If Women had Written the Bible…

[The following story was posted on the Spectrum website about 20 years ago. I may well have already shared it with the Graceworx family. If I have, all I can say is: Here it is again!  It also appeared in my book Conversations with My Church. Still, I thought it might be appropriate to share here since I’m in the middle of a sermon series on Women of the Bible.]

The other day Leonie tried on some clothing she’d just bought, inviting my appraisal. I said she looked "fine."

It wasn't the right answer – especially since I'd continued glancing at the newspaper while replying.

"Good," "fine" and "OK" don't cut it with Leonie at the best of clothes-modeling times. But when my head is in a newspaper, such terms seem to irritate her even more. She shared her feelings with me. And the tone of her voice and the set of her jaw suggested she fully believed what she was saying.

"Wait just a minute," I said, in response to her suggestion that a more definitive word than fine might be an order – not to mention a lot less attention directed toward the newspaper. "Even God, when he'd finished creating each aspect of the world, just said it was ‘good.’ He didn't say it was ‘fantastic,’ ‘mind-boggling’ or ‘out of this world’ – which, you'll have to admit, would have been unusual expression to use at that moment! He just said it was ‘good.’"

"What would you expect him to say?" She shot back. God is a man. And the Bible was written by men. No women at all. Of course he’d just say his creation was ‘good.’ He didn't even provide any detail about how he did it – the obstacles and hassles he encountered in the process."

I had to admit – not to her, of course; I mean, in the silent recesses of my mind – that she had a point. Maybe the Bible would be different if it had been written by women.

For starters, it would be longer. I read that, on average, women speak five times as many words in a day as men. I've also read that they speak three times as many – but I choose to believe the higher number.

I'm sure a woman-written Bible would have included a lot more detail, especially about human feelings. For example, can you imagine a female telling the following story without some comment concerning what the girls thought about this unique approach to wife acquisition?

"So they instructed the Benjamites, saying, ‘Go and hide in the vineyards and watch. When the girls of Shiloh come out to join in the dancing, then rush from the vineyards and each of you seize a wife…’ So that is what the Benjamites did. While the girls were dancing, each man caught one and carried her off to be his wife" (Judges 21:20, 21, 23).

Can you imagine a female writer not telling us something of what was going on in the heart of the woman who was forgiven by Jesus after being caught in adultery (see John 8:1-11)? Or about the feelings and emotions experienced by Mary in her mothering of Jesus?

I don't know why God chose an all-male writing staff for the Bible project. I really don't believe he's a chauvinist. So maybe he thought it would just work better, granted the culture of the day.

Or maybe he’d observed how nearly impossible it seems for a woman to ever get a man's full attention.