Are Women Worth Less Than Men?
Do you sometimes read the Bible and get the idea that God views women as having less worth than men? If so, allow me to share with you an email conversation I had today:
Question: As I read some of your blog posts, I notice you are in favor of defining women in a good light from a biblical standpoint. This is an issue I have difficulty with. It seems that sometimes the Bible is slanted toward men being the better sex, (such as the Levitical unleanliness of a female birth lasting longer than a male birth) ... but that leaves me wondering why I should be happy to be a woman at all.
Answer: When it comes to the Levitical law about girls being unclean for twice as long as boys, I think you may have a fundamental misunderstanding that is damaging to how you view yourself as a woman created by God.
As you probably know, the Levitical laws about being “clean” and “unclean” refer to ritual impurity, not sinful impurity. Even men were unclean for having relations—clearly something God wanted them to do. The law to which you referred relates to bodily discharges. The nations around Israel used bodily fluids—semen and urine—liberally as part of their worship. Yet to be “holy” is to be set apart. God wanted His children to be much different from the nations that did not fear Him. And He made a big deal of bodily fluids being separated from worship. I think that is why there was an outer courtyard for women—women were not allowed as close to the Holy of Holies in the original tabernacle/temple setup. It probably had to do with women's potential for menstruation at unexpected times—thus blood in the temple area. It had nothing to do with relative worth.
The same is true of little girl babies vs. boy babies. If a mom nurses her girl, sometimes the estrogen from Mom causes a clear discharge in the girl during the first month. I suspect it’s because of this potential for a discharge in the girl that her time of ritual impurity was twice as long as for a boy, who does not have that same response to estrogen. (My coauthor, an ob-gyn, was the first person to bring this phenomenon to my attention.)
As for passages that talk about a male’s life being worth more money than a female’s, think of that in terms of insurance, not in terms of relative worth. My husband carries a higher dollar amount on his insurance than I do because we depend more on his income for daily living than we depend on mine. That does not mean that if I die, it’s less of a loss than if he does. It means the economic impact upon my family would not be as great. In the culture in which the Old Testament law was written, men were always the higher wage earners.
As a woman, you are created in God’s image as much as your husband or any man is. Man by himself in creation was the only thing that was “not good.” It took woman and man together created in the image of God to make “very good.” That is God’s perspective from the beginning.
It’s also worth noting that when Jesus died on the cross, the veil in the temple that separated humans—male and female—from God was ripped apart. Because of what Jesus did, men and women both have equal access to boldly approach the throne of grace.