the Empathy List #139: Eve is No Rib

How we read women in the Bible is flat out wrong.

Real quick: if you haven’t bought my book, today is the day. And if you have, take one minute to go review it. Please and thank you!

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Hello friend, Liz here.

I used to call myself “complementarian”—as in, I used to believe in a theology that affirmed “traditional,” cis-het patriarchal gender roles as God’s ideal for marriage. I would’ve hated being called a #tradwife, even when I was in a conservative evangelical setting, because I’m a special unicorn Enneagram 4, but… that’s what I was. I stayed home with the kids, made dinner every night, and attuned more closely to my husband’s desires than to my own. (ahem)

But as I began to study the marriages of those around me in the church, I noticed an uncomfortable trend: the healthiest marriages, those in which both partners felt affirmed as individuated bodies, personalities, and selves, were not ones that embodied complementarian norms.

Take, for example, my time in a “soft complementarian” Acts 29 congregation. I once mentioned to a pastor that, in fact, my own marriage did not meet these norms. And he assured me that if that was case, then I actually had a good complementarian marriage. Mutual self-sacrifice, looking out for each other, listening and seeking agreement above all else—well, that’s just what complementarianism is supposed to look like. Everyone else was doing it wrong.

That may be true. But I began to feel that such a justification did not excuse the perpetuation of abuse that occurred in dysfunctional complementarian marriages, marriages in which women were explicitly told by their husbands that their sexual desires mattered zero, that their dreams/career/preferences were stupid or at least must come second to their husband’s dreams/career/preferences, that their marriage in practice made her a slave to her husband and children.

Go ahead. Tell me how I’m wrong, how that is not the norm, how women love being in complementarian marriages in which they’re taken care of and no longer have to think or provide for themselves, how complementarian men have it worse because they’re held responsible before God for their family’s salvation while their wife now gets to be a spiritual sloth. (Just what every woman wants, for her husband to try to control her salvation…)

I never had that kind of marriage. And yet, my husband suffered crippling anxiety about God’s, our church, and my own spiritual expectations of him, and I felt deeply wrong for being the kind of woman who had so much trouble standing behind my husband instead of walking ahead of him. Sigh. (Turns out, he’s an introvert and I’m an extrovert, so that was very minor way that we bucked norms, apparently.)

Ultimately, my husband and I both rejected the evangelical theology known as complementarianism because we saw it as a twisting of the gospel. The gospel of Jesus which tells us to put the other first, to mutually submit to each other, and to clear space for the other. I have come to believe that God has no grandchildren, which means that I stand with God alone; no one is responsible for me except for me. Individuation, in other words, is not wrong, but essential and ontological.

And we both decided that the median expression of a theology mattered. So, if egalitarian marriages functionally mirrored gospel love better… then that theology could be trusted. And if complementarian marriages functionally encouraged abuse, codependency, or abdication of love, then maybe the theology was rotten.

I bring all this up as a prequel to the essay I’m sharing with you this week. I published a book excerpt in Sojourners Magazine this month, and it chronicles another faulty aspect of theology about women—that is, that Eve was created from Adam’s rib. Turns out, the Hebrew word translated as “rib” is translated as “side” throughout the rest of Genesis. 40+ times, that word is translated as “side” in the Old Testament, and only once—when referring to Eve’s creation—is that word translated as “rib.” Which caused me to wonder whether we’ve been reading Genesis wrong this whole time.

Here’s a snippet of the essay. You can find the rest on Sojourners, and I’d encourage you to subscribe to keep reading! Sojo is a breath of fresh air for me and many other progressive Christian writers who seek a communal voice of faithful reason in these times. I think you’ll dig Sojourners. ;-)

Enjoy! And thanks for reading, my friends.

Warmly, Liz Charlotte Grant

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Eve Was Not Created From the “Rib” of Adam

Originally published in the Jan./Feb. issue of Sojourners Magazine

Lucas Cranach’s “Eve,” circa 1530, Photo by Cassia Davis, Image Source

Lucas Cranach’s “Adam” and “Eve” diptych, circa 1530, Photo by Cassia Davis, Image Source

American Evangelicals like to assume that reading the Bible is easy, that a plain reading exists. If only people were to hold our favorite English translation in their hands, Godself would arrest the reader, Truth making itself obvious on the tissue-paper pages. And voila! We would discover a clear path to world peace (or at least denominational peace).

Unfortunately, Bible reading is not so simple. Sometimes, we as readers have gotten the meaning of the text wrong. Sometimes commentators have allowed bias to shape interpretation. And sometimes, the problems start nearer to the root, in the translation itself. For example, the question of women’s roles in the Bible represents a tower of errors built up over time.

Kate Bushnell from A Woman of the Century: Fourteen Hundred Seventy Biographical Sketches Accompanied by Portraits of Leading American Women in All Walks of Life, 1893, p. 142—University of Victoria Libraries. Special Collections © 2015 Oxford University Press, Image Source

Katharine Bushnell, an American medical missionary to China who was fluent in the biblical languages, was one of the first female translators to take on these errors directly. In her 1921 commentary, God’s Word to Women, she painstakingly retranslated and corrected 100 Bible passages that referred to women and women’s prescribed roles within the home and church.

And she starts at the very beginning. While many male translators had written that in Genesis 2:21 Eve was formed by God from Adam’s “rib,” those translators render that same Hebrew word as “side” the other 42 times it recurs in the Old Testament. Bushnell explains that the Hebrew language contains a different word that explicitly means “rib,” a word that the Genesis author does not utilize in the account of Eve’s creation. Yet even today, a corrected translation appears only as a footnote in my NIV Bible. So, why has the mistranslation of Eve as created from the “rib” of Adam — rather than his “side” — persisted?

[TLDR; misogyny]