Women in Deuteronomy, 1883, and A Hopeful Trajectory

Heads up, Dear Reader: I’m taking you on a lot of rabbit trails today. I hope you’ll stick with me. We’re getting deep into the marrow of Bible study, but I promise you, it’s worth the journey.

Pray

This prayer comes from Crosswalk:

Dear Holy Spirit, open the eyes of my heart so that I might learn from you today. As I read the words, teach me what you would teach me, reveal truth to my heart, and quiet the doubts that rise up inside of me. Please be with me and help me to see what you would have me see from your read. I commit this time to you, so speak to me through your Word. Amen.

Read

Deuteronomy 24:1-5, Matthew 5:31-32, Matthew 19:3-9

Reflect

Reading the Old Testament through the eyes of a woman who loves God with as much of her heart as she can (the goal is all her heart, of course, but we all have our idols), and who treasures the scriptures as trustworthy and inspired by God front to back, is really tough sometimes. There are so many passages of scripture that I stumble upon and stop short, shocked (again) that this is A) in God’s word, B) apparently an acceptable way of thinking at some point in history, and C) still used today in some places to abuse and oppress women.

“Your word is a lamp to my feet and a light to my path” is a favorite verse of mine, but then I come across something like Deuteronomy 25:11-12, and I don’t even know what to say. How in the world can a passage like this be a lamp to my feet and a light to my path? I think to myself.

Maybe you struggle with this too. Maybe you dismiss the Old Testament as irrelevant. Maybe Hebrews 8:13 (“When He said, ‘A new covenant,’ He has made the first obsolete”) supports your position. But if we treat this passage dismissively based on that argument, we lose so much. Psalms. Proverbs. Isaiah. Moses. Aaron’s priestly prayer. Jael, Deborah, Naomi, Rahab, and Esther… the list of holy, beautiful, edifying Old Testament texts goes on.

No, we can’t dismiss them. These hard Old Testament passages are part of our faith’s history of formation, and, like it or not, part of our story. We must press in, push back, and ask the Holy Spirit for insight.

As I lean in to this exploration of women of the Old Testament and prayerfully seek to acquire understanding, two words come to mind: history and trajectory.

History

My husband and I have recently begun watching 1883, a television series depicting one post-Civil war family, the Duttons, as they make their way from their home state of Tennessee to Fort Worth, Texas, where they join a wagon train embarking on the grueling journey west to Oregon and then, ultimately, to Montana, where they settle and establish their family ranch. From what I can tell, the producers of 1883 have done an excellent job of capturing the lawlessness and harsh life of this era, and watching this series while reading through the Old Testament provides a really fascinating context, as it takes me out of my modern mindset and places me in an entirely different time and location in not-so-ancient history.

[Spoiler Alert]

The opening scene is brutal, depicting an American Indian attack on the wagon train. No one is allowed to survive. The Indians kill every man, woman, and child without mercy (not unlike Israel was instructed to do to their enemies), and that is just the start of it. Every episode of this epic drama is marked by intense violence.

One particularly memorable scene features Billy Bob Thornton as Ft. Worth Marshall Jim Courtright, who, responding to reports that some men from his town shot and killed some people in the wagon train, walks into the saloon where they were drinking and shoots them all point blank, no questions asked. “There’s only one killer in Ft. Worth, and that’s me,” he says. In another scene, when a drunk man assaults the Dutton’s 17-year-old daughter, her father shoots him in the head. In the Wild West, anyone with a gun is judge, jury, and executioner, it seems.

But it’s not just guns and arrows that do violence in this series. We also get a gut-wrenching look at the merciless effects of smallpox, when we witness the incomparable Sam Elliott as “Shea Brennan” weeping over his dead wife and daughter’s blistered bodies. Another character, a non-English-speaking immigrant, is dismissed from the wagon train because he has smallpox as well. A stranger in a strange land who doesn’t even speak the language is left to die, because to bring him along would jeopardize the whole tribe.

This era is practically unimaginable to my white, upper-middle-class, heavily vaccinated 21st Century mind, yet it was the way of life for many Americans less than one hundred years before I was born. It is part of my nation’s history—the good, the bad, and the heinous.

I find the experience of watching this show helpful as I approach the Old Testament. Whether I like it or not, the stories of violence and disease, of invasion and conquest, and above all, of patriarchy, are part of my nation’s—and my faith’s—history.

Trajectory

But we can’t miss the trajectory. 1883 depicts a strongly patriarchal culture, yet as a culture, it was dynamic, moving slowly toward a more just future for women. Whenever the men were out, the women were more than capable of taking up arms and defending their families. Faith Hill, as matriarch of the Dutton family, depicts a woman of tremendous strength and courage, a strong leader who is more than able to hold down the fort when her husband is away. And both Dutton parents recognize the value of raising a daughter who can hold her own with the boys.

In fact, the women’s suffrage movement was already underway at this time in history. Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were pushing hard for women’s right to vote, and the momentum for equality for women has been progressively moving forward ever since. While there is still room for improvement, there is no denying the progress that has been made, from the rate of women attending college to holding positions of leadership in business, the sciences, and politics.

A similar trajectory can be seen in scripture, and it is this trajectory that helps me engage these passages as part of our faith history. Like the Wild West, the ancient Middle East represents a patriarchal culture where men ruled and women had very few rights and were not even guaranteed the benefit of the doubt. Yet it is important to note that, just about three hundred years after a scribe was writing Deuteronomy, Deborah was judging Israel. In fact, threaded throughout the heavily patriarchal texts of the Bible are women in respected roles such as prophetess, landowner, ruler, military leader, and fearless defender of her people. Despite the culture of the day, women always found a way to lead, direct, and hold their own, and there have always been men who appreciated them for it.

When Jesus came, He launched that trajectory forward leaps and bounds, welcoming women as disciples, affirming their desire to learn as students, and pointing to their example for men to follow here and here.* And it is that trajectory that we look to as we engage with this passage from Deuteronomy.

“When a man takes a wife and marries her, and it happens, if she finds no favor in his eyes because he has found some indecency in her, that he writes her a certificate of divorce, puts it in her hand, and sends her away from his house, and she leaves his house and goes and becomes another man’s wife, and the latter husband turns against her, writes her a certificate of divorce and puts it in her hand, and sends her away from his house, or if the latter husband who took her to be his wife dies, then her former husband who sent her away is not allowed to take her again to be his wife, after she has been defiled; for that is an abomination before the Lord, and you shall not bring sin on the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance.” (Deuteronomy 24:1-4)

It is this scenario the Pharisees are referring to in Matthew 19, when they test Jesus by asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” But Jesus exposes their ignorance by asking, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, no person is to separate.” 

They said to Him, “Why, then, did Moses command to give her a certificate of divorce and send her away?” 

And here, Jesus turns it right back on them. They are asking about divorce in ancient Israel, but He says, “Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”

Jesus is telling them—and us—that what happened in ancient Israel, what Moses commanded, was not how things were supposed to be. “From the beginning it has not been this way.” The way women were treated? Not how God designed things. Patriarchy? Not in the beginning.

“Then God said, “Let Us make mankind in Our image, according to Our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the livestock and over all the earth, and over every crawling thing that crawls on the earth.” So God created [humanity] in His own image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them. God blessed them; and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” (Gen 1:26-28)

Men ruling over women was a result of the Fall (Gen 3:16). Yet many have reframed that curse as “God’s design for women,” fostering a spirit of oppression and reducing the role women can play in ways God never intended.

Apply

As we continue to wrestle with these hard passages of scripture, we have to be willing to look deeper than what is on the page. Recognizing the historical context in which these stories were written, and the fallen culture and hardness of heart that drove so much of what happened, we can’t overlook the trajectory in scripture toward a redeemed, renewed humanity that embodies God’s original design for His image bearers—male and female. Were women treated harshly in ancient Israel? No doubt. Was the playing field for men and women even? Not in the slightest. Yet as we look to Jesus, we see how He was moving the ball down the field, engaging with women in utterly counter-cultural ways, getting closer to God’s original intent for men and women to thrive in relationship to one another as equals in every way.

“But now you have been united with Christ Jesus. Once you were far away from God, but now you have been brought near to him through the blood of Christ. For Christ himself has brought peace to us. He united Jews and Gentiles into one people when, in his own body on the cross, he broke down the wall of hostility that separated us. He did this by ending the system of law with its commandments and regulations. He made peace between Jews and Gentiles by creating in himself one new people from the two groups.” (Ephesians 2:13-15)

“For all of you who were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus. And if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.” (Galatians 3:27-29)

“Subject yourselves to one another in the fear of Christ.” (Ephesians 5:21)

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*I think it is worth noting that Paul continued to move the trajectory forward as well. Whereas most ancient texts were written by men for men, Paul’s epistles were evidently intended to be read by both men and women. He recognized women as apostles and deacons, he gave instructions to women (and to children!), and he entrusted a woman, Phoebe, to carry his letter to the church in Rome. For a fascinating exploration of the implications of Pheobe as letter carrier in ancient Rome, check out this episode of Theology in the Raw.

Photo Credit: Emerson Miller/ Paramount+ /The Hollywood Archive