choosing one of the youngest son of Jacob over his 11 older, scheming brothers. Here the youngest son is not only favored above the others, but he becomes the savior of them all. To really drive home the point, the tale says that Jacob adopts Joseph’s two sons (Ephraim and Manasseh). This makes Jacob’s baby boy the father of two tribes of Israel instead of just one. God’s subversions continue after the Torah as well, notably when God chooses David’s 10th son Solomon to sit on the throne of Israel and build the Temple.
Of course, the “blessed second-son motif” is only one crack in the patriarchal plaster that’s smeared across so many of our sacred texts, but there are many others. We might explore the countercultural behavior of women such as Esther, Ruth, and Deborah, for example, if we want to close the gap between the two testaments’ subversions of patriarchy. All of which help us contextualize the New Testament’s teachings.
Jesus’s dignifying of women should not come as a shock to us.
The surprise ending of Jesus’s “prodigal son” parable should not seem, well, surprising.
The presence of so many female apostles and teachers should not confound us.
And neither should the assertion that there is “neither male nor female … in Christ.”
God’s habit of disrupting of cultural patriarchal norms begins long before Bethlehem’s silent night. The subversive passages in the New Testament are not abrupt departures, but rather a brave continuation of God’s earliest interventions.