How Does God Really Feel About Females?: A Biblical Study in Gender Equality

By Joanne White Ferdinando

In the very beginning, God made the male and female equal in gender and power, so how did the female become secondary to the male? This book comprehensively reviews the initial gender equality of the sexes, how it was lost, and why it should be reclaimed. Accurate translation evidence is provided for words like desire, rule, head, and submission—words that have unnecessarily held back all females, especially Christian females, for thousands of years. Clear analysis of male/female brain functions, biblical languages, patriarchy, ancient law codes, complementarianism, slavery, rape, marriage, and verses like Genesis 3:16 and 1 Tim. 2:12 should satisfy most skeptics that it was never God’s intention for the female to be second to the male on a human totem pole. They were made to stand together on the same rung of creation’s hierarchical ladder and to freely use all of their talents and abilities. Females are now, and always have been, equally loved in the sight of God and needed in the Church and world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2019
• ISBN: 9781973651451

Joanne White Ferdinando

Joanne White Ferdinando has been researching the Bible with a focus on gender equality for more than 40 years. In-depth study with several biblical research groups during those years highlighted the importance of accurate translation and allowing the Bible to speak for itself without private interpretation. In 1996, Joanne earned a B.A. degree, Magna cum Laude, in Psychology while working full-time and raising three children as a single parent in Florida. She has served in leadership roles in a university, two hospitals, two churches, and several community volunteer programs. Joanne now lives in rural Georgia where she writes, supports her daughter’s ministry, and enjoys her dog Rocky.

Book preview

HOW DOES

GOD

REALLY FEEL ABOUT

FEMALES?

A Biblical Study in Gender Equality

JOANNE WHITE FERDINANDO

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Copyright © 2019 Joanne White Ferdinando.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version (NKJV)®. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from The Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Scripture quotations marked REV are taken from The Revised English Version® (REV®) Copyright © 2014 by Spirit & Truth Fellowship International, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.

Scripture quotations marked WLC are taken from the Westminster Leningrad Codex online digital version, maintained by the J. Alan Groves Center for Advanced Biblical Research. Public domain.

Scripture quotations marked YLT are from Young’s Literal Translation of the Bible. Public domain.

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ISBN: 978-1-9736-5144-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-5143-7 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-9736-5145-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019900540

WestBow Press rev. date: 02/07/2019

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1   Ish and Isha

Chapter 2   The So-Called Curse

Chapter 3   Commandments and Codes

Chapter 4   The Importance of Mary in the Royal Line of Jesus Christ

Chapter 5   New Testament Discipleship

Chapter 6   Headship and Submission

Chapter 7   Brain Matters

Chapter 8   So How Does God Really Feel about Females?

Endnotes

Dedication

For Antoinette Brown Blackwell (1825–1921) and All Who Love Truth

Blackwell was a precocious child living in Rochester, New York, who began preaching in her Congregational church at the age of nine. She eventually became the first woman to be ordained by a major American Protestant denomination in 1853. She continued preaching until 1915. Blackwell was also an abolitionist and early feminist, writing several books on women’s rights and equality. ¹

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my mother (1910–1996) who taught me to stand up for my beliefs. She was a descendant of Marcus Tullius Cicero (which serendipitously makes me one too) and a trailblazer for women’s rights in the early 20th century who could matter-of-factly wring the necks of chickens and kill spiders with an open palm. She taught herself to drive, long before it was fashionable for women, by grinding the gears of her father’s farm truck on a gravel driveway until she felt competent enough to take it down the road to deliver lunches to her brothers working the fields.

I also wish to thank my sister in Christ, Jane Walters, who managed to read several chapters of this manuscript and offer erudite suggestions to a lonely writer while juggling her endless community projects.

My daughter, Rev. Dr. Valerie Hancock, also read the manuscript, generously taking time from her busy counseling practice. I love her more dearly, if that’s possible, for her pertinent and insightful comments.

Robert (Bob) Wassung, MA, Christian friend, teacher, and faithful supporter of biblical gender equality, provided relevant research materials, and I sincerely appreciate him.

My husband and children exhibited gentle, selfless patience while I worked on this project. Perhaps my greatest fan and vocal supporter was my son, Paul Eugene, who died unexpectedly of a lung ailment a few months before the project’s completion.

And of course, I deeply thank God and Jesus Christ for graciously guiding the research and writing of every page of this book. May it enlighten readers, empower females, encourage biblical gender equality, and abound to God’s glory!

Introduction

The twentieth-century woman’s libber who burned her bra is no longer active, having been too radical and antimale, but female activism in support of gender equality hasn’t ended. With subdued but equal fervor, today’s twenty-first-century woman continues to challenge her position in the world.

Natural Law

This book, written from a Christian perspective, encompasses the hopes of all females on this planet for gender equality, whether Christian or not, since no one’s life role or worldview can be totally severed from the Word of God. What is known in the secular world as natural law is patterned on God’s divine law and affects every living creature. The United States Constitution was established on principles of the natural law of the Creator as outlined in the Geneva Bible, speeches of Roman statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero (106–43 BC), and law volumes of Sir William Blackstone (eighteenth-century Oxford professor).

Law, in its most general and comprehensive sense, signifies a rule of action; and is applied indiscriminately to all kinds of action, whether animate or inanimate, rational or irrational. Thus we say the laws of motion, of gravitation, of optics, or mechanics, as well as the laws of nature and of nations … [W]hen the Supreme Being formed the universe, and created matter out of nothing, He impressed certain principles upon that matter from which it can never depart, and without which it would cease to be … The whole progress of plants, from the seed to the root, and from thence to the seed again; the method of animal nutrition, digestion, secretion and all the branches of vital economy—are not left to chance, or the will of the creature itself, but are performed in a wondrous involuntary manner, and guided by unerring rules laid down by the great Creator.²

Globally, humanity has had to cope with the natural laws of suffering, sickness, toil, and death ever since the fall of Adam and Eve. Stories comparable to the biblical Eden abound in legend and lore. Egyptian artwork depicts the temptation, tree of knowledge, cherubs guarding a garden with flaming swords, and warfare between woman and serpent. The Garden of Creation is an ancient Sumerian story of origins. Enuma Elish is a Babylonian epic of creation (but honors the wrong god). Norse mythology introduces Ask and Embla as Adam and Eve, while Hinduism calls them Yama and Manu. Australian aborigines share an oral history of Punjil, the Great Creator. Mayan wall art portrays Cain and Abel. And the list goes on.

No matter how energetically we humans may attempt to deny or ignore God’s divine natural law, for example, by insisting on godless evolution, His hand cannot be removed from His creation. Divine natural law has affected the lives of every person ever born on this planet, including yours and mine, and will continue to affect us until Jesus Christ returns to usher in a new age (Gk. aion) and a new nature.

The Question

It’s the age-old question. In the beginning, did God purposely design females as an inferior sex? Is that why Adam was formed before Eve? Was it really God’s idea for females to be subject to the authority of males? And if so, hasn’t it been pointless and wrong for them to struggle for gender equality? On the other hand, if God designed females equal in power and purpose with males, how did their gender role become secondary? And why has gender equality been so difficult to achieve?

The basic question this book hopes to answer is, How does God really feel about females? We know that God doesn’t feel things the way we do, but He does love. As a matter of fact, the Bible tells us that He is love (1 John 4:16). Love is His very essence. Does He love females as much as males? Does He expect just as much or less from them? Doubt has lurked in the recesses of women’s minds. Am I less important to God simply because I’m a not a man? They deserve an accurate biblical answer to that question, and so do men.

Uncertainty about gender equality swirled in my own mind for years, and I decided to find an answer, but not just any answer—a clear, pure, biblical answer upon which both sexes could agree.

Although in the past few decades there has been a proliferation of books and articles discussing biblical norms for the role of women, both in society and in the church, a consensus of interpretation has not emerged. The complexity of the issue, coupled with the exegetical difficulty of relevant Scripture, has made general agreement elusive.³

Elusive perhaps, but would a loving God leave us wondering what He expects from His daughters? Surely correct exegesis—not eisegesis—is possible, and the answer is in His Word, just waiting to be found. If God expects the female to stand in the shadow of the male, she should stand there with a smile and stop trying to achieve gender equality. But if He made the two sexes gender-equal, as I believe the research outlined in this book will prove, then every fraudulent restraint that denies gender equality should be identified and removed.

What Exactly Is Gender Equality?

Sex and gender aren’t synonymous terms. Sex describes physical characteristics, while gender expresses the behavioral, cultural, or psychological traits typically associated with one sex.⁴

Male and female are sex categories; masculine and feminine are gender categories. Aspects of sex will not vary substantially between different human societies, while aspects of gender may vary greatly.⁵

Gender equality can be defined as the state in which access to rights or opportunities is unaffected by gender.⁶ These rights and opportunities may be spiritual or secular.

Has Gender Equality Been Achieved?

A biblical message to legalistic Galatians began sparking debate in the first century AD when the apostle Paul said, There is neither Jew nor Greek [Gentile], there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:28).

That sounds like across-the-board equality to me, but empirical surveys confirm that, even now, more than two thousand years later, females have yet to achieve full gender equality, either religiously or secularly.

Significant advances have been made, but varying levels of inequality and discrimination continue to exist in our twenty-first-century world. Globally, the overall well-being status of females remains second to males, and there is still overt and covert resistance to change.

In 2015, two-thirds of the 781 million illiterate people⁷ in the world were female, as were nearly 75 percent of the 12 to 27 million people trafficked into slavery in 2012.

Over 10 times as many girls are currently being trafficked each year than African slaves were transported during the height of the trans-Atlantic slave trade … In the last half-century alone, more women and girls have died as a result of gender discrimination than all the men who died in all the battles of the 20th Century.⁸

The 2011 United Nations Human Development Report concluded, Gender inequality varies tremendously across countries—losses in achievement due to gender inequality … range from 4.9 percent to 76.9 percent.⁹ And the United States, believe it or not, is one of those countries.

2010: For all our empowered rhetoric, women in this country aren’t doing nearly as well as we’d like to think … Women hold 17 percent of the seats in Congress; … women work outside the home, but they make about 76 cents to a man’s dollar and make up the majority of Americans living in poverty.¹⁰

2017: Among women who say they have faced gender-based discrimination or unfair treatment, a solid majority (71%) say the country hasn’t gone far enough when it comes to giving women equal rights with men. About half (46%) of women who don’t share these experiences say the same.¹¹

It doesn’t seem plausible that this unfair situation is what a loving God could possibly have intended for females, yet alarming statistics like these have received insufficient attention from bureaucrats, business leaders, crime fighters, educators, sociologists, the media, and, yes, even church leaders.

Don’t get me wrong. Progress in gender equality is noticeable all over the world, and we should applaud it, but it would be foolish to believe that equality has been achieved when there are only a handful of remote places on earth where full parity exists between the sexes, for example, the !Kung San tribe of the Kalahari Desert in Africa and the Vanatinai of Sudest (Tagula) Island in the Coral Sea.

Scriptural Evidence

Genesis tells us that the male was formed before the female, but there is clear scriptural evidence (see chapter 1) that the first couple enjoyed full gender equality in the beginning. Based on this evidence alone and without one smidgen of scriptural proof to the contrary—not even one verse affirming that males are more spiritual, capable, intelligent, or important to God than females—the biblical gender equality question should have been laid to rest long ago: God made both sexes gender-equal in the beginning, and they should always have been treated that way. Ah, but there’s a rub because Eve was deceived in the garden (Gen. 3:6).

Adam blamed Eve, Eve blamed the serpent, and the serpent didn’t have a leg to stand on.

—Author Unknown

Some New Testament verses place the blame on Eve (2 Cor. 11:3; 1 Tim. 2:14) for eating the fruit. (Whether it was an apple, quince, or other object of desire isn’t important to our topic.) Others blame Adam (1 Cor. 15:22; Rom. 5:12, 14–19). Eight times the apostle Paul says in his epistles that one man caused the fall, and twice he names Adam as that man.

We know from scripture that both Adam and Eve ignored God’s command not to eat from the tree under penalty of death, both had the free will to say no, and both were eventually expelled from the garden, yet history oddly placed a greater burden of blame on Eve.

Why wasn’t the culpability for this act equally apportioned? Did some ancient misogynistic writer purposely alter the Genesis text to increase male preeminence and power over females? Or was there perhaps an innocent scriptural transmission or translation error? Or did something else occur that changed the entire course of history?

Consequences

One error often begets another, ad infinitum. No matter what initially caused Eve’s extra burden of blame, the consequences for females have been widespread and tragic over millennia. Here are just a few examples:

• The Aryans, upon invasion of India circa 1500 BC, introduced the custom of sati, the burning of a wife after the death of her husband.¹²

• In 800 BC, the first creation myth was recorded in Greece. It blamed a woman, Pandora, for opening a box and causing all the ills of the world.¹³

• In Persia, around 700 BC, Queen Vashti dared to disobey King Ahaseurus. His royal advisors recommended an immediate divorce, fearing that other wives in the kingdom might also disobey their husbands once they learned of her conduct (Est. 1:17).

• China practiced gender impartiality, in general, until the time of Confucius, circa 500 BC, who taught that a woman’s role was to care for the men in her family. Chinese women could no longer have personal hopes or ambitions. Their feet were painfully bound because men found small feet more appealing. A concubine was sometimes buried alive to keep her master company in an afterlife, and wives were sometimes buried with husbands.

• Not long after Hinduism developed in India, around 500 BC, women were trained to obey their husbands in all things and to walk behind them like slaves. They could not own property or remarry if widowed.

• In The Goat Song,¹⁴ a novel set in Ancient Greece during the Peloponnesian Wars (431–404 BC), women are portrayed as cows that bear children. The idea of a woman being half-animal grew popular in Greece from the teachings of Socrates, who taught this misogynistic fallacy to Plato, who later taught it to Aristotle.

• To the Greek philosopher Aristotle (384–322 BC), women were a deformity of nature (deformed men). Aristotle firmly anchored the doctrine of sexual inequality.

• In the Apocrypha, Wisdom of Ben Sira, circa 250 BC, the following is written, From woman is the beginning of sin and because of her all die.¹⁵

• Ancient Romans paradoxically worshipped and denigrated female citizens. Slave-prostitutes served in Roman temples dedicated to Venus. Young virgins bound to the goddess Vesta were buried alive if caught having sexual intercourse.

• Sometime between 155 and 225 AD, Tertullian wrote, Do you not know that you are each an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live, too. You are the Devil’s gateway: You are the unsealer of the forbidden tree: You are the first deserter of the divine law: You are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert even the Son of God had to die.

• In the Talmud, Jewish men thank God for not making them a Gentile, a woman, or a boor.¹⁶

• Galen, a renowned Greek medical doctor (129–200 AD), taught that women lacked self-restraint.

• From the time of Mohammed (circa 600 AD), the witness of a woman has been equal to half that of a man under Muslim Sharia Law because of the deficiency of the female mind. In the Talmud, Ultra-Orthodox Judaism bans women from acting as witnesses at all.

• In the epic poem Beowulf, written about 1000 AD, women are depicted as objects, monsters, or mothers of monsters.

• In medieval times, the church fathers Augustine and Jerome, having studied Greek Stoic philosophy, considered women inferior to men, and Christian church leaders debated whether women had souls.

• Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274 AD), a Roman Catholic doctor, mixing Greek philosophy and religion, misinterpreted the New Testament after studying Aristotle’s teachings and promoted the inequality of women within the church.¹⁷In 1667 AD, author John Milton condemned Eve in Paradise Lost.

• Also in the seventeenth century, far more females than males were burned at the stake in England and hanged in the Massachusetts Bay Colony for occult practices.¹⁸

• In Whitehaven, England, 1776 AD, women were often forced to strip to a chemise in church before marrying because Englishmen who married women en chemise would not be liable for any debts they had incurred prior to marriage.

• In both North America and Europe in the nineteenth century women were generally expected to live homebound, taking care of cooking, cleaning, and childrearing. Free time for women was to be spent doing other things related to the maintenance of the family, from sewing socks to laundry … [V]ery few women had the same opportunities for education as men. Indeed, educating women was often seen as subversive, a possible perversion of the correct social order. Women were also entirely shut out of political activity. Women were not allowed to vote, and in Great Britain, women were so bound to their husbands that under 19th-century British common law, they were barely considered people at all … Though exceptions to the rule did exist, women in general were entirely shut out of the public sphere of 19th-century society unless they were accompanying their husbands or fathers.¹⁹

• David Cloud, whose articles have appeared in fundamentalist Christian newspapers, wrote in 2000, The woman has a different makeup than the man. She was designed for a different role in life—that of a wife and mother. Her emotional, psychological, and rational makeup are geared perfectly for this, but she was not designed for leadership … Human nature has not changed, and neither have God’s restrictions against women preachers.²⁰

• Ultra-Orthodox Jewish groups posted billboard signs in Jerusalem in 2013 calling for residents to save the Wailing Wall from being desecrated by women who wanted to read the Torah in front of it.

• In 2013, Roman Catholic nuns rallied for voting rights when the College of Cardinals was electing a new pope. Their efforts failed. And in 2016, Pope Francis publicly stated that Roman Catholic women can never be priests.

Decline of Rights

Catholicism is the oldest denominational Christian religion, and canon law, the legal system of Byzantine and Roman Catholic churches, began to disrupt women’s lives soon after the birth of Jesus. (Apostles established a biblical set of rules for the non-denominational Christian church at a meeting in Jerusalem. See Acts 15:1–31.)

Our English word canon comes from the Greek kanon, meaning a rule or measure. Over the years, canon law (not to be confused with the Canon of scripture) became a complex compilation of ecclesiastical decrees and rulings dictated by Catholic synods and councils and established by church fathers, patriarchs, and popes. Historically, canon law has denied education to females, limited their activities, and subjugated them as citizens, church members, daughters, and spouses. God is not the author of canon law.

Ecclesiastical or Canon Law made its greatest encroachments at the period when Chivalry was at its height [about five centuries after Christ]; the outward show of respect and honor to woman under chivalry keeping pace in its false pretense with the destruction of her legal rights …

Higgins shows that the [Latin] word Liber from which our words liberty, freedom, are derived, is one and the same as liber, a book, and had close connection with the intellectual, literary, and priestly class. As under Christian doctrine the priesthood was denied to woman, so under the same rule learning was prohibited to her. To permit woman’s education under Christianity would have been a virtual concession of her right to the priesthood [emphasis added]. At the Synod or Council of Elvira, 305 or 306, several restrictive canons were formulated against woman. Under Canon 81, she was forbidden to write in her own name to lay Christians, but only in the name of her husband. Women were not to receive letters of friendship from anyone addressed only to themselves … Among general canons we find that No woman may approach the altar. A woman may not baptize without extreme necessity. Woman may not receive the Eucharist under a black veil. "Woman may not receive the Eucharist in morbo suo menstrule."²¹

Ulpian (Dig., I, 16, 195) gives a celebrated rule of law which most canonists have embodied in their works: Women are ineligible to all civil and public offices, and therefore they cannot be judges, nor hold a magistracy, nor act as lawyers, judicial intercessors, or procurators. … The reason given by canonists for this prohibition is not the levity, weakness, or fragility of the female sex, but preservation of the modesty and dignity peculiar to woman.²²

The number of canon laws that have affected females over the centuries is staggering. Early in the twentieth century, Pope Pius X consolidated scores of these laws and decrees into a simplified Code of Canon Law. The process took fourteen years from 1903 to 1917 because there were so many.

Last updated in 1983 by Pope John Paul, this code continues to proscribe activities for Catholic females in a less stringent, modified way. More than two thousand years after the resurrection, they still feel the sting of these canonical regulations.

Protestant and Evangelical females who don’t adhere to Catholic canon law have also suffered from religious gender inequality over the centuries. Many convents permanently closed during the Protestant Reformation when Martin Luther was teaching that a woman should stay at home and look after household affairs. A wife was to be a subordinate companion to her husband. Her obedience was commanded, and her activities were restricted by him. Her education was to be limited to homemaking skills.

Times have discernibly changed for Christian females, but not completely. An American AP article observed in 2008,

Within the nation’s largest Protestant denomination [approximately sixteen million members], a woman may not