Trading Anachronisms

I recently listened to a Christian theology podcast called Context Matters, hosted by an Old Testament scholar. She had another female scholar on recently to discuss sexuality in the Bible. When their discussion started after the role of women in the ancient near east, I was taken aback by their correction of a modern Western Christian anachronism. It is common within contemporary Christianity to skate over the discrepancies between men and women in Church and biblical histories. After all, Paul said that in Christ there is no male or female. 

These biblical scholars were right to challenge this anachronism. There was indeed a distinction and imbalance between men and women in Scripture and history. However, I believe these two scholars over-corrected by asserting another anachronism. These scholars interjected the concept of property as a key component to sexual imbalance in biblical times. I think that a modern understanding of property is being read backward into their biblical interpretations. 

These ladies posited that women were the property of fathers and husbands and that bride prices were paid by prospective husbands to fathers, as a purchase. What this ignores is the social unit of the era. Biblical culture was at different times nomadic or agrarian. The work was often distributive and communal -- all persons had a role (think ranch life in Wyoming). The loss of a daughter to a husband was a fiscal and social loss to a family-economic unit, which was often village-oriented and not nuclear. A bride price was not a purchase in as much as it helped the productivity of a community after the loss of a member and a way to unite families economically. The bride was not property in the way we understand property. Elsewhere in Scripture, women also took with them inheritances. 

Core to understanding things is actually the fact that Eve was taken from Adam and that together, there is holism in humanity. Women were not marginalized as property like we possess a record collection. Rather, women were part of a system typified as an honor and shame economy. Women were covered by their husbands honor and they possessed shame (not that they were ashamed), which was the upholding of the family/tribe in unity. Honor (i.e. socio-economic credit) was seen as rightful to men as representing Adam, from whom woman was taken from. Women were a part of the whole, so just as Eve found honor in Adam, women found their wholeness in the male half. It would be shameful to unravel that unity through interjecting individual or personal rights against the family's collective disposition. 

Was this patriarchal? Yes. However it was functional and not egalitarian, because egalitarianism often leaned toward disunity. Did men overreach inappropriately? Also yes. So I am in agreement with these two scholars regarding disparities. I think women were too marginalized and male society used the Adam and Eve motif out of context to secure power and control. That said, the foundation was not about property as we understand it. Ultimately it was about maintaining family/cultural unity and not about private property as in our libertarian market driven context.

The point is not to defend the improprieties of old, but to avoid reading things out of context by noting one anachronism and at the same time interjecting a complete other one. These scholars were not wrong, but slightly nearsighted and abstracting.