I would like to respond to this article from Biblical Archaeology Review and the confused culture from which it came.  Like many BAR articles I’m not sure what the point is, but I’m sure it’s not Biblical.  This article borrows from an article by Christopher somebody, the newest version of which is something about the Nineteenth Amendment.

Oh my.

I don’t really care to get into or to read that article, other than to say this;  The Nineteenth Amendment didn’t give women the right to vote it took away the right of the family vote.  The founders and most peoples throughout time, saw the family as the fundamental political unit.  Originally only heads of household voted.  Which required a household, so only landowners could vote.  It is the basic principle that responsibility and authority go hand and hand.  It doesn’t work when the people in authority don’t have to take responsibility for their decisions in the event that things come crashing down.  This is how much of our bloated federal system operates today.  The rancher in Montana is responsible for his cattle.  He can see that introducing wolves to the area will be harmful to those cattle.  But he no longer has the authority to decide what happens on his land, that is left to some bureaucracy in DC.  To them it sounds like a nice romantic idea. Why not?  It doesn’t really affect them.  Meanwhile the rancher is left with the real consequences on the ground, dead animals, and the cost of meat goes up for everyone.  As this applies to men and women and the family, I will discuss later.

The Nineteenth Amendment is very similar to the Seventeenth Amendment which governs the election of U.S. Senators.  Under the auspices of giving the people more rights, it really enslaves them.  Originally U.S. Senators were chosen by the State Legislators, but the seventeenth amendment changed that into a direct, popular election.  Now it’s far easier to buy a Senator, you only have to pick one election and dump a bunch of money into it.  Under the old system, you would have had to mess with every single local, state and house election.  The people didn’t gain the right to vote for Senators, the States lost that power.  Because direct Democracy can be another form of tyranny, mob rule.  It often devours the very freedom it claims to give, by play on reactionary impulses.

I would argue that similar deception has taken place by removing the vote from the family, as executed by it’s head the husband.  Consider the Presidential elections. Since full suffrage became the zeitgeist of the people in 1920, the vote of women didn’t really make that much difference.  Now your wife can invalidate your vote, and call it freedom, big deal.  It is difficult to measure the result of the women’s vote but it looks like the election of Bill Clinton was the first where their influence was really felt.  The men were mostly divided and the women pushed Clinton over the line.  I find this ironic.  Women exercising their ‘freedom’ vote for a man with a history of abusing women.  We now have a system where the same techniques which once got you in women’s pants now gets you in office.  Since then women have favored the Democrat candidates.  Men sick of everything being about manipulation and polls drive politics and went for the decent guy, George W. Bush.  But then came Obama vs. McCain.  The men were again divided and it is clear that women elected Obama.  Which again, is sick.  This is the first president on record advocating infanticide, the killing of children outside the womb.  This can be nothing other than deception.  The emotions of women were twisted t support the biggest genocide the world has ever known, abortion, by calling it ‘choice’.  It reminds me of the wisdom of Paul speaking to Timothy “Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”  (I Timothy 2:14)

But you aren’t allowed to say that anymore, even in many churches.  Which goes to the source of authority.  Who is your god?  Do you really believe and follow the One True God of Scripture, or do you follow a false god, an idol?  Sadly many today have chose another god, such as feminism or another form of humanism.  Everyone is doing it, so it becomes easy.  But we are slowly undermining everything our civilization is build upon.  Families are falling apart and they are the foundation of society.  And these false gods demand that we go back and tell history their way.  They demand that we look at scripture their way.  And the church has been doing that more and more, including this article.

Noah’s wife and his sisters-in law were not named?  I love this claim.  So we are suddenly demanding more detailed genealogies?  The one part everyone skips when reading the Bible?  And if you had actually read the genealogies or the rest of the text you might learn that the narrative purpose is not to infer that everyone unnamed is evil or worthless.  Noah was named, and it is also detailed how he got drunk and laid around naked.  Later he cursed his grandson for the sake of his son Ham who was also named.  If you want to enter the cage match, you might gain the glory of a victory, but you also might get yourself beat to a bloody pulp.  We pride ourselves on being real and raw these days.  Well we all have sin and those sins are laid bare by the scripture.  But the scriptural tradition of truly caring for women is to exempt them from many of these responsibilities.

The Ten Commandments also supposedly hate women because Exodus 20:17 puts wives next to servants and animals in a list of things you should not covet.  Well verse ten puts men on a list with women, sons and daughters, servants and animals.  So clearly everyone is hated by the Ten Commandments.  If women were just abused and kept in the basement how and why would you covet them?  Oh and also the purpose is to stop covetousness , not to bash women, which actually protects women.  Don’t just pine away for a beautiful wife, get off your butt go and work hard, that you may care for your own wife.  Which is clearly the message of the rest of the Old Testament Law.   Clearly the command applies to everyone, and the fact that you can’t make the jump from “men don’t covet your neighbor’s wife” to “women don’t covet your neighbor’s husband” is just indicative that you are a narrow-minded feminist.

Deuteronomy 22:28-29, supposedly forces women to marry their rapists.   Which clearly ignores Exodus 22:16, which says that it is up to the discretion of the father.  And if you assume the father didn’t consider the wishes of his daughter, again you are assuming the worst.  The point of both of these verses shows a compassion from women.  First of all they are highly valued, unlike later pagan systems which required brides to include a dowry.  In the Old Testament suitors had to pay a bride price.  Second the point of the penalty is to discourage rape in the first place.  Beware of the one night stand, she might be your wife forever and you can never divorce her.  You must pay the bride price and take care of her as she ought to be for the rest of her life(Exodus 21:10).  How is our system of hating the Old Testament working out?  Let’s see, women are passed around as sex toys, their unborn children are slaughtered by the thousands, the emotional damage of constant relationships formed and broken is immeasurable.  And we think we are free.  The bonds of sex are very powerful, which is why virginity is so highly prized by every society but our own.  Women are beautifully designed to come along side and bond to one man.  Research has shown that this happens physiologically from a mere 15 seconds of contact.  The Old Testament wins this one too, and we lose.

It is stunning that you can read the Old Testament and conclude that it speaks highly of polygamy.  So the fact that Cain’s son became a polygamist is supposed to be a glaringly positive review of polygamy?  We all know Cain is the hero of the story.  Wait a minute.  Clearly the Cain thread of the narrative is in stark contradiction to the Created order.  God made them male and female and then things went off the rails.  The narrative traces the world vs. the people of God.  Hint: Cain is the ‘world’ and killing his brother made him the bad guy.  The line of God’s people continues through Seth.  And David’s wives are supposed to be further proof that the Bible glorifies polygamy, despite that the kings of Israel were prohibited from amassing wives(Deuteronomy 17:17).  Also let’s consider the results of those polygamous marriages.  The result of Abraham’s polygamy is two warring nations which fight over Jerusalem to this day.  David destroyed his house, but for the grace of god, by stealing Bathsheba. Solomon was led into idolatry by his many foreign wives. In addition the kingdom was split by these waring heirs.  Polygamy like divorce was made provision for by God’s grace for hard hearts(Matthew 19:7).  And as I mentioned above the rights of the multiplied wives was not to be diminished.  Which is also the point of Deuteronomy 21:15, you can’t give up the first born rights of one wife because you like another wife more.  You must care for them and give all your wives their due.

Numbers 30:3-15 states the rules for how a women’s vow could be vetoed by her father or her husband.  Vows are a much more serious thing than we consider these days.  If you get mad and say “I swear to God, if you do that I’m going to hurt you.” and then you didn’t follow through, that would be breaking your vow which was serious.  Verse 6 says “thoughtless utterance”  which gives us the proper idea here.  But rather than speaking ill of women or repressing them this  frees them from the responsibility of the consequences of such oaths.  They fall on her husband or father, which is why they have the right to veto them.  Consider the story of Jeptha in Judges 11.  He promised God that the first thing that came out to greet him after a mighty victory he would sacrifice to God.  His only daughter came out to meet him.  Which meant she was a perpetual virgin, and his posterity was cut off.  His rash vow was his undoing.  Women are spared from such things, “the Lord will forgive her” as the text says multiple times.

Of course the Levite priesthood was all male, that is the authority structure which God created on this earth(Leviticus).  But we have to get away from the idea that position is all about worth or hate.  Our strict egalitarianism seems to think that equality means equality in absolutely every way about everything.  This is not true, differing roles does not speak to worth.  Women can have kids, men can not, does this make women better?  The general on the battlefield wears distinctive clothing distinguishing himself from the average foot soldier.  He may even ride a horse above all the men, in a superior position. But it doesn’t mean his worth as a human is more than his men, no one thinks that.  Does anyone think this makes him stronger or smarter in every way?  His authority is greater, but so is his responsibility.  He is responsible for all of his men.  But he is not chosen because his superiors hate everyone else.  Someone has to lead, someone had to yell the battle cry to “charge”.  God says those people are to be men, and we have yet to come up with a better system, as we now bring home our mutilated women from the battle field and claim our superior love of women.  Or perhaps they are not maimed but merely shipped home pregnant or exploited on the internet by their male ‘peers’.  The result is the same dishonored women.

Twenty years ago this article would be unthinkable, insofar as it is unthinking.  This paranoid fear of misogyny is everywhere and it is making people crazy.  It substitutes vague feelings for actual arguments, to feed it’s nonsense.  But if sin made sense it wouldn’t everyone be sin.  Hating God is as old as the hills and many people will do whatever they can to pretend their way is better than God’s way.  It’s just unfortunate that so many of those people claim to be Christians and that so many well-meaning Christians fall for it.