Tag Archives: #metoo

December 16, 2025

Ancient Israel’s Women of Faith, by Claude Mariottini. A Review

By Clarke Morledge

Looking for a thoughtful, challenging book to read over the Christmas holidays? Here’s a suggestion.

Much of what we read in the Old Testament is about the contributions of men to the life of ancient Israel. We typically think of the big names, like Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah, and Jeremiah. But what about the women?

Often the stories of women in the Old Testament are sidelined in favor of male figures. In some stories, women are even cast as villains. However, more recent scholarship suggests women stand out better in at least some of those cases, more so than previously thought.

A Cheating Wife? Or an Abusive Husband? What is the Real Story?

One often neglected story is about the Levite and his concubine of Judges 19:1-30. No matter what way you look at it, the story is tragically shocking, one of the more graphic episodes in the entire Bible.

Typically, a concubine served as a second wife for a man, in this case an Israelite Levite. The more traditional reading suggests that the Levite’s concubine was unfaithful to him, assuming that the concubine became a prostitute. In becoming a prostitute, the concubine had committed adultery, a capital offense. The concubine had fled the house of the Levite, and went back to her parents’ home. But eventually the Levite went out to pursue his concubine and bring her back to his home.

After several nights staying with the concubine’s family, he was able to retrieve his concubine from her parents’ home. On the way home, the Levite and his concubine managed to spend the night with an old man in the town of Gibeah. But during the night, men from the city came to threaten the Levite. The Levite saved himself by giving his concubine over to the men of Gibeah, who in turn sexually violated the Levite’s concubine to near the point of death. When the Levite finally returned home with the lifeless body of his concubine, he cut up her body into twelve pieces, and sent the remains throughout the land of Israel.

It is a pretty awful story. But the traditional reading has some serious problems. The traditional reading hinges on an ambiguous verse, Judges 19:2, at the outset of the story.  The ESV translation reads:

And his concubine was unfaithful to him, and she went away from him to her father’s house at Bethlehem in Judah, and was there some four months.

The KJV is even more direct, implicating the adultery of the concubine:

And his concubine played the whore against him, and went away from him unto her father’s house to Bethlehemjudah, and was there four whole months.

However, some other translations read differently. Consider the NASB, revised in 2020 (as compared to the earlier 1995 revision, which was more like the KJV):

But his concubine found him repugnant, and she left him and went to her father’s house in Bethlehem in Judah, and remained there for a period of four months.

Or the NRSVUE:

But his concubine became angry with him, and she went away from him to her father’s house at Bethlehem in Judah and was there some four months.

It turns out that the Hebrew word, zana, can be translated in different ways. The traditional reading has the word meaning to be “unfaithful” (as with the ESV) or to “commit adultery.” However, the Septuagint, the ancient Greek translation of the Hebrew text, has zana to mean to be “angry” with (as with the NRSVUE). The second meaning does not imply any sexual infidelity on the part of the concubine. Instead, it suggests that the woman had some reason to be angry with the Levite, angry enough to leave him and return home to her parents, without any hint of prostitution or other infidelity, as the KJV states.

Dr. Claude F. Mariottini, Professor Emeritus at Northern Baptist Seminary, suggests that translations like the NASB and NRSVUE get it right. The text does not tell us why the concubine found her Levite husband to be “repugnant.” While the reason for the concubine’s “anger” is never stated, it easily implies that her husband was abusive, and that she sought to return to her parents to get away from an abusive man. In an age when spousal abuse is getting a lot of attention, as with the #metoo movement, this should spark our interest more in the 21st century. There are some good reasons to accept this alternative reading.

The following verse may contain some clues, as there is ambiguity in Judges 19:3 as well. The ESV follows the traditional reading:

Then her husband arose and went after her, to speak kindly to her and bring her back. He had with him his servant and a couple of donkeys. And she brought him into her father’s house. And when the girl’s father saw him, he came with joy to meet him.

You get the impression that the Levite wants to try to persuade his concubine to return back to him. Was the Levite offering his love and forgiveness towards her? Here it is the woman who took her husband, the Levite, into her father’s house. Why did she do this? It is possible that she felt obligated to do so, for if she was unfaithful to her husband, she may have felt it was her responsibility to seek reconciliation. But there is more to the story. The NLT translation reads differently:

…. her husband set out for Bethlehem to speak personally to her and persuade her to come back. He took with him a servant and a pair of donkeys. When he arrived at her father’s house, her father saw him and welcomed him.

In this translation, there is no mention of the woman bringing her Levite husband into her father’s house. Only the father-in-law receives the Levite.  Furthermore, the NLT suggests that the Levite husband was on a mission to try to talk her back into coming home to his house, which is behavior consistent with an abusive husband. Curiously, the concubine and the Levite’s father-in-law tried some stall tactics for several nights which prevented the Levite from leaving with his concubine wife to take her back to his home. Were the concubine and her father hoping that the Levite would eventually just give up and go back home without her?

The incident in Gibeah raises other problems for the traditional view which casts the concubine as an adulterer. When the men of Gibeah threatened the Levite in Judges 19:25 , the ESV says that the Levite “seized” his concubine and sent her out to be sexually abused by the men of Gibeah. If the Levite truly loved his concubine, would he really “seize” her to be handed over to these violent men? The text purposely uses this word to convey a meaning which is certainly not a gentle way to treat a wife.

To make matters worse for the Levite, Judges 19:22, in a manner much like the story of the men in Sodom with Lot, these men of Gibeah declared their intentions to “know” the Levite, a euphemism for having sexual relations. But when the Levite relates his version of the story in Judges 20:5-6, the Levite says that the men were intent on killing him, which was not the case.

The story gets even worse. If the Levite really loved his concubine, and wanted her back, it seems really creepy and unloving for the Levite to chop her dead body up and send her body parts all across Israel. All of these pieces of evidence suggests that the standard portrayal of the concubine as a wayward woman hides the real story, namely that she was an innocent victim of a Levite husband who abused her, and in the process, she ultimately lost her life.  What a tragic story!!

Mariottini’s interpretation of this difficult passage is compelling. It demonstrates that the Bible is quite aware of the problem of “toxic masculinity,” whereby men can abuse their power and destroy the women in their lives. The story of the Levite and his concubine serves as both a warning and a rebuke against such morally perverse behavior.

Claude Mariottini’s newest book, Ancient Israel’s Women of Faith: A Survey of the Heroines of the Old Testament, is collection of stories about many of the amazing women of the Old Testament, offering insights that will be helpful to many men and women today.

 

Women of Faith in Ancient Israel

Claude Mariottini has written a vitally helpful book: Ancient Israel’s Women of Faith: A Survey of the Heroines of the Old Testament, to highlight the often forgotten contributions of women in the story of the Old Testament, with a single chapter focused on the story of the Levite and his concubine. Thankfully, Professor Mariottini’s book has more positive stories to offer to highlight the valuable contributions made by women to the story of ancient Israel. Professor Mariottini has for years written a blog which focuses on the best of Old Testament scholarship, making the story of the Old Testament more accessible to lay persons and scholars alike. While a good deal of the material found in the book can be discovered on his blog, his new 250 page book brings the wealth of that material to one place in one text.

As Mariottini says, the influence of women in the Old Testament is often obscured by how our sources came to us, filtered through male perspectives and priorities. Make no doubt about it, ancient Israel was a patriarchal society, where women were subordinated at home, with limited autonomy, and even treated as property. Nevertheless, as the Old Testament narrative unfolds we read how women were given a greater voice and were at times vindicated in the face of injustice, which can serve as an inspiration to women today.

Mariottini does not sugar-coat the story. The men typically take center stage in Israel’s narrative.

But then certain women come at critical points in the Old Testament, to make a difference. There are fairly well-known women, like Sarah, Abraham’s wife; Deborah; a prophetess and a judge; and Rahab, who hid and rescued the Hebrew spies at Jericho.  Then there are lesser known women, like Sheerah, who was a builder of cities (1 Chronicles 7:22-24). Jehosheba, the daughter of King Jehoram of Judah, protected the young Joash, the Davidic heir to become king, from being killed (2 Kings 11:20). Huldah, a prophetess, was consulted by King Josiah, who had rediscovered a book of the law found in the Temple, bringing it to Huldah to verify that the book was indeed authentic (2 Kings 22:15-20).

Professor Mariottini follows standard insights into the Old Testament held among nearly all evangelical scholars today, insights which are not always well understood by the average church-going Christian. He acknowledges the concept of Yahweh’s “Divine Council,” whereby the uncreated and supreme Yahweh presides over a fellowship of other created divine beings, often described as “gods” or “sons of god” in the Old Testament, a concept in the academic world popularized most recently by the late Dr. Michael Heiser (Mariottini, p. 25). Mariottini acknowledges that the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, was written in stages, such that a text like Deuteronomy acts as an inspired revision to earlier material. Identifying Moses as the originator of the Pentatuech tradition need not rule out the activity of divinely inspired editors in later centuries,  or even just Moses himself later in his life, working to keep the Mosaic law tradition up to date, in light of new challenges to the people of Israel over time.

Mariottini offers several examples, by showing how Deuteronomy provides more protections for women as compared to earlier texts in the Pentateuch. In the days of King Josiah, in the seventh century before Christ, Deuteronomy was cited to prescribe these protections.

In Exodus 20:17, the tenth commandment reads:

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

However, in Deuteronomy 5:21, the same commandment reads:

“And you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife. And you shall not desire your neighbor’s house, his field, or his male servant, or his female servant, his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

Even though the Exodus version does not relegate the position of the wife to that of a slave, it nevertheless is ambiguous enough to indicate that the wife belongs to the husband, as though the wife is the possession of her husband (Mariottini, p. 39).

Yet the Deuteronomy version rearranges the original Exodus version, splitting the command not-to-covet into two separate commands, first that of not coveting a neighbor’s wife, and the second, that of not to covet (or desire) anything which is a possession of the husband, like a house, a field, a servant, a domestic animal, or any other possession. This gives greater clarity and explicit force to suggest that a wife is not to be treated in this same way as a man’s piece of property  (Mariottini, p. 42-43). Deuteronomy gives more explicit recognition of women having their own voice in the life of the Israelite community.

A similar pattern is observed when considering the Pentateuch’s code regarding the release of a Hebrew slave. In Exodus 21:2-6, a male Hebrew slave was to be released after six years of labor. But if that male slave enters the slave relationship as a single man, and the master gives him a wife, that woman will remain with the master even after the male slave is allowed to go free. However, in the Deuteronomy 15:12-18 version of the same rule, the woman is allowed to go free with the freed Hebrew slave, and remain the wife of that Hebrew slave (Mariottini, p. 44-47).

Perhaps the most important contribution Mariottini makes is in his highlighting of the Book of Deuteronomy, as giving us a clearer expression of addressing injustice against women in ancient Israel.

Some Critique of Mariottini

Ancient Israel’s Women of Faith is a great book, but a few criticisms are in order. There is at least one minor error whereby the NRSV’s translation of 1 Chronicles 25:5-6 is said to read: “God gave Heman fourteen sons and three daughters. All these men were under the supervision of their father for the music of the temple of the LORD.” Actually, this translation is what the NIV 2011 has for this passage. The NSRV actually substitutes the phrase “all these men” with “they were all,” a more gender accurate translation of the verse, acknowledging the inclusion of both Heman’s sons and daughters in helping to lead the worship music in the temple (Mariottini, p. 56-57).

A more serious problem arises when Mariottini expands his treatment on this passage later in the book. Here he corrects the earlier misquote of the NSRV translation of the passage, which suggests that both men and women participated in leading worship music in the temple (Mariottini, p. 83).

Mariottini describes this as the “egalitarian” reading, thus indicating that “although sin created a distortion of [this] mutuality [resulting from men and women being created equal], the gospel of Jesus Christ has abolished this distortion and that now both men and women are equally called to serve God” (Mariottini, p. 84) He contrasts that with the CSB (Christian Standard Bible) and NIV 1984 (despite the fact that the NIV 2011 keeps the same translation regarding gender), which reads “all these men.” This latter reading Mariottini says is exemplar for the “complementarian” position, that “God has set apart men to hold political and religious leadership in Israel.” This explains why the CSB and NIV suggest that the daughters of Heman were “not part of the music ministry of the temple” (Mariottini, p. 83).

However, this analysis is misleading as the complementarian position is not as monolithic as Mariottini assumes. While some complementarian churches do restrict women from leading music in a worship service, not all complementarians hold to such a broad restriction.

These other complementarians allow women to serve in such leadership roles, though these same churches nevertheless still hold that the office of elder specifically be held only by qualified men, according to what is found in 1 Timothy 2 & 3, and Titus 1. Other leadership functions in the church, like that of deacon, worship leader, etc. are open to both men and women. This reality is reflected in the fact that the ESV translation echoes in similarity the NRSV reading: “God had given Heman fourteen sons and three daughters. They were all under the direction of their father in the music in the house of the Lord with cymbals, harps, and lyres for the service of the house of God.”  In other words, men and women participate in the leading of worship music.

The ESV (English Standard Version) is rarely described as an “egalitarian” Bible translation, and is instead popularly known as the most influential complementarian-leaning Bible translation today in the English speaking world. Nevertheless, Mariottini is right to conclude, along with the ESV and NRSV, that women were allowed to participate in the music ministry of the temple, and that should anticipate later Christian worship practice.

The question of whether or not women can serve as elders, much less other leadership positions in the church, is a contentious issue today in evangelical churches. As a moderate complementarian myself, the idea of having only qualified males to serve as elders is not a slight against women, as women clearly can exercise leadership in other ways in Christian ministry. Rather, the gender “restriction” regarding elders is more about encouraging men to act as spiritual leaders in the church, modeling what should be done in the home. Even in our supposedly morally-advanced 21st century culture in the West, typically men much more than women tend to abdicate in taking spiritual leadership in their families, relegating such a task to their wives, who are often already overburdened with other responsibilities. When husbands and fathers take more responsibility in a positive, supportive way to spiritually lead in the home, everyone in the family is enabled to benefit.  (As a side note, I spent about four years writing on the complementarian/egalitarian controversy which is dividing evangelical churches today. You can read my research referenced here. Just this past year, yet another church in my town of Williamsburg, Virginia divided over this same issue. In my estimation, there are extremes on both sides of this issue which has tragically led to such church divisions).

It is curious how Mariottini cites some scholarship which challenges the traditional translation of Genesis 3:16 (Mariottini, p. 33).  The ESV has controversially rendered this verse as:  “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.”  In fairness, the ESV also includes a footnote which suggests an alternative translation: “Your desire shall be to (or toward, or even against) your husband, and he shall rule over you.” But Mariottini cites Allen H. Godbey’s translation: “Thy longing shall be toward thy husband; and he shall be likewise toward thee.”  Godbey’s translation is completely new to me, and I am not familiar with other scholars commenting on Godbey’s view.

Some of the chapters in Ancient Israel’s Women of Faith tend to be repetitive at certain points. This is because a number of the stories highlighted by Mariottini tend to overlap, which indicates that the book is more of a reference book, where the chapters can be read in any order, whereby the reader can select what stories might interest them, while coming back to other stories later. This is probably fine for most readers, who want to read a short chapter that interests them, and then read some other short chapter elsewhere in the book. But for someone who wants to read the book from start to finish, the repetition might be bothersome.

Aside from a handful of problems like these, Claude Mariottini has given us a book which assists Christians to discover how many of the forgotten women of the Old Testament expressed their voices and have made significant contributions to the story of ancient Israel. Ancient Israel’s Women of Faith will be a helpful read for those who tend to think that the Old Testament has a purely negative view of women. May these stories continue to inspire us regarding the faith of these amazing women of the Old Testament.

One more thing: As I have read Claude Mariottini before, I am a bit partial to his work. However, there is another book out now which covers the same theme of women in the Old Testament, along with a brief look at women in the New Testament. Ingrid Faro’s Redeeming Eden: How Women in the Bible Advance the Story of Salvation has received some good reviews, too, so that might also be worth checking out.

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March 14, 2021

Women Should Keep Silent in Church? : A Corinthian Conundrum Considered

By Clarke Morledge

Should “women keep silent in the churches,” as Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35? Is it really “shameful for a woman to speak in church?” This is one of those more difficult passages in the Bible, for several reasons.

Some critics of the Christian faith read these verses from Paul, and they therefore conclude that Christianity is hopelessly misogynistic. A few cases in church history have shown that there is a grain of truth here, so the church does need to take this on the chin, to a certain extent.

Various Christians leaders, ranging from Tertullian to Thomas Aquinas, believed from these verses that women should not sing or pray out loud, when men were present. Some Presbyterians up through the late 19th century restricted women from singing in church worship services.

The #MeToo movement today has led many to believe that the church still silences the voices of women…. in ways that go much beyond women’s participation in a worship service, with more perverse consequences. The well-publicized moral failure of evangelist/apologist Ravi Zacharias, accused of sexually abusing other women, sadly reminds us of this. Compounding this, I learned a few days before publishing this post, that Beth Moore, a popular women’s Bible study leader, and a sexual abuse survivor, has left her denomination, the Southern Baptist Convention, saying that her denomination has not done enough to listen to the voices of women who have suffered sexual abuse in that Protestant tradition.

Other liberal-minded, or “progressive” Christians, will point out that Jesus was definitely NOT misogynistic, but will claim that Paul probably was, based on certain Bible passages like what we read in 1 Corinthians 14. Some so-called “Red-Letter Christians,” simply take Jesus over Paul, when it comes to teaching regarding women. Others might merely comment on Paul’s inconsistency of thought, when elsewhere in Galatians 3:28, he says that there is neither “male [nor] female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” Galatians 3:28 then becomes the paradigm by which we can throwout other verses of the Bible that trouble us. So, we just have to put up with the rest of Paul’s lingering misogyny, when we find it here and there, and thus roll our eyes when we get to such passages as found in 1 Corinthians 14.

While these progressivist approaches are meant to somehow salvage Christian faith, it all comes across as rather desperate, and does not lend itself to give us a great deal of confidence in the Bible as God’s inspired word. After all, if Jesus really did select Paul to be his representative voice to the Gentiles (Galatians 1:1), as Paul repeatedly claims, then if Paul failed at the job, this would also reflect poorly upon Jesus. Do any genuine Christians really believe that Jesus royally messed up when he picked out Paul to be his great ambassador to the Gentiles? I would certainly hope not!

When Christians default to this kind of thinking, we end up with a faith that merely picks and chooses verses of the Bible we do like, and reject the rest, a “cafeteria” approach to Christianity, which is really no Christian faith at all. However, a closer look at the Scriptural evidence shows that there are better approaches to this difficult passage, that do not demand the reader to adopt some extremist viewpoint, whether it be on the progressive or traditionalist end of the controversy.

When I wrote my multi-part blog series on “women in ministry” two years ago, I purposely avoided discussing this passage because of its complexity, as I will show in this current blog post. There are basically three different approaches that Bible scholars propose, to try to resolve the difficulty in 1 Corinthians 14: (1) Paul is addressing a particular situation in the early Christian church, that we are largely unfamiliar with today, (2) Paul never actually wrote this passage in his letter. It was inserted by a later copyist into the text of 1 Corinthians, or (3) Paul is quoting a Corinthian objection to women speaking in church, with the purpose of refuting their argument. Let us examine each proposal in turn.

Is Paul Addressing a Particular, Cultural Situation, That Would Require Women to Remain Silent in Church?

No matter where you land in the “women in ministry” debate, often referred to by theologians as the “complementarian/egalitarian controversy,” 1 Corinthians 14:34-45 presents difficulties that extend far beyond the claims of misogyny in the Bible.

The most pressing issue is that 1 Corinthians 11 is actually encouraging women to pray and prophesy in church worship settings. Paul specifically urges women to wear a head covering, but he certainly allows women to speak in church, through prayer and/or prophesy (1 Corinthians 11:5).1  Paul’s climatic verse honoring male and female equally, Galatians 3:28, only raises the stakes higher.2 So, if Paul allows for women to speak in 1 Corinthians 11, but then forbids women to speak in 1 Corinthians 14, just three chapters later, that would indicate that Paul was contradicting himself, or that he said one thing at first, only to change his mind later in the letter. Having this type of in-your-face contradiction is not suitable for something claiming to be the Word of God.

But if you follow the time-honored principle of Scripture-interpreting-Scripture, you can look at a parallel passage to get a hint at what is going on. 1 Timothy 2:11-12 includes these phrases that can remind the reader of 1 Corinthians 14:3

“Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness…. she is to remain quiet”

Readers often focus on the “she is to remain quiet” part. Some might run off in a huff and mutter, “There goes that misogynistic Paul again!” But what is typically missed is that Paul wants women to “learn.” Why might that be an important cultural clue that students of the Bible should notice?

In contemporary Western culture, we regularly take for granted that both men and women should be properly educated. However, in the first century Greco-Roman society, the education of women was the exception, rather than the norm.

Imagine yourself in an elementary or middle school classroom today, and a substitute teacher comes in, but they show little ability to keep control of the classroom. If left to their own devices, the students will talk amongst themselves, resulting in chaos, and no learning occurs in the classroom.

Since women in the first century rarely participated in classroom-type settings, they would be very prone to be disruptive in instructional situations, including church services. The Apostle Paul, on the other hand, believed that the ministry of teaching was essential to the mission of the church, and he firmly believed that order was necessary to allow for learning to take place. But what was so radical about Paul is that he specifically encouraged women to learn the Scriptures, along with the men. In doing so, Paul was widely out of step with the dominant culture, that saw no reason for educating women. Our current day Western culture, which evidently values the education of both men and women, is in many ways the multi-century product of the Apostle Paul’s radical vision completely overturning a fully misogynist society, in Greco-Roman times (Just consider historian Tom Holland’s view of Christian history).

Therefore, far from being a misogynist, one could safely argue that 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 follows the same pattern as 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Paul wants women to learn, but he wants them to learn within the context of an orderly learning environment, where there are not constant interruptions, and people are actively listening. Here are the two controversial verses from 1 Corinthians, in full:

“34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.“

The advantage of this approach is that it modifies Paul’s encouragement for women to actively participate in various ways during the worship service, in 1 Corinthians 11, for a legitimate cultural purpose. For the sake of preserving order within the church, in 1 Corinthians 14, Paul follows the same pattern as taught also in 1 Timothy 2:11-12. Because of this, the general tone of consistency across all of the passages of Scripture involved, and the weight of tradition down through the ages, many if not most Christians find this proposal to be most likely and acceptable.4

The downside to this approach is that such a cultural modification may not satisfy all critics of this proposal. Some might still say that while the “in-your-face” contradiction is removed in this interpretation, it is not wholly removed. It is merely muted.

Furthermore, supporters of this proposal will often note that women “are not permitted to speak, and should be in submission, as the Law also says.” So, where does “the Law” say that women are not to speak, out of submission? Supporters of this view contend that the Old Testament in general teaches this principle. But detractors against this view observe that there is no specific Old Testament passage, in the Law of Moses, which requires women to be silent, within the context of submission. Male headership? Yes. But the silence of women? Not explicitly. You will search the Old Testament in vain to try to find such a prooftext.

We do find instances of women being asked to remain silent in the oral tradition of the Jewish law. However, Jesus frequently rejected the oral tradition of the Pharisees, arguing that the oral law of the Pharisees would often nullify the commands of the written law, as found in our Old Testament (see Matthew 15:1-6). Therefore, according to critics of this view, if we understand that Jesus rejected the oral tradition of the Pharisees, it seems highly unlikely that Paul would be commending the oral tradition here. Nevertheless, supporters of this view contend that the Old Testament; that is, “the Law,”  implicitly instructs for women to be silent in worship, out of submission.

On the Evaluation of Prophecy? …. Something For Only Male Elders to Do?

A close variation of the above proposal, and frankly, the more traditional reading, notes that 1 Corinthians 14 includes a lengthy discussion of the proper order in a church worship setting, where people offer a “tongue” or prophetic word. In this view, the prohibition against women speaking in church is not absolute. Rather, it is intended to be a prohibition against women evaluating prophecy, specifically. Again, Paul is most concerned about establishing order within a church worship service; thereby necessitating his command that uneducated women should behave in an orderly fashion in a church worship service. Again, the concept of what “the Law also says” is a broad appeal to order within the practice of corporate worship, in opposition to having confusion distorting that practice. For example:

“29 Let two or three prophets speak, and let the others weigh what is said. 30 If a revelation is made to another sitting there, let the first be silent.31 For you can all prophesy one by one, so that all may learn and all be encouraged, 32 and the spirits of prophets are subject to prophets. 33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace.“

We then get to Paul’s principle that addresses how women are to behave in church. This Pauline ruling emphasizes the universal extent of this teaching, “as in all the churches of the saints” (v.33b), with the concluding admonition that “all things should be done decently and in order.”

“As in all the churches of the saints, 34 the women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.36 Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? 37 If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 39 So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 40 But all things should be done decently and in order.“5

Paul does not want women to look foolish or be shamed in church, so he seeks to honor women, who have received less education than the men. But this call for order, between the sexes, is not something Paul merely wants. He reminds his readers that this call for order is also a command from the Lord. In other words, there is a timeless principle involved, which has a particular application in this 1st century church situation, and even beyond to our present day.

Most advocates of this view go further to say that the evaluation of prophecy, which is what Paul has in view here, is something to be done by the elders in the church, presumably who are all qualified men. The lack of education among 1st century Corinthian women is not really relevant to Paul’s primary concern.  In other words, women are not to participate in the evaluation of prophecy, as a matter of principle, which means that this is not necessarily a practice restricted to 1st century Corinth. But the point here is that this restriction on women is indeed limited, for when compared with what Paul says earlier in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, where women are praying and prophesying, Paul must be specifying a limited application for women to be silent, in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, since clearly women are not to be silent in 1 Corinthians 11:2-16.

Did an Unknown Copyist Insert Verses 34-35 Into 1 Corinthians 14?

This second particular approach is very interesting, in that it dives into the nitty-gritty of how the Bible got to be the English Bible we have today. In the days of the early church, they had neither computers nor Xerox copying machines to preserve written documents. Instead, the church relied on copyists to continually copy the Bible over and over again, for each new generation of readers, as written materials tended to decay over time.

In the vast majority of cases, the New Testament copyists did exceedingly well in preserving the ancient text, that would eventually become the basis for our English Bibles today. However, there were times when mistakes were made, and textual critics are needed to step in and analyze where such mistakes were made, in order to correct them.

Nevertheless, there are certain cases where even the finest textual critical scholars are not in complete agreement regarding the authenticity of certain, small portions of the New Testament.  A classic example of such controversy is regarding Mark 16:9-20. Most English Bibles today will note that some of the earliest manuscripts do not include Mark 16:9-20.  Opinion is divided as to what to make of Mark 16:9-20, but many scholars contend that Mark 16:9-20 was not original to the Gospel of Mark, because of the big differences among the manuscripts (See this Veracity blog post on the issue of the ending of Mark’s Gospel, for more details).

This becomes important because there are some churches that will use Mark 16:18 as the basis for snake handling in church, “they will pick up serpents with their hands,” and they will not get hurt by those snakes … Uh… I will go with the scholarly majority on this one. How about that? 😉

Interestingly, there are some textual critical scholars who put 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 in the same category. The larger majority of English translations follow the standard order for these verses, but this verse ordering is following only one particular tradition.

The “Western” tradition of manuscripts, and a few other variations put these verses after the very end of the chapter, after verse 40. It would read like this (we can start with verse 33, to get a feel for it):

“33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints……..36 Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? 37 If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 39 So, my brothers, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 40 But all things should be done decently and in order……… .34 The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.

So, where do these two verses really go? Between verses 33 and 36, as found in most Bibles today? Or after verse 40?

Some scholars conclude that the confusion over where to put these verses may indicate that this passage is an example of what scholars call an “interpolation,” where something of a different nature is inserted into something else. In other words, some scribal copyist may have inserted these two verses into the text, merely as a side commentary in the margins, and then this got copied into the main body of the text by later copyists, who never detected the illegitimate insertion.6

The advantage of this approach is that it raises enough suspicion about the precise nature of these two verses, such that it would warrant any Christian to proceed with caution, and not make a whole doctrine out of these two verses, in the event we eventually learn that these two verses were wrongly inserted into the New Testament, not by Paul himself, but rather, by a later copyist.

The downside to the proposal is that we have zero New Testament documents that omit these two verses. So, in this particular case of 1 Corinthians 14:34-35, it does not match up exactly with the situation we have with Mark 16:9-20, where there are certain early manuscripts that omit those verses altogether.

Was Paul Quoting a Corinthian Saying, For the Purpose of Refuting It?

This last major approach to 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 actually turns the whole idea of Paul approving of the idea found in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 on its head. This proposal suggests that what Paul is doing here is quoting from a Corinthian saying, that would prohibit women from speaking in church, for the purpose of utterly refuting it. A little background is in order to understand this.

First, when the New Testament was originally written, and copied by copyists later, down through the centuries, there were no quotation marks in those ancient Greek manuscripts of the New Testament. This tradition of not having quotation marks available, to aid the reader, was even extended to the popular English version of the Bible, the King James Version. You will not find quotation marks in the King James Bible, but you will find them in more modern translations, as scholars have been able to detect where a New Testament author was quoting from some other source, as opposed to where they were not quoting from an outside source.

Next, it is important to know that there were other letters involving Paul, aside from 1 and 2 Corinthians, which are not available to us in our Bibles. 1 Corinthians should probably be called “2 Corinthians” instead, because Paul has already mentioned a previous letter he wrote to the church of Corinth, which is now lost (1 Corinthians 5:9). Evidently, Paul is writing our traditionally called “1 Corinthians,” found in our Bibles, partly to respond to another letter sent by the Corinthians to him. This letter from Corinth, was probably written in response to Paul’s first, now lost letter to the Corinthian church:  “Now concerning the matters about which you wrote” (1 Corinthians 7:1).

In answering the Corinthians previous letter to him, Paul quotes certain sections of that letter, and then he responds to those concerns. For example, read the opening of chapter 7 in full:

1 Now concerning the matters about which you wrote: “It is good for a man not to have sexual relations with a woman.” 2 But because of the temptation to sexual immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 3 The husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to her husband.

The quoted Corinthian saying is highlighted above. The Corinthians, in this particular quotation, were saying that celibacy is the only appropriate calling of the Christian, whereas Paul rejects that argument and affirms the validity of marriage as a genuine calling for the Christian, where sexual relations should rightly take place.

Paul makes rhetorical use of the Greek word translated into English as “but“, as we have here in 1 Corinthians 7:1, or in other cases the Greek word for “or“, or even an exclamation such as “what?!”, or some other transitional mechanism, in order to argue against the Corinthian position (1 Corinthians 1:13; 6:16; 9:6, 8, 10; 11:22), or to reject a particular practice at Corinth ( 1 Corinthians 6:2; 9, 19; 10:22; 11:13).

One particular case shows how Paul’s rhetorical skill works: In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul first lays out the Corinthian quoted sayings, with some brief responses interspersed (in this instance). Paul’s purpose here is to rebuke the Corinthian mindset, which was allowing certain unethical conduct to continue on unchecked:

12 “All things are lawful for me,” but not all things are helpful. “All things are lawful for me,” but I will not be dominated by anything.13 “Food is meant for the stomach and the stomach for food”—and God will destroy both one and the other. The body is not meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord, and the Lord for the body.

Note the highlighted phrases within the quotes, which are quotes from the Corinthians. Note also that a modern translation like the ESV explicitly shows you where these quotes are in the verses. Then Paul unloads on his original readers by interjecting his rhetorical “but” to refute the thinking of the Corinthians, verses 12 and 13. Then he expands his refutation more fully in the following verses. See the highlights in verses 16 and 19, where Paul uses the rhetorical “or” to accomplish the same rhetorical transitions:

14 And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.15 Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a prostitute? Never! 16 Or do you not know that he who is joined to a prostitute becomes one body with her? For, as it is written, “The two will become one flesh.” 17 But he who is joined to the Lord becomes one spirit with him. 18 Flee from sexual immorality. Every other sin a person commits is outside the body, but the sexually immoral person sins against his own body. 19 Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.

This same type of pattern has been recognized by various scholars in our 1 Corinthian 14 passage under review (note the quoted part, that I have highlighted, for verses 34-35, as well as the rhetorical “or” language in verse 36):

33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints,
34 “The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”
36 Or was it from you that the word of God came? Or are you the only ones it has reached? 37 If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 39 So, my brothers and sisters, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 40 But all things should be done decently and in order.
Verse 36 could also be translated as follows, substituting the acceptable English exclamation “what” for the rhetorical use of “or“:   “What!!? Was it from you that the word of God came? What!? Are you the only ones it has reached?” 

The point here is that Paul is quoting a Corinthian saying, in verses 34-35, for the purposes of refuting it, starting with Paul’s mockery of the Corinthians in verse 36.

The more substantial argument for this interpretation relies on the gender implied by the language used in this entire passage, noted above. The idea that women should remain silent, is part of the Corinthian logic. Yet Paul specifically uses masculine language in verse 36. In New Testament Greek, as in many other gendered languages, masculine language can refer to “men only” or “men and women.” But in this case, since women are being specifically addressed in verses 34-35, and the fact that the “from you” and the “only ones” mentioned in verse 36, are masculine, it would consistently indicate that Paul is addressing “men only” in this verse. For if Paul had intended his rebuke against the women of Corinth specifically, Paul would have used feminine language in verse 36, which he has not. Therefore, this would indicate Paul’s rebuke is directed against the men in Corinth, who are promoting this false teaching.

A reinforcement of this interpretation comes from observing that “the Law” referenced in verses 34-35 probably comes from the oral law, and not the written law, associated with the New Testament. In other words, it would make sense for Paul to rebuke the Judaizers in Corinth, who wish for the Christians to hold to the oral Jewish law.

Paying attention to the gender of the language, verse 36 could more accurately be translated as follows:

What!!? Was it from you men that the word of God came? What!? Are you men the only ones it has reached?”

Far from approving of the “silence of women,” Paul is actually reinforcing his argument from 1 Corinthians 11 that women should be encouraged to participate in the church worship service, through the exercise of prayer and prophesy, just as the men do. As long as things are done in an orderly fashion, Paul is encouraging men and women to worship together.

One other observation to make is that in this particular interpretation, it makes better sense to put the entirety of verse 33, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace. As in all the churches of the saints ” at the end of the previous section regarding the interpretation of tongues and the evaluation of prophecy (1 Corinthians 14:26-33). Many translations actually split verse 33, putting the “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” part with the prior section, and the “As in all the churches of the saints ” part with the “women should keep silent” following section.  In other words, the concluding section about tongues and prophecy should be read with one complete thought in mind, putting a comma in place instead of a period, in the middle of the sentence:

33 For God is not a God of confusion but of peace, as in all the churches of the saints.

A fully reconstructed reading of our “Corinthian Conundrum” passage might better look like this, with all of the important contextual differences highlighted:  first the Corinthian saying that Paul is trying to refute, then the “What?!” transition, and then the references to “men“:

34 “The women should keep silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be in submission, as the Law also says. 35 If there is anything they desire to learn, let them ask their husbands at home. For it is shameful for a woman to speak in church.”
36 What!!? Was it from you men that the word of God came?  What!?  Are you men the only ones it has reached? 37 If anyone thinks that he is a prophet, or spiritual, he should acknowledge that the things I am writing to you are a command of the Lord. 38 If anyone does not recognize this, he is not recognized. 39 So, my brothers and sisters, earnestly desire to prophesy, and do not forbid speaking in tongues. 40 But all things should be done decently and in order.

The advantage of this approach is that it completely removes all possible contradictions between 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Corinthians 14, thus serving an apologetic purpose for defending Scripture better than other approaches. It also has a great deal of supportive, contextual evidence, as it extends a well known pattern of how Paul interacts with the quotations of the Corinthians, in this letter, to make this particular difficult passage exceedingly less difficult.7

The downside to this proposal is that it completely flips a great deal of traditional teaching regarding this passage. Has this more contextualized approach met the burden of proof to sufficiently overcome more traditional interpretations of this passage?

Clearing Up Confusion over a Corinthian Conundrum

Which proposal to resolving this Bible difficulty is best? You be the judge based on the evidence, knowing that this blog post is but a brief exposition of the main ideas and points of evidence available.

My own conclusion at this point is that the final proposal, that of this being a quotation/refutation device used by Paul to support his teaching that women should participate fully and NOT be silent in church, has the greatest amount of explanatory power. Yet perhaps others are still not convinced.

Here is what has finally convinced me that the quotation/refutation view is the most correct: There is not a single passage in the Old Testament, or “the Law” which teaches that “women should keep silent in the [assembly].” Not a single one. Go and try to find it yourself.

The reference to “the law” in this passage must be about something else. Defenders of other viewpoints have to somehow invent the existence of a prohibition of women speaking in church that simply does not exist in the Old Testamet.

Therefore, I am very skeptical of the idea the Paul would approvingly cite a portion of the Jewish oral law (or something from pagan Roman law), as binding on the Corinthian church, particularly when Jesus makes such a big deal about how the oral traditions of the Pharisees have led them to fail to see the truth of the Gospel. The idea that Paul would knowingly leave a potential contradiction or serious error like this in one of his letters, without any clarifying explanation, is unbecoming to the character of sacred Scripture, in my mind. Nor am I convinced that some later Christian scribe would insert a similar reference to the Jewish oral law, centuries later into the New Testament.

However, the other two positions are still viable, given the assumptions they carry, so I have no reason to be dogmatic here. The point is that we need not “bring back the patriarchy” in order to have a fully authentic Scriptural faith that properly incorporates 1 Corinthians 14:34-35. But neither do we need to throw certain passages of Paul out, simply because we do not like the taste of them.

It is important to note that Paul nevertheless affirms a principle of order, when it comes to the practice of Christian corporate worship. He also acknowledges that there are real differences between men and women, and that such differences should be honored and upheld by all of the churches of God. In particular, men and women are not interchangeable in the mind of Paul, as expressed through the Scriptures, as it is clearly taught in 1 Corinthians, particularly in 1 Corinthians 11. As London-based pastor and author, Andrew Wilson, puts it, there is a “beautiful difference” between male and female, a complementarity in how men relate to women, and vice-versa, and this is something that the New Testament calls all Christians to celebrate.

Notably, 1 Corinthians makes absolutely zero mention of elders and/or overseers in the church at Corinth. Defenders of a more traditional reading have to pull in the idea of elders/overseers being in view in this passage from elsewhere. Paul is primarily concerned about how the entire local church body functions, men and women together, giving honor and glory to God. In 1 Corinthians, Paul is not interested in addressing how the church should be governed, nor is he making any special plea regarding how the sheep are to be shepherded, by those entrusted to their care. Paul leaves the discussion of such other matters, particularly with respect to church elders and/or overseers, to the Pastoral Letters, with a particular focus found in 1 Timothy.

For more reflection on the centrality of 1 Timothy for articulating a sacramentalist approach to honoring the distinction of male and female, within the context of a local church, please explore the “women in ministry” blog series, linked here.

 

Notes:

1. For an in-depth look at 1 Corinthians 11:2-16 concerning head coverings, please consult the Veracity blog post series beginning here. The head covering issue is troubling for many as well, as most American Christian women, aside from certain traditions like the Mennonites, do not use head coverings. But the whole topic of head coverings is fascinating, that deserves separate attention. I urge readers to get a copy of Michael Heiser’s Angels, to dig into the nitty gritty of what is going on with head coverings, in a way that will probably surprise you. I reviewed Angels in 2020, and wrote about it here.  ALSO: in this blog post, I am mainly quoting from the ESV translation of the Bible. ↩

2. Please note that Galatians 3:28 is getting abused more and more in the current Western culture climate. To learn about this, see this blog post from 2020.  ↩

3. 1 Timothy 2:12 is probably one of, if not the most, controversial verses in the New Testament today. I address the central concerns in other blog posts (#1, #2, #3). But in this blog post, only the women being “quiet” part is being addressed.  ↩

4. Some even say that the supposed contradiction (according to Sam Storms), between 1 Corinthians 11 and 1 Corinthians 14, is way overstated. Some contend that 1 Corinthians 11:5, “but every wife (or woman) who prays or prophesies with her head uncovered dishonors her head, since it is the same as if her head were shaven,” is really a conditional statement. It should be read as “if a woman were to pray or prophesy with an uncovered head, it would be disgraceful.”  Paul only rejects the whole practice of women praying or prophesying in church until 1 Corinthians 14. But this type of translation appears to be a case of special pleading, as I know of no other English translation that tries to translate 1 Corinthians 11:5 in this matter. A variation of this view suggests that 1 Corinthians 11 teaches that a married woman should wear a head covering, when around their marriage husbands, in a private setting, and this practice has nothing to do with a public, corporate act of worship. But 1 Corinthians 11:16 refutes this idea, as this practice is applicable in all of “the churches of God,” which would indicate a public, worship setting. I only mention this perspective as there are only tiny minorities of Christians who hold to such views.   ↩

5. Note that the word “brothers” highlighted here generally means “brothers and sisters,” when in the plural form. Other translations, such as the NIV specifically spell out that both men and women, “brothers and sisters” are addressed here. While the majority of complementarian scholars accept this particular proposal, a number of egalitarian scholars are open to some variation of this proposal as well, such as Marg Mowcko, a prominent egalitarians blogger, whom I used for reference for doing research for this blog post. Complementarian Denny Burk takes the alternative view described in this section of the blog post, staying within the scope of this particular proposal. Author Aimee Byrd takes a position midway between Mowcko and Burk. Burk takes the position that women are only being restricting from judging prophecies. Yet for some very Reformed interpreters, even this solution is going too far. ↩

6. The most notable proponent of this “interpolation” view is made by Gordon Fee, in his New International Commentary of the New Testament, on First Corinthians. ↩

7. Kirk MacGregor is a very articulate, persuasive proponent for the “quotation-refutation device” rhetorical proposal. I have tried to summarize MacGregor’s argument in this blog post. Examples of the Jewish oral law calling for the silence of women in the church assembly include: (a)The Mishnah (M. Ketub. 7:6), is sinful for a woman to “speak with any man” in assemblies, (b) first-century AD historian Josephus (Ag. Ap.200–1) relates the following instruction from the oral Torah: “The woman, says the law, is in all things inferior to the man. Let her accordingly be submissive,” and the first-century AD Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, Philo of Alexandria, in a comment on the oral Torah, “The husband seems competent to transmit knowledge of the laws to his wife” (Hypothetica 8.7.14). With respect to examples of Roman law calling for women to be silent in government assembly, we have the 215 BC Oppian Law that banned public displays of wealth, during a time of crisis for Rome when Rome needed more money to fight Hannibal, during the Second Punic War.  The law against public display of wealth for men was eventually repealed, but not for women. Women rose up against the law, after the Hannibal crisis had ended, in 195 B.C.  The Roman historian Livy quotes Cato the Elder, who opposed the repeal of the law, sometime during the reign of Caesar Augustus (30 BCE to 17 CE), urging women to stay at home, or be quiet in the public assemblies.   Juvenal, in the early second century CE, in Satires 6, also condemns women publicly intruding on male governance in the assemblies. The earliest prohibition of women speaking in public assembly can be traced back to Aristotle Politics 1.1260a. Critical scholar Joseph A. P. Wilson defends this view: Joseph A. P. Wilson, “Recasting Paul as a Chauvinist within the Western Text-Type Manuscript Tradition: Implications for the Authorship Debate on 1 Corinthians 14.34-35”, Religions, 2022, 13(5), p. 432 . Legal and other precedents gave way to cultural attitudes that forbade women from speaking up in public assemblies, that were common to the world of Paul. Whether the “Law” in 1 Corinthians 14:34-35 is the Jewish oral law or the Roman laws, there is abundant evidence to show that Paul is critiquing a misguided view held by the Corinthians.  ↩

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