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Women in bible essay
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Representation of God in the Bible
Throughout the Bible God can be represented in a number of different ways. In some chapters of the Bible God can be found to be a compassionate, loving God, who would do anything for his people. To contradict this, in other chapters of the Bible God can be found trying to instill fear into people so that they believe in him, or do what he wants of them. In both instances it shows how different God can be seen and why believers can have doubts about how God really is.
In the first book of the Bible, Genesis, God can be seen as having a sort of bi-polar attitude. In the beginning chapters God is shown as a caring person when he is creating the earth and when he talks about how he wants Adam and Eve to succeed and do well and how he gives Adam a companion, Eve because he feels Adam will be lonely. As the book unfolds God becomes very angry with how his world is turning out. Sin has been introduced and humans seem to be falling away from the righteous. This upsets God and he creates an idea that he will flood the world so that only Noah and the people and animals inside the ark will live. His intentions seem horrible, trying to kill humans because they have sinned, but in reality he is trying to free the world of sin so that the remaining humans will live wonderful lives free of pain and despair. The flood can be seen as both a positive and negative thing. To non-believers they may find fault in the idea that God felt that he had to punish the world as a result of how sinful the people of earth had become. To help promote their ideas they could use statements from the Bible such as this one when God's feelings are stated about how he seems to be dissatisfied with the people of earth, "The Lord was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and his heart was filled with pain" (Genesis 6:6). It can also be revealed when God states, "I am going to put an end to all people, for the earth is filled with violence because of them. I am surely going to destroy both them and the earth" (Genesis 6:13).
In Genesis the way women are treated directly displays all the work women have gone through to achieve equality.
In the Hebrew Bible, women are viewed as minor and inferior figures. Women are given a secondary place in society, nonetheless they play a crucial role and have a number of vital figures in the Biblical history.
In the first chapter of God Behaving Badly, David Lamb argues that God is unfairly given a bad reputation. He claims these negative perceptions are fueled by pop culture and lead many to believe the lie that the God of the Old Testament is angry, sexist, racist, violent, legalistic, rigid, and distant. These negative perceptions, in turn, affect our faith. Ultimately, Lamb seeks to demonstrate that historical context disproves the presumptuous aforementioned. In addition, he defends his position by citing patterns of descriptions that characterize God throughout the Old Testament. “Our image of God will directly affect how we either pursue or avoid God. If we believe that the God of the Old Testament is really harsh, unfair and cruel, we won’t want anything to do with him” (Lamb 22). Clearly, they way Christians choose to see God will shape their relationship with Him.
The stories about women in the bible illustrate the importance of their role and contribution to society. Women were slaves, concubines, and child bearers; they were also wives, matriarchs, and prophets. Although, some women had less important titles than others each served a purpose. Even if the Bible does not explain God’s relationship with women as with Moses and other prophets, it illustrates the love and dedication women had for Him. The scriptures describe brave, nurturing, and God fearing women whose decisions impacted the existence of the Israelites.
This is an important point, because if our understanding of God is that He is purely good, then why would so many of this heinous events occur. “Theist reply that because God is necessarily good, He would never do anything morally reprehensible Himself nor command us to preform heinous acts.” (Anderson, 2007). However, God is seen punishing not only those who are considered to be evil, but also those who are innocent, He causes floods, plagues and death to many people because of one person’s act, or if He was angry. This is completely opposite to our understanding of God loving us all and to our most important idea that God is perfectly good. Even if these acts were seen as punishing those who are considered evil, then God would have not done any act that would harm someone, nor would He permit us to do so. The bible is filled with these inaccuracies, is God loving of all, or just the few that follow Him, it states different allowances in stories (Infidels.org, 2016). It is my understanding that these stories are proof that God is not purely good, which itself is an argument for Him not to exist or that the stories themselves or false. Murder was perfectly fine for the soldiers of the First Crusade, who slaughtered every man, woman, and child, however it is written in the bible that murder is prohibited, it is a sin. Many other events like this occurred. When we look
...he one that most Christians know today. This God is quite different from both the New Testament and Plato’s. In Genesis, God states, “For behold, I will bring a flood of waters upon the earth to destroy all flesh in which is the breath of life under heaven. Everything that is on the earth shall die.” This God does not desire human beings to accept knowledge but rather to accept His rule and obey. This particular deity is about fear, power, and absolute control; so much so that those who do not adhere to His law, their deaths are assured. This is seen in Deuteronomy 7:2, it states, “When the Lord your God gives them over to you, and you defeat them, then you must devote them to complete destruction.” God is characterized not as a kindly guider of souls, but rather the harsh taskmaster intent on defeating enemies of His and spreading the influence of His supporters.
The values in Genesis are disobeyed by yet another woman who does not conform to the female model of a fertile mother. While fertility is an overriding value in god’s human construct that women in Genesis threaten to undermine women also obstruct the “natural” course of history which god has set in motion as part of his ideal world. After god reconstructs the world through Noah and then Abraham, the divine element withdraws from the world slightly, and a natural historical course begins to play out through the momentum that god has initiated.
“It is time that we all see gender as a spectrum instead of two sets of opposing ideals. We should stop defining each other by what we are not and start defining ourselves by who we are” (Emma Watson). Since the beginning of time, Eve was portrayed as the first sinner and this could be the reason why women are still paying for her sins to this day, from either education to jobs and look to stereotypes. Though now women are crawling out of the hole of inequality faster than before and soon women will be able to reach the light they have been waiting to grasp.
God’s power “is like great waters that are dammed for the present; they increase more and more, and higher and higher, til an outlet is given” (Edwards 109). God’s anger builds up from the people who sin, and eventually he unleashes his madness and irritability towards people who are at fault. He’s the ruler of all people and with only the movement of his hand, he can send a disaster of punishments. As more people commit sins, God’s desire to retaliate becomes sufficiently greater. He has dominance over humans and when he sees the right time to strike back, he easily does. God is shown as rude when he threatens people with his bountiful power to send them to hell if they cross him. Likewise, at any given time, God can extract “his hand from the floodgate, [and] it would immediately fly open, and the fiery floods of the fierceness and wrath of God, would rush forth with inconceivable fury, and would come upon you with omnipotent power” (Edwards 109). Whenever God feels it is necessary to let out his rage, just by lifting his hand, he can release his overflowing power which will swallow the population of sinners and send them all to hell. God is a bully because his violence and power is at the tips of his fingers ready to use against guilty and disobedient humans. God is in total control for making decisions to lead people to hell, which demonstrates his dominant impact over humans.
Elizabeth A. Johnson draws attention to how, despite being considered equal in Genesis, women had their worth ignored “Consistently subordinated and demeaned in the theories, symbols, rituals,
This is better explained when one understands God’s character. God has an insatiable desire to know His creation, the human being. Much like a parent yearns to interact with their developing child, so God enjoys continual interaction with humankind. The child images the parent in a way like humankind images God. To image God, is to be like but not the same. But, much like there is an emotional and spiritual disparity between the child and parent, there is also a disparity between God and humankind. Much like a parent provides protection and direction to their children, so does God to His creation. However, one understands that a ...
Throughout the course of human events, many truths have been held self-evident, that all men are created equal. That doesn’t account for about fifty percent of the human population: women. Women have been degraded and treated as evil pariahs, not only in the real world, but also through works fiction. Every culture has evil women or women that are responsible for great catastrophes, while men were portrayed as saviors. Other women still were portrayed as petty and jealous, especially the Greek and Roman goddesses that many feminists look at to show that women were not always treated unfairly. These acts of fiction parallel the views we see in both of the books that we read in our English class.
Most people in this world have an idea of who or what God is. Whether they believe in God or not, they have certain conceptions that they use to define God. Traditionally, due in large part to classical theism, people define God mostly by His omnipotence. A lot of people have an image of God being an all-powerful ruler over the entire universe. These ideas come out of a mindset that affirms the greatest being must be the one with all the power. They imagine a being that is so far above the world, that He cannot be affected by what humans do. They want to continually affirm that He is completely unchanged, unmoving, and compassionless. To uphold this belief denies a good portion of Scripture as well as liturgical tradition within the church. For example, Hosea 11 describes God’s compassion and concern growing for the Israelites in a way that assumes God’s changing emotions (Inbody 145).
Several observations and questions can be immediately gleaned from this passage. For example, is there a difference between saying that Jesus took the “very nature of a servant” (2:7), opposed to “made in human likeness” (2:7) or “appearance as a man” (2:8)? Can the same OT reference to Genesis 1:27 be used in this context like how it is used for Colossians 1:15’s “image of God”? Is saying that “every knee should bow” (2:10) any weaker of an insistence than saying that every knee will bow? If Paul’s letters are meant to be occasional, is there a specific reason why he tells the Philippians not to complain or argue (2:14)? If he had previously received reports from the Philippians about this problem, this would seem to contradict what he had
Many ideas of male superiority come from and began with the Bible. It can be noted that woman, in the second creation story in Genesis, is made from that which is man. It can also be noted that it is a woman who, in the Garden of Eden story in Genesis, initially commits the first act against God's wishes and therefore causes herself and her companion to be judged and punished. Throughout the Bible, women are rarely referred to by an actual proper name. Women are referred to as property, a mere woman in a world of men. Also in the Bible, women are presented to be focused entirely around the home and are property of men with the sole purpose of bearing children, as in the Abraham, Sarah, and Haggar cycle in Genesis in which the two women are property of Abraham, there only to provide him with an heir. However unfortunate, in the context and time it was written, this was the case. Still, today we cannot believe the Bible to be a guideline for the roles of women. Many ideas may be false concerning what has been inferred and what was actually written and its purpose. A closer reading of the text will prove that women played a vital role in many of the treasured beliefs of believers. Even without names, women had a voice and were a force to be reckoned with.
Later on, God said, “ Human beings have a choice to be good or evil. So there is no reason to destroy the world if I gave them the choice.” “It did not change the complexity of human and it will never change because this is the structure of human. His attitude toward human race changed again after the flood, which took 40 days and nights. The lord of God granted Noah to multiply and repopulate the Earth. He felt that there is no reason of taking the choice away from the people if it was given in the first place. There is no control of the people to choose good or evil because choice has been given to them. The