When you have been hurt, or watched someone you love be hurt, some of the Bible’s stories about women can read like evidence against God. Women are handed over, used and discarded, sometimes with no rescue in sight. Can you trust that God sees women and cares what happens to them? This study argues that the Bible’s witness points toward yes, and it does not hide what remains hard. It reads the difficult passages rather than around them, holds them against the whole of Scripture, and leaves room for grief that an argument cannot settle.
You can work through it alone over several sittings or with a small group over one or two meetings. The reading is short. The practices take longer, and they are meant to. Nothing here requires you to tell anyone your story.
Before you open the text
Some of the passages ahead describe sexual violence directly. If you carry that kind of history, you set the pace. You may skim, skip a passage, read it with a trusted friend beside you, or come back another week. Stopping is not a failure of faith.
If you are leading a group, say this out loud at the start. What is shared stays in the room. No one will be asked to explain why a passage is hard for them, and silence counts as participation. If someone discloses current abuse, the study stops being the priority: their safety comes first, then a trusted person, then professional help. In the US, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is 1-800-799-7233. A trained counselor is part of how God cares for people, not a sign that Scripture has failed them.
Why the quick answer can hurt
Christians often meet these passages with a fast reply: God is good, so the hard parts must be fine. For a wounded reader, that can feel like being hurried past one’s own pain. It can also sound like the people who first used Scripture to excuse what was done to them.
Dr. Jo Vitale did her doctoral work at Oxford on how women are presented in Israel’s Scriptures. She models a slower posture. She admits the limits of her own vantage point: “I’m not someone who has been a victim of extreme sexual abuse. So I can’t even imagine how traumatizing it must feel to read these texts.” She also argues that being disturbed by these passages is a right response, not a weak one: “if we didn’t react sensitively to them, if we weren’t concerned by them, it would say something about us that we weren’t troubled by the language.”
If these passages trouble you, then, you are not resisting the Bible. You may be reading it closer to its intent than someone who feels nothing. Vitale also names why many believers avoid these texts: “I think people are genuinely scared to go into these passages.” Lisa Fields adds a practical cost. Christians who have never read them are often caught off guard when someone else raises them. This guide goes into the passages carefully, with permission to stop.
A first observation
Before the hardest story, read three short passages and notice one thing: who sees whom.
- Genesis 1:27: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.”
- Genesis 16:7-13, where Hagar, an Egyptian slave who has fled mistreatment, is found alone in the wilderness. Her response ends with the words “Thou God seest me” (Genesis 16:13).
- Luke 7:36-50, where a woman the town has labeled a sinner weeps at Jesus’s feet in a Pharisee’s house. Simon sees only the label. Luke writes: “And he turned to the woman, and said unto Simon, Seest thou this woman?” (Luke 7:44). Simon can obviously see her. Jesus is asking whether he sees a person.
Vitale describes Hagar’s name for God as naming “the God who sees her, who sees her in her despair, in her hurt, in her pain.” Hold that phrase, and Jesus’s question to Simon, lightly for now. The test is whether they survive a story where no rescue comes.
Reading Judges 19 with a witness
Judges 19 is the account of a Levite’s concubine. She is never named. When men of Gibeah surround the house where she is staying, the men inside push her out to save themselves. She is assaulted through the night and found at the door in the morning. Her husband then cuts her body into pieces and sends them across Israel. Lisa Fields calls it one of the most horrific passages in Scripture.
The practice below is designed so you do not read this alone in the dark, even if you are physically alone.
- Decide how you will read. You may read Judges 19:22-30 in full, read only verses 22-26, or rely on the summary above. All three are legitimate ways to do this study.
- Name the people who looked away. On paper, list every person in the chapter who had power to protect her and did not. Vitale’s own list is blunt: “her father doesn’t see her, the men don’t see her, nobody sees her.” Add anyone she leaves out.
- Find the narrator’s verdict. Turn to Judges 21:25: “In those days there was no king in Israel: every man did that which was right in his own eyes.” Ask whether the book presents this chapter as a model or as a warning. The tribes respond with war, yet no one questions the Levite. Vitale’s judgment is that “justice is still completely missed in this story.” She also notes that the same expression of outrage appears when Tamar is raped in 2 Samuel 13, a signal of horror, not approval.
- Weigh one interpretation. Vitale asks of passages like this, “could it be that they’re not there to commend the behavior, but actually to condemn it in the strongest possible terms?” She reads the chapter’s preservation as God’s refusal to forget this woman, putting it in God’s voice: “I won’t allow her story to go unheard.” The chapter itself does not say why it was kept. Treat this as a careful reading, not a stated fact, and decide whether it accounts for the chapter better than the alternatives.
- Notice your own reading. Vitale warns that “when we ignore a passage like this, we become complicit in the very thing that goes wrong in this passage of actually not seeing this woman.” Write one sentence about her, the woman herself, not the war that follows.
Narrative describes. It does not automatically endorse what it describes. Judges frames this chapter so that every male character fails, and the reader is meant to be horrified. Vitale draws a direct line to churches today: here a man with religious standing treats a woman as disposable, and the people around him never confront what he did. If a religious leader or household was part of your harm, this chapter does not take their side. It exposes them. Lisa Fields draws a related lesson from the book’s refrain, that the story “helps us to know the importance of not having truth be self-determined.” When people decide right and wrong by their own eyes, the vulnerable pay first.
When the hard words seem to come from God
A careful reader may object here. Stories can condemn by showing. What about laws and prophecies, which come to us as God’s own speech?
Vitale takes this objection seriously and says these are the passages she still finds hardest. She reads the law about women captured in war in Deuteronomy 21:10-14 as limits placed on a brutal situation: the woman gets a month to mourn, and she cannot be kept or sold as a slave. Even so, she says, “I still would say it still never sits quite easily with me.” On the prophets who picture unfaithful Israel as a wife punished by violent exposure, in Jeremiah 13, Ezekiel and Hosea, she draws a distinction worth testing. Prophetic metaphors of judgment are not legal codes, and she argues it was foreign nations, not Israel’s law, that exposed captive women this way. Then she stops short of a full answer: “It’s not a complete answer, but that’s where I find my hope.”
Her hope rests partly on direction rather than every detail: “So I think I see the trajectory, even if the details sometimes are difficult.” It also rests on the cross. Thinking of a woman at a campus protest whose sign said her rapists were getting away with it, Vitale concluded that Jesus knows that place from the inside: “He too was stripped naked and exposed like her.” Test that against the text. Mark 15:16-24 records soldiers stripping Jesus, mocking him and dividing his clothes before crucifying him in public view. That supports the claim that Jesus endured public stripping, shame and violence at human hands. It does not describe sexual assault, and the Gospel writers do not say he suffered in order to identify with assault victims. Vitale’s application is a reasonable theological reflection built on that account, and it should be held as one.
She also reconsidered God’s judgment through a friend who was raped. Watching her friend blame herself for what she was not to blame for, Vitale asked how much more angry “would a God who loves even more than I could possibly imagine be for the ways that we wrong and abuse and violate each other.” For a victim, she argues, there is hope in saying “that even though human justice failed, that divine justice will not fail her.” That is a hope about God’s justice. It is not a promise about how or when any one person’s pain will ease.
A practice of lament
Scripture gives words for the moment when understanding runs out. Psalm 13:1 begins: “How long wilt thou forget me, O LORD? for ever? how long wilt thou hide thy face from me?” The psalm complains first, then asks, and only at the end trusts. Try writing a lament in that shape. Keep it private unless you choose otherwise.
- Complain. Tell God plainly what is hard: a passage in this guide, the way someone used Scripture against you, or what happened to someone you love.
- Ask. Say what you want God to do. Be specific, even if the request feels too large.
- Trust, if you can. Name one thing you know about God from these passages, perhaps Hagar’s “Thou God seest me.” If you cannot write this part yet, leave it blank. Psalm 88 ends in darkness and it is still in the Bible.
In a group, give ten quiet minutes for writing. Then invite anyone who wishes to read a single line. Do not ask follow-up questions of someone who reads. Thank them and move on.
Questions for discussion or reflection
- Before this study, what did you assume these hard passages said about how God views women? Has anything shifted, and what still has not?
- Vitale reads the preservation of Judges 19 as God refusing to let this woman go unseen. What makes that reading persuasive to you, and what makes you hesitate?
- Where have you seen Scripture used to excuse harm or silence someone? What in the passages you read today pushes against that use?
- Vitale is willing to say her answer is incomplete. Does that make her more or less trustworthy to you? Why?
- What would a church look like if it read Judges 19 as a warning about itself rather than about outsiders?
- Simon looked at the woman in Luke 7 and saw a label. Who in your life or community is present but unseen, and what might seeing her actually require?
Something to carry
What this study can give is a way of reading. In the passages we read, the God of Scripture keeps turning toward the woman everyone else has stopped looking at. That holds when he finds Hagar, and it holds when the text refuses to forget a woman no one rescued.
This week, return to Luke 7:36-50. Notice that Jesus speaks to Simon while turned toward the woman. If you are carrying harm that this guide brought close to the surface, let one more person see it too: a friend you trust, a pastor or a counselor. If you are in danger at home, call 1-800-799-7233.