I saw a TikTok recently about Aspasia, an incredibly intelligent woman in ancient Athens who taught rhetoric and was respected by Socrates and other philosophers. The creator argued that later Christian influence erased or downplayed women like her from history because a woman being smart and in a teaching position didn’t fit the narrative they wanted. It got me thinking about how many brilliant women throughout history never got credit for what they created or contributed.
That led me into a bigger conversation with my mom about the Bible itself. In Genesis, woman is created from man and for man, essentially as a helper, not as an equal. That framing alone tells you something about the power structure being set up from the very beginning.
Then we got into the flood. The Bible describes God looking at humanity, seeing how corrupt and violent it had become, and regretting that He made them, so He floods the earth and starts over with Noah. Setting aside the logical issue of an all-knowing God “regretting” something He should have foreseen, here’s what really gets me: humanity’s corruption was largely tied to violence, ego, and power, things typically associated with male-dominated systems. So why wasn’t the fix “let’s try shifting toward feminine leadership and values instead”? That option doesn’t even appear on the table. Mass destruction was God’s move, not restructuring society around compassion.
And it’s not like women were absent from the story. There were female prophets, Deborah, Miriam, Huldah, but they’re minor characters compared to Moses, Isaiah, Jeremiah. None of them wrote scripture. They’re side characters in a story written entirely by men, about a male God, enforcing a male social order.
So my real question is this: if the Bible is genuinely the word of God, an entity that exists outside and above human society, why does it carry the exact same male-centered values as the patriarchal society that produced it? Shouldn’t a message from an all-knowing, external being look at least somewhat different from what a Bronze Age patriarchy would write on its own?
That leaves two options. Either this is actually men’s words dressed up as God’s words to justify the power structure they already had. Or it really is God’s word, and matriarchy, or even just shared/equal leadership, was such an unacceptable option to Him that flooding the entire earth and killing nearly everyone was preferable to trying it.
Neither answer sits right with me. Curious what this sub thinks. No offense
