Doctrine of Women – Why are Women Treated Differently in the Bible?

I’ve always been confused about some of the Bible’s teachings regarding women. If you’ve been reading the Bible long enough, you’ve come across a few of these troubling passages. But I was listening to the Book of Leviticus yesterday and had a realization that helped me make sense of “the doctrine of women.” Some of you will want to argue against this. For some of you, it will “click” and make sense.

First, I came to the part about clean and unclean foods, the animals the Israelites were allowed and not allowed to eat. Leviticus 14:3 reads, “You must not eat any detestable animals that are ceremonially unclean.”

Notice that the Lord qualifies what it means to be unclean. The animals are CEREMONIALLY unclean. They’re not ACTUALLY unclean. They’re not inherently unclean. In fact, in the New Testament, God reverses this rule and says that people are allowed to eat any animal. So, certain animals were only to be considered unclean for the sake of ceremony, for the sake of religious observance.

Then I heard Leviticus 12, which says that if a woman gives birth to a male child, she is to be considered unclean for a week, but if she gives birth to a female child, she’s to be considered unclean for two weeks. That doesn’t make any sense, does it? There’s no ACTUAL difference in the birthing process for bearing a boy or a girl. So the difference, again, must be CEREMONIAL, solely for the sake of communicating something about the religion.

So, what is God telling us in making the time of impurity longer for a baby girl? He’s reminding us about how the woman Eve was the first person to sin. He’s calling to mind the severity of sin, the devastation that it caused, and the fact that the first sin just so happened to be committed by a woman.

A comment on that: There were two people around when the first sin was committed, which means they both had a 50/50 chance of committing it. And as we see, when the woman happened to be the first, the man quickly followed suit.

What I’m thinking, then, is that all those passages in the Bible that seem to penalize women are not making comments on women so much as it’s making comments on sin. Women’s “punishment” and status and call to submit serve as a reminder for us of what happens when we disobey God. Women are not, in any way, ACTUALLY unclean. There are times when the Bible portrays them as CEREMONIALLY unclean to teach us a religious lesson.

Which is why you can have exceptions to the rule. The Bible says women shouldn’t teach or be in authority over men, and yet we see God using Deborah as the supreme leader over the nation of Israel. We see multiple women delivering the Word of God as prophetesses. It’s kind of like God saying, “Don’t eat these foods unless I say you can eat them.”

There’s the ceremonial rule, and there’s the actual reality, and sometimes God shows us the difference when He breaks the ceremonial rule to show us it’s only ceremonial.

To sum up, there is no “doctrine of woman” strung together in various passages in the Bible. It’s the doctrine of sin we should be focusing on.