Women in the Bible

Contemporary Perspectives on Women in the Bible — to read the article, click here!
by Sister Teresa Okure, SHCJ
Discussion Guide

Sister Teresa Okure, SHCJ, is one of Nigeria’s leading theologians. In this piece, she articulates some of the important issues of the role of women in the Bible, and the implications of these roles on women and men reading the Bible today. In the middle of the article, she lists some Practical Exercises for interpreting the Bible in a liberatory way, listed in part below. She also provides resources for further study.

>Practical Exercises

The reader needs to participate personally in discovering the presence and contribution of women in the Bible if this discussion is to be of benefit to the individual person. One way of doing this is to compile one’s own list of women in the Bible (a kind of stock-taking), to watch what the women are doing and discern the influences at work in the way each is portrayed. There are, for instance, women disciples of Jesus, women prophets (Acts 21:10), Church workers (Rom 16 :1-16) women preachers of the word (Acts 18:1-4; 19:24-28; Phil 4:1-3), pastors in their house churches (Acts 12 :12; 16:11-15, 40; Rom 16:3-5); women with special vocations (Acts 9:36-43) and a renowned woman Deacon (Rom 16:1-2). Such a compilation makes women visible in the Bible, at least for oneself. The exercise surprises one at the number of women mentioned in the Bible. This could be a project for group or individual study where the findings could be shared later in groups and with friends.…

Once the list has been compiled, the reader is invited to read each story critically in its own biblical context. This total context is crucial if one wishes to gain a fuller meaning of the stories. The reader should also listen to these stories in the light of her or his Christian faith. The Gospel is essentially a message of liberation of the poor and the oppressed from all dehumanising and death dealing forces. In this respect, Jesus himself is the Gospel par excellence and all four Gospels do not exhaust the limits of his own person as God’s gospel. One needs then to identify where the good news lies in these stories of biblical women, or where God’s voice is to be distinguished from culturally conditioned human voices and viewpoints. This discernment is necessary, because as said earlier, the Bible is God’s Word expressed in limited human language and cultures in a given period of history. The reader thus becomes aware not only of the limited cultural dimensions of the Bible but of his or her own cultural conditionings.

General Questions

How are women represented in the Bible? How are they represented differently from men?

Is the Bible a representation of the world of men and women that you experience? If not, is it a model to strive for? Do the Bible’s gender relations inform our lives without us imitating them?

Who is your favorite woman in the Bible?

If most of the books of the Bible were written by men, what effect does that have on how you read or use the Bible?

How do gender relations in the Bible impact gender relations in your own life? In your church?

What other questions do you have?