Would the Bible pass the Bechdel Test?
Facing the misogyny of the Bible honestly: Part Two
Some years ago, I was sitting in my friend’s kitchen amongst her arty knick-knacks and intelligent book collection and deciding which of her excellent selection of teas to sample next.
We were discussing something about faith and spirituality. I forget what exactly. As she dropped my teabag of choice into a mug, she shrugged and said, “well, the Bible was written by men.”
As if that settled the matter. As I say, I can’t now remember what matter it apparently settled or what question it allegedly answered.
But I do remember feeling a bit unsettled and leaving our conversation with considerably more questions than answers.
If the Bible is God’s word, does the gender of the people who wrote it really matter? What difference does it make to what the Bible says? If we acknowledge the humanity and the maleness of the Bible’s authors and the impact that has on what they wrote, what does that do to our relationship with the Bible? Was she saying we could ignore bits of the Bible because it’s too male? Does that constitute theological reasoning?
These were not thoughts I quite knew what to do with or how to express, but they continued to niggle long after I’d finished sipping my tea and gone home. The maleness of the Bible, it turns out, is not something we can just ignore. If we’re going to understand the Bible, then acknowledging that ‘it was written by men turns out to be quite important.
I recently began to read through the Bible again as part of my exploration of femininity and God. I began with the intention of reading from a female perspective. I was quite excited about focussing on the stories and perspectives of the women in the Bible.
It wasn’t long before I started to run into problems.
The first thing I noticed is just how few women turn up. Most of the stories are about men. The significant characters are nearly all men. As far as we know, the authors are men. The storytelling perspective is almost exclusively male. The Bible is deeply androcentric.
In recent years, the Bechdel test, suggested by Alison Bechdel, has been used as an indicator of whether a work of fiction includes a female perspective. A film passes the Bechdel test if it includes two women, preferably named, talking to each other about something other than a man.
This is important because, so often, female characters don’t really have a life of their own. They are bit parts in the stories of men.
Simply counting the number of female cast members doesn’t tell you very much. Particularly if you’re watching a Bond film.
At least if two female characters are talking to each other about something other than a man, there is a chance that their perspective is genuinely present. It has to be said this is still a pretty low bar. You only need a woman to ask her mother to pass the salt in a dinner scene for your movie to pass the test. Even so, it’s startling how many don’t.
Almost none of the books in the Bible pass the Bechdel test. The ones that arguably do only just about squeak through.
In Exodus, Miriam, the prophet, leads the women in worship, and we get all 17 words of her song. The book of Ruth passes the test. Just about. The story is driven by three women losing their husbands and about Ruth acquiring a new husband, so almost all the conversation is about that. In the book of Luke, we get a conversation between Mary and Elizabeth. But the fact that the focus of their conversation is their respective pregnancies, with Jesus and John the Baptist, makes that questionable too.
Finally, there is a moment in Mark’s gospel when the women murmur to each other, ‘who shall move the stone away?’ Given that they want to move the stone to get to Jesus, this conversation, if you can call it a conversation, is essentially about a man, so it’s a little bit of a stretch to suggest that this moment passes the Bechdel test either. And that’s it, folks.
Of course, there are limitations to applying this yardstick to the Bible. Quite large chunks of the Bible don’t contain any conversation at all, and in the Gospels, there aren’t many conversations that don’t include Jesus. Even taking those things into consideration, it’s still pretty striking. What the almost complete failure of the Bible to pass the Bechdel test tells us is not that there are no women in the Bible.
But it does highlight the fact that the authors of the Bible had very little interest in recording for us the lives of women for their own sakes. The narrator’s perspective is male.
When women do turn up, which is not that often, they do so almost exclusively in their roles as wives and mothers and bit parts in the stories of men. So take the story in Genesis, where Dinah, the daughter of Jacob, is raped by Shechem, the son of a local chieftain (Genesis 34). What we hear about is the outrage of the men and the revenge they exact because Shechem had “committed an outrage in Israel by lying with Jacob’s daughter” (Genesis 34:7).
As Ellen Frankel points out in her book The five books of Miriam: a woman’s commentary on the Torah, the point was not who Dinah was or what she had suffered. It was whose she was and the effect that her rape had on their honour. Frankel imagines Dinah’s voice:
“I was only a status symbol, a place marker in this process — much in the same way that a zero, although nothing in itself, adds value to numbers or diminishes them.” (page 67)
That so eloquently describes the role that women play in so much of the Bible. Significant because of their impact on the value, honour and status of the men in their lives.
The book of Ruth is a lone bright spot in the depiction of women’s lives. But it’s worth noting that at the end of the book, we discover that she is David’s great-grandmother. So would we have heard her story for its own sake, or does she earn her place in scripture by being the ancestor of a famous man? I suspect the latter.
We do not see the rich tapestry of the lives of women in biblical times. The best we get is incidental glimpses as we peek around and between the stories told by and about men. We can occasionally make inferences, but we get no opportunity to sit with the women around the fire or at the well and listen to them talking to one another.
We learn nothing of what the sisterhood of faith was like in ancient Israel or in the early church.
We get a rich insight into David’s prayer life through the psalms. There is no female equivalent. We know that some of Israel’s prophets were women, but we barely hear their voices.
In short, women in the bible are largely invisible. Often when women do appear, it is as the victims of appalling abuse. Even when abuse is recorded, it’s not for its own sake but because there are implications for the men in the story. If a rape entails damage to the honour of a man or is part of a man’s story, it might get a mention. Otherwise, it usually doesn’t.
Even the beautiful passages we looked at earlier, where we see some of the feminine imagery surrounding God, are described from a male perspective. Take the verse we saw earlier from Isaiah 42, where God declares:
But now, like a woman in childbirth, I cry out, I gasp and pant…
I love the fact that Isaiah uses this imagery but notice that he describes the sound of a woman in childbirth.
This is what Isaiah, a man in the community, has experienced during childbirth. It’s what he hears when he can’t sleep because the woman next door is in labour or while he waits, hoping that this time it’s a son. For the woman giving birth and the woman supporting her, the sound that she makes is far from the most significant part of the experience.
A woman writing these verses would have access to much richer imagery. By way of contrast, here are some extracts from poems by women describing their experience of childbirth:
I bite my lips and pull my hair
The pain I feel is so severe
A feeling sharp rips through my brain
It tears my loins and hurts my veins …
…The throbbing ache takes hold of me
It feels like I’ve been hit by a tree…
It cuts so deep and rends my soul
it tears and twists I groan and howl
My body trembles hurts and quivers
In spite of drugs and pain-relievers
I gasp for breath; I twist and turn
I stretch and wretch, I hurt and burn…
…My palms are moist, my throat is parched
My heart explodes, my back is arched…
From: MY LABOUR PAIN a poem by Gideon Delali Awoonor, Nigeria [voicesnet.com accessed 3rd April 2020]
That was taken from ‘My Labour Pain’ by Gideon Delali Awoonor from Nigeria. This, by Mina Loy, is equally expressive:
Parturition
I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction
The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pinpoint nucleus of being
[poetryfoundation.org accessed 3rd April 2020]
You will notice that the shouting goes completely unremarked upon.
Proverbs: Advice for young men
Having been somewhat discouraged by my reading so far, I went to the book of Proverbs with the intention of meeting God as Sophia, Wisdom, an undeniably feminine character. Here, surely, I would find the missing feminine perspective.
But no.
The first thing that hit me in the face is that this is a book written by a man addressing men. A father giving advice to his son. The words ‘my son’ or ‘my sons’ occur about seventeen times in the first seven chapters. Reading it as a woman, it’s very easy to feel like an interloper.
Some modern translations gender-neutralise the Hebrew ‘my son’ to ‘my friend’ or ‘my child’.While I am generally very much in favour of more inclusive language, in this case, it doesn’t help much because the substance of Proverbs is very obviously centred around male concerns. On balance, I think I’d rather keep the masculine language and let the book be what it is than whitewash its male-cent redness with inclusive pronouns.
The first chapter has advice for young men about not getting drawn into criminal behaviour. Precisely the sort of risky and violent behaviour that young men coping with adolescent testosterone still sometimes find a temptation.
Great advice if you’re a young man.
Probably not necessary if you’re a young woman. And even less likely to have been necessary advice for women in the culture within which Proverbs was written where joining a gang of hooligans was definitely not an equal opportunities occupation. Where women are mentioned it’s from a male perspective. Making humorous observations about the perils of living with a nagging wife. Giving advice about the kind of wife you should seek.
The last chapter of Proverbs is a lengthy description of the kind of woman King Lemuel’s mother thought he needed as a wife. An unfailingly kind, sartorially elegant combination of a domestic goddess, clothing manufacturer, serial entrepreneur, philanthropist, philosopher and, presumably, insomniac.
This passage is often used by women to point out that the Bible is not against career women and doesn’t expect women to be meekly sitting at home warming the slippers of their returning men. It’s also pulled out as a sort of instructional leaflet for the would be godly woman. A quick consultation of the oracle otherwise known as Google will avail you of a multiplicity of advice about how to become a wife of noble character.
But this is not an instruction manual for the woman who, as one blogger puts it, wants to learn how to become ‘her husband’s crown’ in ‘just 90 days’. It’s a shopping list for men. More specifically, it’s a shopping list for the mysterious King Lemuel, whose mother was, it has to be said, a trifle optimistic. Yes, it’s great to know that the Bible (or at least King Lemuel’s mother) approves of women who are industrious and creative and assertive. But this is not about women in their own right. It’s about wives, whose marvellous deeds and character will bring blessing and honour to their husbands. Like the rest of Proverbs, it’s not written for women. It’s written for men.
Of course, much of the advice contained within Proverbs works for both genders, particularly now that women are more likely to be involved in work beyond the domestic sphere, but this is a book written by men and for men. Where it makes helpful reading for women, it’s coincidental rather than intentional. Just like the rest of the Hebrew scriptures, the authors didn’t expect women to be amongst their readers.
The New Testament
When it comes to including women in the narrative, the New Testament does much better. The reason for this is that Jesus spent quite a bit of time in the company of women and treated them as equals and with respect, which means that we hear far more of their voices. But the voices we hear are largely those of the women to whom Jesus ministered. We still have to read between the lines to have much chance of noticing the significance of the women who accompanied Jesus in his ministry and who are involved in leading the early church. We know that there were women in the inner circle of Jesus’ followers because Luke, the most socially inclusive of the gospel writers, mention some of them by name in a little verse tucked away in the eighth chapter of his book. But even Luke, the great includer, doesn’t give us much to go on:
Jesus travelled about from one town and village to another, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom of God. The Twelve were with him, and also some women who had been cured of evil spirits and diseases: Mary (called Magdalene) from whom seven demons had come out; Joanna, the wife of Chuza, the manager of Herod’s household; Susanna; and many others. These women were helping to support them out of their own means. (Luke 8:1–3)
I can’t help wishing that we knew more about these women and what they got up to. We know there were a lot of them. We know that they were involved and committed enough to be bank rolling Jesus’ ministry. So they were not playing bit parts on the edges, they were at the centre of the action but the men who wrote the gospels didn’t think to include them in the narrative. The only time we really get to see them is in the resurrection story. The men had all fled or were in hiding, so the gospel writers have no choice but to include their voices. There was no one else around.
However revolutionary Jesus’ approach to women might have been, the authors of the New Testament are still all men living in a patriarchal society. And it shows in their story telling. It would be fabulous to know what the women who followed Jesus along with the male disciples got up to during his ministry and after Pentecost, but their stories have largely been lost.
There are enough fleeting mentions of women in the epistles and in Acts for us to know that they were involved in ministering and leading and teaching, but the men recording the stories and writing the letters were looking at the world through patriarchal lenses, and it’s their perspective that we see.
So no, the Bible doesn’t really pass the Bechdel test. Not in any meaningful way, at any rate. My friend was right. The Bible is written by men, and that one simple fact explains a great deal about what it contains and what it doesn’t contain.
If you’re a woman and you’ve ever read the Bible and felt missed out and ignored, there’s a reason for that. It’s not an illusion. Women are missed out on and ignored most of the time.
Mainly marginal characters and bit parts in the stories of men. There is also blatant sexism. We’re coming to that.
But we shouldn’t allow that to distract us from the basic fact that the Bible is not a book written either by or for women, and this simple fact has huge ramifications.
Keep reading this series:
To begin reading this series at the beginning:
My series, rediscovering the feminine God begins here:
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