Women in the Bible

Interpretation: Resources for the Use of Scripture in the Church

By: Jaime Clark-Soles

Narrated by: Erin Bennett

What was it like to be a woman in the biblical period? It depended, in part, on who you were: a queen, a judge, a primary wife, a secondary wife, a widow, a slave, or some other kind of "ordinary woman." In Women in the Bible, Jaime Clark-Soles investigates how women are presented in Scripture, taking into account cultural views of both ancient societies as well as our own. Most of Christendom still excludes women from religious leadership, and many Christians invoke the Bible to circumscribe women's leadership in the public square and in the home as well.

In a multipronged approach, Clark-Soles treats well-known biblical women from fresh perspectives, highlights women who have been ignored, and recovers those who have been erased from historical memory by particular moves made in the transmission and translations of the text. She explores symbolic feminized figures like Woman Wisdom and the Whore of Babylon and reclaims the uses of feminine imagery in the Bible that often go unnoticed. Clark-Soles aims to equip clergy and other leaders invested in the study of Scripture to consider women in the Bible from multiple angles and, as a result, help people of all genders to live God's vision of better, more just lives as we navigate the challenges of our complex, globally connected world.

PLEASE NOTE: When you purchase this title, the accompanying PDF will be available in your Audible Library along with the audio.

©2020 Jaime Clark-Soles (P)2021 Tantor

A good book but...

A good resource for information regarding the topic at hand. I will be getting the hardback version of this book to have it as reference.
However, it left me wondering if the author thinks that God was wrong when he said what he said in Gen. 2 & 3 about the effects of the fall between women and men. But even before the fall, the naming of Isha by Ish, doesn't that show that God is a God of order, since Paul appeals to that order in I Cor. 11:3-16? So, claiming that Paul is charismatic and open to women in ministry, while the pseudo Paul of the deuterocanonical letters is not, is not congruent with the author's argument. And that would be the pattern of objections I would pose to this book.
I am for women being in ministry, but this book seems to justify the objection of those who oppose it. The objection being that those of us who support it either have to undermine the text as to make it unreliable (as in the case of pseudo Paul) or to make the text say something that is not, as in Gal.3:28, where the issue Paul is dealing with is salvation, but the author turns it into something else, women in ministry.