“This year Victor had sent her a book for her birthday in October like he always did. It was The Three Musketeers. And she had said she had read it on a brief phone conversation in November, secure in the knowledge that she had plenty of time to do so before seeing him at Christmas. Except somehow she’d been doing more interesting things and the book remained unopened. And one reason was that she liked the books he sent well enough, but was beginning to notice that they were always about boys having adventures and doing the swashbuckling stuff.
Not girls.
Girls seemed to be there, when
they were there, to be rescued.”
Charlie
Fletcher, Far Rockaway (2011)
 |
| A girl engaging in the kind of perilous activity one imagines might be necessary for her to rescue herself. There’s also a scene in Far Rockaway where the main character, Cat, climbs a huge mountain, so it is sort of relevant. |
But seriously though, why are
there so few women in the Bible?
It’s one of those questions
that nags at the back of my mind, an irritating point of friction in my nice
comfortable faith.1 I spent far too long pretending it didn’t exist,
out of a fear of what I might find were I actually to confront it. What if,
the threat lurked somewhere in my subconscious, God really does think women
are less important and interesting and worth bothering with than men?
Of course, once one brings
these anxieties out into the light, one can see how ridiculous they are. My
understanding of God may be light-years away from the complete picture, but I
know enough to be sure that it would have been completely inconsistent with who
he is to have created one half the human race to be inferior to the other. Still,
as great a relief as it has been to leave that particular fear behind, I do, as
a result, find myself once again face-to-face with the question. If God values
women as much as he does men, why didn’t he put more of them in his book?2
It’s not a question to which I
can currently provide a satisfactory answer. Women-and-the-Bible is an issue
with which I am in the process of wrestling from several angles, attempting to
disentangle Biblical truth from the influences of wider society and Christian
subculture; I have watched my beliefs about it shift quite significantly in the
past few years and am quite willing to admit I might watch them do so again in
the next few. Still, I may have something to offer towards the construction of
such an answer in the form of a reflection on the tagline of a novel I recently
finished.
“Cat is fighting for her life
in two worlds: a midtown Manhattan hospital, and a strange landscape full of
heroes and villains,” reads the blurb on the back cover of Far Rockaway.
“She doesn’t know how she’s going to survive, let alone get home, but she does
know one thing: Real girls rescue themselves.” Italics here are
substituted for a font-size increase and a colour change; these four words
clearly, in the blurb writer’s opinion, encapsulated the, or at least a, key
message of the novel.
Far Rockaway is a gorgeous story, though I’d
probably think so even more were I more familiar with The Last of the
Mohicans, Treasure Island, and Kidnapped, all stories which protagonist
Cat’s grandfather Victor read her when she was younger, and whose settings and
characters combine to produce the world in which she finds herself having
slipped into a coma after being hit by a fire engine. This book is one of those
that seizes you by the hand and just runs; there are some excellent plot twists,
and swashbuckling abounds. Cat is a realistically and engagingly drawn heroine,
and her disappointment that so few girls feature prominently in the stories her
grandfather loves undeniably echoes with my frustration at the absence and
inactivity of women in so much of the Bible – but I don’t think the solution
she proposes can be similarly transferred. This from towards the end of the
novel, pages 402-3 in the copy I read:
 |
| Fletcher, Charlie, Far Rockaway, London: Hodder Children’s Books (2011) |
Magua wasn’t coming.
Nor was he going anywhere. He
was lying sideways on the sand, kebabed on her sword.
He looked more surprised than
hurt, but the blade had passed through his chest from side to side where he had
fallen on it.
He was trying to push up, but
not getting very far.
“But,” he spat in disbelief. “But
… this is … wrong! You’re just a–”
Cat didn’t feel elated. Or
relieved. She just felt very tired all of a sudden.
“I know,” she said. “I mean, I
know you’re a big strong man and I should run away and wait for another big
strong man to come and rescue me, but you know what I never get?”
She looked back at Victor.
“Why do the guys get to do all
the rescuing? I mean I loved all the stories you gave me and read me, but one
thing: where were the real girls? Half the books, they weren’t there at all,
and the other half they’re wimped-out girly-girls getting all weepy and falling
in love with the mysterious complicated dude or waiting for the right guy to
save them.”
Magua coughed at her feet. His
eyes were draining away as he rolled them up to look at her in confusion.
“You’re just a girl…” he
snarled weakly.
“Just little old me,” she
agreed.
And then she leant down,
gripped the sword handle decisively and gave a sharp tug, yanking it free and
dropping him back to the sand. Magua’s eyes flared up at her as if he was about
to retort.
Then they fluttered. And were
still.
“But then, that’s all it takes,”
said Cat. “Real girls rescue themselves.”
My knee-jerk reaction to the
lack of female presence and agency in the Bible can easily be to attempt to
shoehorn various Biblical women into the kind of self-rescuing role Cat
describes. The classic example of a ‘strong’ Biblical woman is Esther, of
course, boldly approaching the king despite threat of death in order to save
her people from genocide.3 Then there’s Miriam, cunningly engineering
things so that her mother ends up employed as a wet-nurse for her own son.4
Deborah does very well too: the leader of all Israel in her day, without whom
metaphorically holding his hand, military man Barak refuses to go and attack
anyone.5 And I elevate these women: look how great they were, how
brave, how clever, how important – and in doing so, I miss the point.
If I’m reading the Bible and
elevating anything other than God as a result, I’m getting something seriously
wrong. That’s not to say that I shouldn’t admire the admirable qualities that
Biblical women display, but rather that I have to do that in the context that
God is the source and measure of all that is admirable. And God’s priorities
for those who follow him are not that they should be important or independent,
that they should get by on their own courage and wits, that they should rescue
themselves. Rather, he is concerned that they should humbly love him and other
people, wholeheartedly and selflessly, always trusting in and relying on him. Having
an attitude like that means not minding melting into the background, so maybe
that’s one lens through which we might view the scarcity of Biblical women. In
any case, if, in desperately attempting to demonstrate that God values women, I
consequently end up sidelining him in favour of them, I’m diminishing him in
his many brilliances – one among them being, of course, that very equal valuing
of all humans regardless of sex.
Real girls can’t rescue
themselves from the one captivity that will matter most in the end, that of the
selfish nature. Nor can real boys. That’s the kind of rescuing only God can do –
and he, in his infinite mercy, chose, for our sake, not to rescue himself from
the agony of the cross.6 That’s the example he would have us follow.
And the universality of that sacrifice surely contains a far more powerful
statement about the relative value God places on men and women than the
character gender-balance in the stories of the Bible ever could.
Footnotes
1 This statement is, in case
this didn’t come across, supposed to contain the notion that my faith shouldn’t
actually be all that comfortable, and I should be more worried about being too
comfortable than encountering such points of friction. This from Andy Mineo’s
song ‘Comfortable’: “Nobody told me you could die like this. / Nobody told me
you could die from bliss, yeah. / Nobody told me. Nobody told me. / We never
ever saw it coming.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2W1KT8xXaN8
2 I’ve not counted, but
Christian Answers has handily put together some lists which show pretty clearly
that there are many more men than women mentioned in the Bible: http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/men.html,
http://www.christiananswers.net/dictionary/women.html.
3 See, surprise surprise, the
book of Esther: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Esther+1&version=ESVUK.
4 This particular story comes
from Exodus 2, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%202&version=ESVUK,
where Miriam is not explicitly named, but she pops up plenty of times in the
rest of the Pentateuch as well. Have an explore.
5 Check Judges 4-5: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Judges+4-5&version=ESVUK.
6 “So also the chief priests,
with the scribes and elders, mocked him, saying, ‘He saved others; he cannot
save himself. He is the King of Israel; let him come down now from the cross,
and we will believe in him.” Matthew 27:41-42 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Matthew+27&version=ESVUK
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